The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,74
silence ended in the classroom as we tried to part for the day. I was still crying, thinking of all the school dropoffs I will miss in the years to come. I was gripped by an overwhelming sense of the futility of everything, that no matter what I did I was going to die from this disease, that it was simply a matter of time, probably less time rather than more, and that this little girl would be deprived of the person who loves her most. She was now fighting for me to stay with her. “Don’t go, Mommy! Don’t go!” she begged. I needed one of the assistant teachers to pry her out of my arms so I could leave, running out of the room, afraid to look back while her cries rang in my ears.
As I left the school, I begged whatever gods there may be for a sign, a sign that my efforts to fight this disease and thus the rest of my life would not be futile, that this misery that had come for me was not going to completely choke the life out of me, that I could still derive some untarnished happiness from life, that I would find some peace amid all the doubts that cluttered my mind. You know you’re really in the depths of despair when you start begging the gods for signs.
As I began the twenty-minute walk north on Court Street toward the Trader Joe’s—I needed to do a quick grocery run before heading in for my next treatment—I heard someone call my name. I turned, embarrassed at my obvious distraught state, as a woman I didn’t recognize approached me.
“We’re here to help,” she said. “Please let us know how we can help.”
I was even more embarrassed at my inability to place this woman—facial recognition has never been one of my strengths, due to my poor vision. She was one of Isabelle’s classmates’ mothers. She and others knew about my situation. The class parents wanted to help. I was so touched. I told her there wasn’t anything in particular at that moment, but that I was keeping track of all offers, for there would be a time when I would need as much help as I could get. I started crying, and she cried with me, and we stood in the middle of the broad sidewalk hugging. Was this my sign from the gods?
After buying the groceries and hauling them home on the B63 bus down Atlantic Avenue, I put lidocaine cream on the skin covering the mediport in my chest in preparation for the giant needle that would be inserted an hour later and hopped on the subway toward the NYU Cancer Center. I was walking east on Thirty-fourth Street, glumly lost in my own thoughts, when a petite but plump black-haired woman, probably in her fifties, approached me with a piece of paper. Great. Now what? I thought she was going to solicit money from me. The woman didn’t speak much English, but she managed to convey to me that she needed directions and handed me the slip of paper. It contained written directions to the NYU Cancer Center. How ironic.
“I’m going there, too. Just follow me,” I said, oddly buoyed by the knowledge that I wasn’t the only one heading to that dreaded place.
“What kind of cancer do you have?” I asked. Have you figured out by now that I’m nosy and will ask all those personal questions of strangers that most people would never ask? She pointed to her breasts.
“I have colon cancer,” I told her, pointing to my lower abdomen.
Based on the confused expression on her face, I wasn’t confident she entirely understood me, so I asked, “Do you speak Spanish?” just in case I could communicate with her better in my terrible Spanish.
She shook her head.
“Where are you from?” I asked, carefully enunciating every syllable.
“Bangladesh,” she said.
Now, that was really weird. How many people do you encounter from Bangladesh, even in a diverse city like New York? I think I’ve met only one other person from Bangladesh in New York City in all my years living here. What’s more, Bangladesh has a particular significance to me. I lived there for ten weeks the summer after my first year in law school, interning at a local human-rights nongovernmental organization. The experiences I had during those ten weeks were among the most enriching and profound of my life. My time there was fraught with all