The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,88

shit with my four-year-old daughter, who refused to go to bed. I know it was a reaction to all this cancer crap. I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want my children to remember me as a bitch in pain and unhappy. I have my next treatment tomorrow, and I told my husband I want to stop. I would rather die sooner than live like this. I’d rather feel good and be happy and be a good mother. I know I don’t have the courage to actually follow through with that statement, but in time I will.

We recently started going to church because Mia insisted. I’m not a Christian and I never will be, but I go to church to support my husband (who was raised an Episcopalian) and children. I politely refuse communion in lieu of the blessing, but I do listen to the sermon with as open a mind as I can. One sermon in particular by Mother Kate has stayed with me. She spoke of how while we often emphasize the power and goodness of the light, sometimes wonderful things can come out of darkness, too. She held up a plant from her Brooklyn apartment, which, like so many other apartments in the city, is in short supply of natural light. She spoke of how it started as a seed in the dark depth of the soil. This is also true of all human and animal life; we all begin in the dark, do we not?

On that night, I cried and I cried. In what seemed like a symbolic gesture of how low I had gone, I dropped to the floor and cried on the rug, sobbing inconsolably into the pile. And then, in that lonely darkness, my precious Isabelle, the same child I had raged at only hours before, came to me. She found me on the rug and, for many minutes, she sat next to me, putting her hand on my head and saying nothing, as I continued to weep.

Then she asked in her sweet little four-year-old voice, “Mommy, why are you lying on the floor?”

The more metaphorical answer was of course impossible for me to say to her, so I gave her a simple answer: “Because Mommy is hot.”

A comfortable silence fell between us. Then, I said, “Isabelle, you should go back to your bed and go to sleep.”

Her response: “But, Mommy, I want you to come sleep with me. You can sleep on the floor in my room, if you want.”

How could I refuse this child of mine who had ventured into the darkness to extend her hand and offer love and forgiveness to her awful mother? I slept between her and Mia on their full-size bed the rest of the night, shunning the floor.

30

The Gift of Grief

The most frequent question I get, after “How are you?,” is “How are the girls doing?”

My children are very aware that I am sick, that I will likely die before too much more time has passed. Slowly, as they have grown older, they have understood more and more what “death” means, although of course I doubt they have a true understanding of what my death would mean to them emotionally.

My so-smart, almost six-year-old Mia quietly tries to intellectualize all of this, break it down to its component parts, and analyze it. She likes to watch documentaries about wild animals killing each other. She loves to sit on her daddy’s lap and watch shows about airplane crashes in which death is reenacted and then the investigators come in to solve the mystery of why the plane fell out of the sky. She watches forensic autopsy shows about gruesome murders and how science is used to find the murderers. Josh finds such morbid shows captivating, and apparently so does his elder daughter, since she watches them with exceptional focus. Other than the wildlife shows, every time Mia and Josh turn such shows on, Belle protests, screaming, “I don’t wanna watch airplane crash shows!” and runs into another room, frequently dragging me with her.

It was on one such occasion, while father and daughter were watching a show and Josh was explaining to Mia the meaning of “A.D.” as in the year A.D. 1532 and its association with the crucifixion of Jesus, that Mia expressed her desire to go to church, to learn more about Jesus, and said that she believed herself to be a Christian. Since we don’t talk to her much about religion (and