The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,68

don’t want them to live through my emotional roller coaster. In no way am I minimizing the love Josh feels for me. It is very real and deep, but I also know that he is capable of loving someone else, that he should and will need to love someone else. And perhaps that love will be as profound as, if not more profound than, the love we have. He is a good and wonderful man, and I have been inordinately lucky to have him. And I know that the children are resilient, that they will withstand my loss and thrive regardless. They are, after all, my children, and I like to think the best of me flows through their veins.

I know that so many will step in to help Josh raise them and that so many will tell them about their mother. I know they will be surrounded by love.

So no, if I choose to keep fighting, it won’t be because I think Josh and the girls really need me or that somehow more time with me will make much of a positive difference in their ultimate destinies. Nor will I fight based on some delusional hope that I will somehow still miraculously beat this, or that I will have a lot more time than I now expect to have. I have always had a tumultuous relationship with the concept of hope, and I still do. I’m not a believer. I will leave the hope stuff to all of you.

Even so, I do choose to keep fighting. It took me nearly two weeks to make that affirmative choice. It took me nearly two weeks to recover from the lows of that day after Christmas, to pull myself out of that darkness. It happened with the help of Josh and my girls, my beloved longtime therapist, and the words of my even more beloved sister, Lyna, and best friend, Sue. They helped me to see important truths about me and how I want my life to be viewed now and after I am gone.

When I did poorly on a test in high school—and by “poorly” I mean by my nerdy standards a 92 instead of a 95, or a 97 instead of 100—I would come home tearful, convinced that this unacceptable grade was the greatest tragedy of my young life, and indeed it was. My parents were not the typical crazy Asian American parents who put pressure on us. Yes, my dad would pay us for every A we got on our report cards, but there were never any demands or threats. In response to my crying, my mother would ask in her broken English, “Did you do the best you can?” Of course I had. “Then that’s all you can do,” she would tell me.

It was such simplistic advice, and yet it was so true. Your best effort is all you can ask of yourself—no more and no less. And once you’ve done that, there can be no regrets. I will continue to fight this disease—not with the same gung-ho attitude I had at the beginning—but I will continue to fight it with an even more nuanced, deeper, and more realistic understanding of its deadliness. I am an overachiever, used to doing my best at everything. A lot of times my best wasn’t good enough to get the stellar grades. Similarly, my best will not be enough to beat cancer, but even as I lie dying someday not that far in the future, to know that I tried my best to gain more time in this life and to live as well as possible in the face of this disease and therefore have no regrets, that knowledge will be enough for me. It will bring me peace, because by choosing to fight without ceasing, even in the face of such a formidable foe, I will teach my girls one of the most important lessons there can be. I want them to understand the importance of always doing the best they can in whatever endeavor, a lesson that their maternal grandmother taught me and one that I now must teach them.

As a mother, I don’t get to just walk away from my children, however much I may want to escape further physical and emotional pain or for any other selfish reasons. I made the choice to be a mother and with that choice came sacrosanct commitments, the most important among them being to give my children the tools to