The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,133

that woman? She was becoming an ever-distant memory, and I was sad, not for my daughters or my husband, but simply for me, for I realized that I was losing the person who I once was and whom I loved, and this dying woman, this woman who was aging at an accelerated pace, an ugly, ever-thinning creature, was taking her place. As I prepared to die and the invisible wall between me and the living grew thicker and taller, I mourned my own impending death in an ever-shrinking bubble of isolation, loneliness, and darkness.

But then, once my summer of grief was over, my perspective shifted, and a sort of peace came over me. I was sad to be leaving my husband and my daughters, but I felt something else, too: awe at what was happening to my body. I couldn’t watch myself be born, but with eyes open, I could watch myself die. And that is no less a miracle than any other. It is hard to find the beauty in dying, but I’ve learned; I’m learning still.

My grandmother died when I was twenty years old, and it broke my heart because I loved her so very much. My mother told me that my grandmother hated me for a very long time, that she didn’t grow to love me until long after we came to this country and I had gained some sight. The odd thing is that when I was growing up, I would have never guessed that my grandmother hated me. She was a wonderful grandmother to all thirteen of her grandchildren, cooking weekly feasts for us and calling us constantly to ask whether we’d eaten dinner yet and coming over to fold our laundry. She had had a hand in raising and caring for each of us at some point in our lives. During the summer before she died (no one, including her, knew she was dying), she and I would take walks in the coolness of the setting sun, her hand grasping my elbow; I was never sure whether she was using me as support or whether she thought she was guiding me; maybe it was a little bit of both. She came with me to the airport to see me off to my senior year of college—she’d never done that before. I remember feeling slightly nervous and nauseous at returning to school after a year of studying abroad and laying my head on her shoulder in the backseat of the car as my dad sped along the freeway at that early hour; I remember hugging her and telling her I’d see her at Christmas and her waving goodbye to me as I boarded the plane.

Seven weeks later I flew home to sit at her hospital bedside as she faced her last days, her skin yellowed, her body bloated, and her ability to speak gone. She was surrounded by her enormous family. Her daughters-in-law would take turns spending the night with her to make sure she was never alone. I was moved by all the love that surrounded her. There was something special about my grandmother, something that drew people to her, even in her darkest days.

I tried unsuccessfully to study for midterms as I tried much harder to process this first death of someone I truly loved, to reconcile this diminished woman who was days from leaving this world with the dominant woman I’d always known, she who had left her little village as a girl to travel by boat to a foreign land where a boy she’d never met waited to marry her, she who had never learned how to read but through her sons and grandchildren found all the success she ever dreamed of, she who had such an iron will that she’d not thrown up once on the fishing boat that took us away from Vietnam even as everyone around her retched into the sea.

At the end of the fourth day of my visit, I went to bid her farewell, knowing that once I left her side that evening I would never see her alive again. The room was filled with her children and grandchildren. I took her hand—it was too warm and as dry as rice paper. Her eyes remained closed, as they were most of the time now. “I have to go back to school tomorrow, Grandma,” I said in our Chinese dialect. I wasn’t sure she could hear me or if she was even awake. I switched