The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,77

own resilience? What? Is there some base primal instinct compelling them to fight for survival at any cost, like a wild animal clawing savagely against its natural predator? Are they that afraid of death? Or do they love life that much? Or are they weighed down by the obligations of love that dictate they must live as long as possible under any circumstance for those who rely on them? What motivates them, fear or love, death or life? I’ve been pondering these questions deeply since that conversation with Tanya, trying to determine how I would answer them as I make decisions about whether and how to live what remains of my days.

I suspect that the old man and X, like many people, are more afraid of death than they are in love with life, and that an animalistic fear overrides whatever rational intelligence they possess; I would guess that they fear the unknown of what Shakespeare called the “undiscovered country,” the probable nothingness they believe lies beyond this life despite their wavering belief in God; they fear having the fire of their existence extinguished as if they had never been; they fear being small and irrelevant and forgotten. I’ve seen people only days from death proclaim to a mostly unbelieving audience on social media how they’re still going to beat their cancer. I read somewhere that those people who cling to such unrealistic hopes have egos that cannot fathom their own nonexistence, the very notion so incomprehensible, so incongruous with everything that has ever been their reality, so wrong that their minds must reject, reject, and reject until there can no longer be denial of what in fact is objective reality.

It seems I don’t have much of an ego (at least not the kind of ego that clings to its own existence)—my Freudian therapist would know better than I—for I don’t have such a powerful fear of what awaits in the undiscovered country, perhaps because I do believe there is another country and not just nothingness. I can’t explain to you why I believe; it is simply a matter of intuition and faith. For me, death waits like a doorway beckoning me to a new adventure, yet another on my long list of adventures, a new territory to explore and understand and from which my everlasting soul will learn and evolve.

I don’t want to mislead in suggesting that I don’t have an ego—we all do—a place in which our arrogance and conceit are born. My ego thrives on a belief in, and the need to continually cultivate, my inner strength and courage, my innate sense of grace and dignity that has heretofore allowed me to withstand the vicissitudes of life with a sometimes brutal self-honesty, and then to arise after shouting the expletives and shedding the tears, smiling and laughing at myself. I’ve never been a beauty, nor have I ever been the smartest person at school or work, but because of the circumstances of my life and the successes I have achieved despite those circumstances, I have always believed myself to be strong and resilient. I am good at looking directly at the harshness of life’s reality. I have faith and pride in my own spiritual invincibility.

I couldn’t say it better than Albert Camus, who wrote:

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger—something better, pushing right back.

For me, raging and raging like a wild, irrational beast, denying one’s own mortality, clinging to delusion and false hopes, pursuing treatment at the cost of living in the moment, sacrificing one’s quality of life for the sake of quantity, none of this is graceful or dignified, and all of it denies us our contemplative and evolved humanity; such acts do not cultivate an invincible spirit; such acts are not testaments to inner strength and fortitude. For me, true inner strength lies in facing death with serenity, in recognizing that death is not the enemy but simply an inevitable part of life.

Ever since I learned that my cancer had metastasized to my lungs and that I have a dim prognosis, more than one person has commented on a change in me, and on my resigned tone, as if I have accepted my death from this disease as a foregone conclusion, even if I don’t know when exactly that will be. More than