The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,131

trying from the grave to kill me again. I’ve always felt, even long before I found out about the herbalist, that I have been living on borrowed time, that my life had been saved once already—twice if you count the restoration of residual vision as constructive salvation—that no one gets to have her life saved a third time. Intuitively, I just know that that is how the universe works. No, I haven’t been hoping for a miracle. I’ve already had my miracle and then some. Rather, I’ve been thinking about the notion of a miracle in the context of life itself—its beginning and ending, my beginning and ending, everyone’s beginning and ending, everyone’s miracle of life.

When I see myself as having lived on borrowed time all these years, when I take the view that my life was never meant to be, I appreciate anew how my very existence (and therefore my children’s existence) is, was, and has always been a miracle. And the cancer, although it is shortening my life, destroying what could have been another forty years of living, in no way diminishes that miracle. Everything that lives must die. Even my small children understand this fundamental rule of nature. Some things just happen to die sooner than expected.

And so, the miracle of life must end for each of us. I happen to know how my miracle will end and am painfully conscious of the fact. And that ending—the how of it, what it will look and feel like, the process of dying, the complete antithesis of birth, the unraveling, the unwinding of the miracle of life, how much of that unwinding is within our orderly control, possessed of a certain beauty, and how much of it is a chaotic undoing of the threads of our lives, ugly and dark—these are the questions that have preoccupied me these past five years, especially now, as the end draws ever closer. But all of it is, in itself, also a miracle.

We live in a culture that fears the unwinding of the miracle. It is dark; it is frightening; it is tragic, especially when the death is deemed premature. When I was diagnosed, I went looking for others like me with whom I could explore the darkness, fear, and tragedy. Processing hard truths and vigorously embracing reality have after all been the salvation of my life. But mostly, I found and continue to find delusion, false optimism, and forced cheer in the face of a devastating diagnosis, where death and all the fears that come with it must be avoided at all cost. Clichés born of that need to avoid the truth—from well-meaning family and friends, but most confoundingly from the sickest and caregivers of the sickest—are unthinkingly offered to me constantly. “There’s always hope. You have to stay positive. You have to keep fighting. There is no other option.” I grit my teeth as I think, Actually, there is a point where there is no more hope for continued life. That’s just a factual matter. Really? Why do I have to stay positive? Is there something wrong with being negative? And no, there is always an option, the option of choosing to die. Horror of horrors! In the orthodoxy of dying, this is heresy.

There was the popular blogger who wrote of being excited when she was diagnosed because cancer presented another challenge in her young life and she loved challenges. I felt no excitement when I was diagnosed, and if this woman really had, it was all part of a lie she was telling herself to avoid what was happening in her own body. Another popular blogger only a few short weeks from dying couldn’t seem to recognize or accept the telltale signs—the weight loss, the liver invaded by tumors, the five brain metastases. He was a clinician, a cancer researcher, which made the denial and delusion that much more astounding. The brain tumors were being treated with radiation. Subsequently, as he reported on his blog, he fell over from a loss of balance, which he attributed to inflammation caused by the radiation. He expected the inflammation to subside, and then he would be able to return to systemic treatment. I read and looked at photos he had posted on social media a month earlier, and I knew that there would be no return to systemic treatment. The end was near for him.

Those of us familiar with the cancer world, who have witnessed enough of our friends die, recognized