The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,102

or resent my demands. We don’t have a difficult relationship in which I have to lecture him about the value of money and how I can’t buy him a toy whenever he wants. He has truly basic needs that are generally very easy to satisfy and that, I’ve discovered, I am capable of fulfilling. And he loves unconditionally, with a purity that is in its own way quite beautiful and inspiring. It is in the performance of our daily, mesmerizing rituals—me squatting with a plastic bag in hand to pick up his waste, me tossing a squeaky frog as he eagerly waits to give chase, me brushing out the tangles in his snowy coat—that I find that he and his simplicity shield me from what I don’t want to deal with right now, and he allows me to continue with my pretense for as long as I want. And within those rituals, there is no cancer, no life, no death, no future, no past, not even that day or hour or even minute, not even Josh or the girls or me; there is just that second, and then the next and then the next. And there is just him.

35

Courage and Love

Who has more courage? (1) The cancer patient who presses on with grueling treatments that are of dubious benefit in the infinitesimal hope that they will prolong life until something better comes along? or (2) The cancer patient who simply walks away, choosing to feel good for as long as she can and then seeking palliative treatments only to mitigate pain before the inevitable happens?

This is a question that has plagued me for nearly as long as I’ve known that I have cancer. As you may have surmised, I put a great deal of weight on courage and bravery. I want to be remembered as a courageous person, one who, instead of running from cancer and death and begging for my life like a wild, crazed animal, stood there and stared them down, all the while acknowledging and embracing the reality and my fear, anger, and sadness, a stance reflective of an aspirational inner strength, dignity, grace, and beauty. But which path produces that result? Based on how we as a society seem to love sports stories and movies about protagonists overcoming impossible odds, I believe the general consensus and more popular view is number 1. I understand that—the long-suffering patient who endures so much to spend just one more day with her loved ones, even if it comes at an incredible emotional and physical toll. But then again, it takes tremendous courage to stop all treatments and to let the disease run its course, because then gone is any semblance of a safety net as that person invites death to quicken its arrival. Isn’t that person then truly staring death in the face? Isn’t that person then choosing death on her own terms with dignity and grace? Or is that person truly a coward, a horrible wife and mother, too weakened, defeated, and exhausted to fight any longer, not even for the faintest promise of one more day with her beloved children, handicapped by an inferior love that does have limits?

Or maybe the answer to that question is personal to each individual, based on a subjective determination of which path is easier—if there is such a thing—and that true courage goes to the person who takes the path more difficult for that person.

For me, the easier path, the path of less resistance, is number 2. And I suppose that if I take that path, then I am a coward for not choosing to stay on and “fight” like the “warrior” I’m supposed to be and once was. I hate the rhetoric of war that pervades the cancer world, even though I once used it liberally. With fighting and war, there is a winner and a loser. Will you judge me then a loser when I die because I succumbed to my disease? Will you judge me a loser if I simply choose to stop treatment and to stop actively “fighting”? If you do, so be it.

It seems that I have come to the end of the road of tolerable treatment options, and therefore there is a particular urgency in my coming to an answer to this question. I had scans in mid-June and received my results a few days later. While my lungs are overall stable (one tumor’s notable shrinkage and another tumor’s growth, with all other lung