The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,69
live their lives, tools that go well beyond feeding, bathing, and clothing them. Continuing to live and battle this disease in the face of its likely outcome is about keeping the most sacred promises I made to them on the days I held each of their little, fragile bodies in my arms for the first time.
And, by God, I will live with joy.
After the bad news, I received many wonderful messages of support and love, from intimates as well as strangers. All of them lifted my spirit, and got me thinking that somehow my fight was also their fight, and the notion that I must continue to fight for them was incredibly beautiful to me, and in turn gives me the will to fight even more.
It is as John Donne wrote in his “no man is an island” meditation: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” Yes, I suppose that my death will diminish you, but I also understand now that my living and fighting makes you greater than you are. We humans are resilient little bugs. And indeed, anyone who chooses to live and fight and show by example the power of the human spirit that we all share, and its determination to persevere against the brutalities of what life can bring, strengthens us all with a sense of the tremendous potential and fortitude that lie within each of us, a potential that is realized only when truly tested.
So I fight for myself, for my family, for the message that my war against cancer conveys to all of you, to all of humanity, about the incredible strength of which we are all capable. And by that same token, I urge all of you who face your own challenges that make you want to fall into the darkness to fight, too, because you, too, are part of humanity, and your fight matters and gives me and others strength when we falter.
As the new year began, I received many messages reminding me of how brave and strong I am. Which in the moment felt akin to telling a Chihuahua that he is actually Great Dane. I felt anything but brave and strong during those weeks. Does a brave and strong person lie on the ground crying as her children look on in horror? No, those are not images of bravery and strength. It is what she does afterward, though, that matters. A brave and strong person then hugs her daughters and tells them stories about her childhood, and even though they’re too young to understand, she talks to them about what it means to get married one day and how important it is for them to love themselves first and foremost before thinking about loving someone else. A brave and strong person pulls herself out of the abyss with the help of those who have more strength, hope, and faith than she and goes about the business of living even though she doesn’t necessarily want to. A brave and strong person goes back to doing more research as she tries to figure out what to do next. She does all this knowing that there will be another abyss and many more moments and hours and days of darkness before she succumbs to the inevitable.
24
“Keeping It in the Stomach”
Enough gloom and doom from me.
Who’s got time for that?
I need to resolve something here. I want to talk about love, and about other words, spoken and unspoken. I want to talk about my mother and my grandmother. My grandmother—that grandmother—the larger-than-life woman whom I had loved so completely and respected so much for her intelligence and indomitable strength. When she died so suddenly of colon cancer at the age of seventy-three, I was convinced that I would suffocate beneath the weight of all the grief, for it was the first time in my twenty years of life that someone I loved and someone I believed loved me just as much had left me.
But then, when my mother told me how much my grandmother had loathed me, I had to learn to hate, because I wanted to hate her back—this woman who was a stranger to me now—with as much venom as she had shown me, and to set fire to everything good I had ever thought of or felt for her. I wanted to yank her back from the spirit world to demand that she answer for her crimes against me, for her betrayal.