The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,26

I’ve told Josh, of course; I’ve told close friends; and now I’m telling the world.

One day soon, I hope to have the courage to ask my father for some answers, not in anger but in forgiveness, to gain a better understanding of the motivations of those involved, to tell him that I forgive him and my mother for their complicity. I’m just not ready yet. I’ve not spoken of the secret to my mother since that night, except once after my hemicolectomy, after we’d known that I had cancer for five days and I knew she was not handling it well—she was angry, fearful, guilt-ridden. I spoke to her in the privacy of my hospital room, with my sister there as moral support. “You have to tell people that I have cancer, Mom. You need to tell people so they can help you through this.” No response. No surprise. My mother is a very emotionally repressed person. “Mom, you know better than anyone else how strong I am. You know better than anyone else how unlikely it was for me to be where I am today. Considering ‘that matter’ when I was born, you know how unlikely it is for me to even be alive, much less living the life I’m living now.”

“Truly” was my mother’s response, the only word she uttered during that brief conversation as she sat, bolt upright, her face set in an unreadable mask.

10

Moments of Happiness

When I was first diagnosed, I thought that I would never feel happiness in its truest, unadulterated form again. I was certain that every second in which I felt even a modicum of happiness, at seeing Mia grasp concepts like the solar system or watching Belle walk fearlessly into her first day of school, would be tarnished by cancer and that cancer’s ominous presence would invariably invade every moment of my life going forward. In many ways, what I suspected would happen has happened. The joy I felt in watching my little girls dance with abandon under the flashing lights of another child’s birthday party was marred by the thoughts in my head about how many future moments like this I will not be able to witness. In the midst of all that music and raucous screaming, I cried for all the things that I might never see.

Even without the cloud of cancer hanging overhead, happiness can come on unexpectedly, an elusive feeling that flits across the consciousness and is gone. Anyone who raises young children understands the oftentimes soul-crushing monotony of life’s routines, of battling through fatigue to get up every morning, of rushing the kids off to school, of withstanding the stresses of the oh-so-necessary paying job, of cooking healthy dinners that will likely go uneaten by picky children, of relentlessly negotiating with the kids over when to brush teeth and what clothes to wear the next day and what treats they can have if they eat tomorrow’s lunch. Before cancer, occasionally I would find flickers of the pure joy that everyone says children bring. Happiness came when Mia said something clever and funny or when Belle wrapped her little arms around me and held me like I was the most important person in the world. Joy came, too, when I spent a long weekend away with Josh or hung out with friends during a rare evening out without children. But for the most part, life before cancer, which consisted primarily of working and parenting, was plain old hard and thankless.

Don’t get me wrong—I always appreciated what I had, my children’s health and our comfort and well-being. I didn’t need cancer to make me grateful for everything in my life. Growing up a poor immigrant and legally blind had already taught me all I ever needed to know about gratitude and appreciating life, truly. Rather, my life before cancer had settled into a routinized contentment and acceptance of the status quo, as opposed to an existence dominated by moments of happiness, defined as elevated feelings of pleasure, delight, and euphoria. After the cancer diagnosis, I simply assumed that whatever few moments of pure joy I would have would be tainted and that unadulterated happiness going forward was a total and complete impossibility.

But my assumption was wrong.

On a Thursday in the first blush of fall, I was sitting across a table from my former obstetrician, Dr. C., at a nondescript eatery buried in the dinginess of lower Manhattan. We were sharing a late lunch of spinach, brown rice,