The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,66

any of this seems nothing but a mockery now, a cruel illusion. And also, a lesson: we control nothing.

Well, that’s not exactly true. We control how good we are to people. We control how honest we are with ourselves and others. We control the effort we have put into living. We control how we respond to impossible news. And when the time comes, we control the terms of our surrender.

23

From Darkness to Strength

The day I got the horrible news, I learned of a laser surgery performed in Germany and London that is designed to deal with up to one hundred lung mets. Although the surgery has been performed for ten years, it is not available in the United States because the FDA has not approved the equipment. I asked my oncologist what he thought of the surgery and what his lung tumor board thinks. He says that my tumors are too small for the surgery, that a surgeon would not be able to see them to destroy them. What kind of war is this in which the lethal enemy won’t show itself? Cancer fights dirty.

Dr. A.C. does have a patient he is sending to Germany to have it done, but he said that the surgeon would be able to feel her tumors. I might get a second opinion about this. The surgery costs eleven thousand euros per lung. Yikes!

I vowed when I started writing my way through this calamity that I would endeavor to be honest about who I am and what it is for me to battle cancer, that I would strive against my very human egoist tendencies to prop up some persona of myself as perpetually inspiring, strong, or wise. Why was this so important to me? In part because if this writing were to become the principal means by which my children would come to know my innermost thoughts and feelings after my death, I wanted them to see my real self, a self that, in addition to experiencing many moments of joy, gratitude, and insight, was often tormented by fear, anger, hurt, despair, and darkness. I also made that promise because I disliked tremendously those bloggers who always presented in the face of a life-threatening illness images of pumped fists and unending positivity and determination. To me, such portrayals were disingenuous, an insult to the intelligence of readers, and above all, disorienting and potentially harmful for those like myself who were newly diagnosed and felt more darkness than light. I wanted to detail and explore that darkness, to let others out there who I knew experienced a similar desolation and lonely darkness know that they were not and are not alone. There is a natural, intuitive fear of darkness; people who are gripped by it are ashamed to speak of it, while those who are free of it for however long wish to run from it as if it were a contagious plague. If the cost of my brutal honesty about my darkness is a highly unflattering picture of me that repels, so be it.

In the weeks after I received the news, I fell into a darkness that was a thousand times worse than anything I had experienced before. I managed to get through Christmas Day, and the full force of the darkness hit me the day after. It left me broken and crumpled on the ground, my rage-filled screams ringing in its wake and a husband and children utterly shocked at the madness they had never thought possible in this woman who was supposed to be their steadfast wife and mother.

Yes, Josh has seen me angry and despairing before, but never like this, for this frightened him; this made him afraid for his own and his children’s safety, because I was like a deranged animal, devoid of reason, hope, and light. I yelled and hurled things, not at Josh or the children, but at the heartless gods who would do this to me and, in the absence of those gods, at the painfully unjust cruelty that is an inherent part of the human existence. Why me? I demanded of the gods. Hadn’t I already borne my share of trials and tribulations? Hadn’t I already known enough suffering? Hadn’t I lived a good and moral life? The absence of any divine answer arising from the chaos of my thoughts made me even more crazed. Even the gods cower from me. Cowards.

Through heaving sobs, I begged Josh to let me go, to let me leave