The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,105

made him promise that he would not move out of this apartment that I have spent so much time and energy renovating for my children because the Slutty Second Wife demands that, to banish all traces of me. A friend told me about a little boy who lost his mother to cancer at age one; subsequently, his father remarried, and now, four years later, that boy calls this woman Mom. That story made me cringe and incited hysteria.

As I write all this, I know how unhinged I sound. I’m crazy. Josh would tell you I was crazy to begin with and cancer has made me crazier.

Poor Josh has to put up with my hysterics, my anger, my sadness, my tears, my darkness. Josh is tired, too. He’s tired of living under this black cloud. And out of love for him, I want to die sooner rather than later. I want to set him and the children free. I want him to have a normal, happy life again. And no doubt, his family wants the same for him. I am a burden. I don’t want to be an embarrassment to him at family gatherings, me with my ravaged skin and body—oh, poor Josh, they must all think. It will be a lot better for him when my presence is gone and he has someone else with whom to share the rest of his life, someone who will help him heal and forget the pain.

So now you understand what I am wrestling with. Is it more courageous to continue or to stop? Is it more loving to leave or to stay? I still don’t know.

36

Hate

I used to not hate people. But now I hate people. Can you guess who I hate the most?

It isn’t the grandmother who has the privilege of taking her grandson to violin lesson, the one I always see when I come out of Mia’s lesson. No doubt that is a privilege she doesn’t even fully appreciate.

It isn’t even the old lady with a cane who criticized me for taking a seat at the front of the bus reserved for the disabled and thereby forcing a man hobbling down the aisle to take another seat a few feet away—I shut her up when I screamed at her that I have Stage IV cancer and yanked at the neck of my T-shirt to show her and everyone else on the bus the unmistakable bump on my chest under which lies my mediport. I wanted to scream something about my legal blindness, too, making me disabled on yet another level and entirely entitled to that seat in ways she could not possibly understand, and that she should go fuck herself. But the presence of my older daughter beside me stopped me. (My poor children. They have been so traumatized by me and no doubt will carry with them confusing and humiliating memories of their angry mother acting like a stark-raving lunatic on this and many other occasions. I hope they will understand that the rage was rooted in a deep love for them.)

Then there was the tall, well-dressed woman who made some snide comment at me when Chipper got away on his leash and therefore interfered with her self-absorbed rush along the broad sidewalk outside my building. I wanted to chase her down and punch her again and again and again, until all the rage inside me found an escape. I wanted to claw her eyes out. I wanted to strangle her to death. I still do. Criminal charges, imprisonment, life sentences, none of them matter in those moments of fury. But my children were with me, so I just let the incident pass. Even though I wanted to kill that woman, I don’t hate her the most, either.

Nor is it all the other mothers I know and don’t know who get to attend back-to-school nights and listen to the new teachers talk about homework routines, all without worrying about who exactly is going to make sure their children do homework after they die and more broadly, about how the hell their children are not going to become totally fucked up in light of their mother’s death.

It isn’t even mothers who have been cured of Stage I or II or III cancer.

Don’t get me wrong—I hate all of these people to some degree, at least in the abstract. But the people I hate above all others are the mothers who were diagnosed with Stage IV cancer and who somehow were