The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,118

the bodies it inhabits seem to find an equilibrium for a time, some balance between stability or slow progression and treatment, where both live in a relatively peaceful coexistence based on a mutual agreement not to bother each other. But then I bothered the cancer, and it got really, really mad. How dare you fuck with me? it raged. And in response to my daring to attack it, it grew and grew and grew and continues to grow. I had disturbed the beast, and I have paid the price. The met next to my belly button now feels like a golf ball, with more masses nearby. The mets in my pelvis are growing quickly as well, and at some point I expect they will block my digestive tract so that I will no longer be able to eat, at which point I will consider the viability and desirability of being fed artificially. But death comes only when there is failure of a vital organ. For now, my lungs and liver are functioning properly, although I have no idea for how long that will be true. Based on my observations, near the end, cancer becomes even more aggressive, growing at an even faster rate, until it consumes the body it depends on for life. How stupid cancer is, indeed. If only I could negotiate a truce. But despite how it may seem, cancer is not a sentient being with intelligence or reason.

Grieving is a necessary part of preparation, too, so that’s what I did this summer—grieve. After those scan results, I grieved for the life that will never be, the vacation to Tahiti with Josh that will remain a dream, the African safari with the girls that will be without me, the trip to Vietnam to show the girls where their mother was born with my sister instead of me. I grieved and grieve for my declining body, for the fact that running next door to Target or the bank is now a monumental endeavor, for my atrophying muscles and sagging skin, for the fear of being too far from home and a bed or a couch, for the body that cares not at all about what others may think as it needs to squat on the sidewalk when no bench is in sight so the abdominal pain might ease. Is this what it’s like to age, but at high speed, I often wonder.

I summoned my parents to me. I wanted my mother to make my favorite soups and my father to buy me my favorite Chinese pastries. I hesitated at first, because I thought it would be too difficult to watch my parents absorb the fact of my dying. There can be nothing more cruel than watching your own child die. I understand that, now that I am a mother. But my sister insisted that it would be better for us to all grieve together than apart, that they would feel better being with me than not with me. So my siblings and I purchased one-way tickets for them, their stay achingly indefinite. For a while, my mother drove me nuts as she insisted on my drinking and eating weird Chinese medicine crap that I don’t believe in and balked at my father’s purchase of all the unhealthy Chinese pastries I wanted to eat. I told her I could now eat whatever the fuck I wanted, and my father would bark some words at her, effectively telling her to shut up. Every night, when my parents returned to my sister’s apartment, my sister and my father would tell my mother to leave me alone, let me enjoy what time there was left for me, and trust that I knew what I wanted for myself. At one point, her pestering got so bad I threatened to throw her out of my apartment and send her back to Los Angeles. After that, she stopped.

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I spent my summer saying goodbye. I summoned my brother. I wanted him to come sharpen my knives and oil my cutting board and change the water filters under the kitchen sink. I wanted us to make one last trip to Costco together because that’s what Chinese siblings who love deals do together. My brother stayed for only a weekend in late July. The night before he was to leave, the five of us—my parents, my sister, my brother, and I—sat in my dining room, not saying much, knowing that it would be the last time