than kayaking through the Antarctic waters. I learned that no one could tell me what I could or couldn’t do, that only I could set my limitations. I learned to appreciate everything that I could do, that indeed even some people with normal vision couldn’t have traveled the world alone as I had. I learned to accept myself as I am, to be patient with and love myself.
And then I met you, when I was ready to meet you, when I felt I was deserving of you. Being with you and falling in love with you was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. It felt so right. You were so smart—my intellectual equal, if not my intellectual superior. You taught me. You challenged me (admittedly sometimes in the most annoying ways). But you know what touched me the most? The way you would wordlessly reach for my hand when we went down a set of stairs, the way you without prompting would start reading a menu to me, the way you happily acted as my driver. You’ve never doubted my abilities. My sister told me that she warned you right before you were about to Skype with my parents to ask them for permission to marry me (she was going to act as the translator) that you had to accept and love me as I am, visual disability and all. That is exactly what you have always done, loved me and accepted me for who I am with all my imperfections.
It isn’t about figuring out how many months after my death would be appropriate. It’s about you. My death will break you. It will shatter you into a million little pieces. But I want you and you alone to fix yourself. I want you to use the opportunity to form an incredible bond with the girls that might not have been possible had I lived. I want you to figure out how to manage the kids and the apartment and your career on your own, as lonely as that may feel sometimes. Please don’t be with a woman because you need a wife or mother for your children. Know that no woman can make this easier. No woman can fix what is broken inside you. I want you to be whole again through your own doing. And only then do I believe you can find a real, healthy love, someone who is deserving and worthy of you and the girls. Who knows? She might even be someone I would have liked.
I love you, sweetheart. Be well. Until we meet again…
Julie
44
The Unwinding of the Miracle
Last year, in May, we were all flying back to New York from Austin. Josh and Mia were in another section and I was entertaining Isabelle, and as we were looking out the window I said, “Belle, wouldn’t it be fun if we could just go outside and sit on the clouds?”
And she said “Mommy, don’t be silly, you’d just fall right through—it’s just air.”
And I said, “Do you really think so, Belle? Because, I mean, don’t angels sit around on clouds?”
She said, “Do you think angels are real, Mommy?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe…”
And she said, “Do you think that’s what happens after we die, we become angels?” She paused, and thought to herself for a moment, and then quietly said, “I’d like to be an angel.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because otherwise I’d just be dead,” she said.
I laughed, and said, “Wow, that’s a really good reason.”
Wearing a serious expression on her face, my five-year-old then said words that humbled and moved me, words that seem fitting to begin the last chapter of this book. She said, “But for you, mommy, for you, I want you to grow inside another woman’s tummy.”
Well, as you might imagine, for a time I couldn’t speak. Finally, I managed to whisper, “I think that’s a wonderful idea, Belle. I hope that happens.”
“But Mommy,” she said. “Come back well.”
* * *
—
My now six- and eight-year-old daughters love having me tell them the stories of how I and they were born. They never tire of hearing the same thing again and again. Of course, the stories couldn’t be more different. I used to ask my mother to tell me my story all the time, too.
I was born in the midwife’s two-room concrete house, nine months after the fall of Saigon, in a nondescript provincial capital in central Vietnam, which in actuality was nothing more than a little town. The midwife had successfully