by Julie Yip-Williams, 2019
Brutally honest book written by young wife and mother, Julie Yip-Williams, who was born blind in Vietnam, almost euthanized at the age of 2 months, escaped Vietnam with her family on a boat at age 3 or 4, ends up a Harvard-educated lawyer, world-traveler, married with 2 daughters, and diagnosed with Stage IV Colon Cancer at age 37. She decided to write her story mostly for her two young daughters so they could know her and remember her after she is gone. She fought the cancer for 5 years, trying just about everything, but she died in March of 2018. Her husband, Josh Williams, wrote the Epilogue.
Here are some notable quotes from this deeply personal tale:
From Chapter 10, Moments of Happiness: “Anyone who raises young children understands the oftentimes soul-crushing monotony of life’s routines, of battling through fatigue to get up every morning, of rushing the kids off to school, of withstanding the stresses of the oh-so-necessary paying job, of cooking healthy dinners that will likely go uneaten by picky children, of relentlessly negotiating with the kids over when to brush teeth and what clothes to wear the next day and what treats they can have if they eat tomorrow’s lunch.”
And, “I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the moments when I’ve been the happiest in my life. You might expect me to say it was the moment I married Josh, or the moment I held each of my squirming daughters for the first time. Alas, no–sorry, Josh and Mia and Belle. As honest as I am, I have to admit that marriage and bringing forth life, while filled with joy, were too fraught with anxiety to be truly and purely happy moments.”
“No, when I think of the happiest moments of my life, free from anxiety and worry, I think of the time I sat atop a hillside with three Tibetan monks in the distant province of Gansu, China, at age nineteen, listening to the haunting chants from the monastery below. I think of sitting in a Zodiac on Thanksgiving Day 2005, making my way through white, green, and blue water toward the antarctic coast under the brightest sky and sun I’d ever seen, to meet hundreds of wild penguins. I think of riding on a bicycle rickshaw along the country roads of Bangladesh too narrow for a car, under a star-filled sky with hundreds of fireflies lighting our path. These were the most euphoric moments of my life, moments when I was at peace, however briefly, when I had no worries about my past or my future, when I had traveled alone long and often difficult distances to reach my destination, when I felt gratitude in the breathtaking beauty I was so privileged to behold, when I felt like my soul was expanding to encompass a rare and even divine part of the human experience, to see and feel places of such extraordinary natural wonder that they must surely have been touched by the hand of God.”
From Chapter 18, A Love Story: “Costa clutched my hands one afternoon after she’d caught a glimpse of my girls leaving the room and prayed solemnly to God for me in a language I didn’t understand. The fervor of her prayers brought tears to my eyes. Then she went about changing my sheets….”
“Then there was the man whose name I never knew, the one who didn’t speak a word of English, whom I might have mistaken for a youthful gangster in any other setting in light of the way his dark brown hair was slicked back into a ponytail at the nape of his neck and the way the rippling muscles in his forearms bespoke an easy violence if he so chose. He silently cleaned me one night after I’d had a humiliating accident. the gentleness of his touch, and the absence of disgust and judgment, which I found shocking and so humbling, destroyed all my unkind preconceived notions of who he was. I doubted that I could do for a stranger what he was doing for me, but I wanted to after being in his presence. I witnessed through him the extent and power of compassion, the love that one human being can express to another through action alone, not because they know one another but because they are simply members of the same human race.”
From Chapter 18, A Love Story: “While in some respects the story of my diagnosis was a nightmare, I think it is ultimately a story of love between me and all those who came to support me. In my moments of elusive faith, I believed the hand of God had brought me to Los Angeles then so that I could know that kind of magical and singular love, a love that I had never experienced before and, I daresay, that even many of those who have lived many more years than I have never experienced and will never experience. Sadly, it’s the type of love that is shown only when life is threatened, when for a few minutes, hours, days, or weeks, everyone agrees on and understands what really matters. And yet, as transient as that love can be, its magic, intensity, and power can sustain the most cynical among us, as long as we allow ourselves to linger in the glow of its memory. This disease may bring me to the final days of my life on this earth, but the story of how cancer came into my life reminds me every day that while it has taken from me the innocence and happiness of my old life, it has also given me the gift of human love, which has now become part of my soul and which I will take with me forever.”
From Chapter 22, The Cancer Is in My Lungs: “The sense that we ever had control over any of this seems nothing but a mockery now, a cruel illusion. And also, a lesson: we control nothing.”
“Well, that’s not exactly true. We control how good we are to people. We control how honest we are with ourselves and others. We control the effort we have put into living. We control how we respond to impossible news And when the time comes, we control the terms of our surrender.”
From Chapter 23, From Darkness to Strength: “I vowed when I started writing my way through this calamity that I would endeavor to be honest about who I am and what it is for me to battle cancer….In part because if this writing were to become the principal means by which my children would come to know my innermost thoughts and feelings after my death, I wanted them to see my real self, a self that, in addition to experiencing many moments of joy, gratitude, and insight, was often tormented by fear, anger, hurt, despair, and darkness…In the weeks after I received the news, I fell into a darkness that was a thousand times worse than anything I had experienced before. I managed to get through Christmas Day, and then the full force of the darkness hit me the day after. It left me broken and crumpled on the ground, my rage-filled screams ringing in its wake and a husband and children utterly shocked at the madness they had never thought possible in this woman who was supposed to be their steadfast wife and mother.”
Chapter 24, “Keeping It in the Stomach:” “…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 did 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 loated 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.”
“After the hurt came the need to clear the smoke and ashes so I could move on (I am moving on still), to create order out of the chaos in my mind, with rationalization and even pity for these misguided people I had to call my family. They were all superstitious souls trapped in a backward, hopeless country, trying to survive in difficult times, living within a culture where female infanticide was not an unfamiliar idea. Perhaps in that situation, even I would have thought murder was justified . . . perhaps.”
“Don’t fool yourself. You know you wouldn’t have. Even the herbalist, who by the way came from the same time and place as all of them, knew that.“
From Chapter 25, A Day in My Life (regarding her time in Bangladesh): “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 the discomfort of living amid extreme heat, monsoons, until-then-unimaginable poverty, and cultural displacement, and the pain of observing girl prostitutes living in squalor and women with their noses burned off by sulfuric acid thrown at them by their abusive husbands. But my time there was also filled with the self-knowledge and pride that I could endure and even thrive with discomfort, finding wonder and gratitude in the unmatched beauty and richness of a lush and unspoiled countryside and the unparalleled kindness and resilience of the people.”
From Chapter 26, Invincibility: “…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…But what Josh and others don’t understand is that with acceptance and peace, I have learned to live more fully and completely in the here and now, that I now live with a fierceness, passion, and love that I’ve never known. In what is the greatest irony of all, I have come to realize that in accepting death, I am embracing life in all of its splendor, for the first time…”
From Chapter 27, Dreams Reborn: She is talking about her contractor after she told him she would need to be able to trust him to carry out her wishes after she is gone: “He was immediately alarmed, wanting to know if there had been negative health developments. I assured him that I was stable for the moment, but I had to always prepare for the worst. He looked me in the eye, put his hand on my shoulder, and declared, “Nothing is going to happen to you. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.” I was so moved by his obvious concern and his belief that he could somehow affect the course of my disease. That kind of support is priceless.”
She ends that chapter with the statement, “Live while you live, my friends.”
From Chapter 35, Courage and Love, in which she talks to her husband, Josh, about after she is gone: “It is because of my jealousy and hate and worry and love that I have threatened Josh with murder from the grave if he were to ever favor future children over our children, even monetarily. I made him promise that he would not move out of this apartment that I have spent so much time and energy renovating for my children because the Slutty Second Wife demands that, to banish all traces of me…Poor Josh has to put up with my hysterics, my anger, my sadness, my tears, my darkness. Josh is tired, too. He’s tired of living under this black cloud. And out of love for him, I want to die sooner rather than later. I want to set him and the children free. I want him to have a normal, happy life again…I am a burden…”
From Chapter 37, Faith, A Lesson of History: “Then I let everything else go and put faith in myself and a higher power, and I just walked forward, through the fear, into my incredible adventure. Rather than shrouded in shadows, Bangladesh was and is a beautiful place filled with vibrant colors and kind people. My dark prognostications had been wrong. That night in the hospital room, I willed myself to again acknowledge the fear, told myself to do everything within my power to control my destiny and let everything else go, and then ordered myself to look ahead and walk through the fear once more.”
From Chapter 39, Believe, which is all about Roger Federer: “I love Roger Federer…Josh, as do most people, loves to watch dominance, to marvel at human physical excellence, and Roger Federer was a prime example of the incredible feats that the human body is capable of. My feigned interest in basketball and football disappeared after we got engaged and then married, but my love for Federer persisted. After our wedding, in the fall of 2007, Federer’s physical decline began. Josh and I would watch matches together with greater stress as the odds of his victory decreased with the passing of the months and years…In the years that followed, Federer didn’t win. He made it deep into many Grand Slam tournaments, quarters and semis but no finals…I stopped watching. I told Josh it was game over for our beloved Federer, that it was time for him to retire with grace, that I didn’t want him to be humiliated by these younger guys. Josh never gave up on him, though. Never. Josh believed as I have never seen anyone believe. He kept telling me that as long as Fed could go deep into a Grand Slam tournament, he still had a chance…Josh never stopped believing in Federer. He has never stopped believing in me, either, never…”
From Chapter 41, Death, Part Two: “I know that soon I will stand on the brink of something extraordinary, something greater than the human mind can understand. I have far greater faith in the belief that there is more than this life than I do in a God. I know with every fiber of my being that there is an afterlife.”
From Chapter 43, Love, in which she writes a letter to her husband, Josh: “We’ve spent much time over the last four years talking about the Slutty Second Wife, a name I gave the woman who would replace me within days of my diagnosis. Actually, I have been the one talking about her, while you just rolled your eyes. and I wouldn’t call it talking; it was more like railing, threatening, and ranting…”
“My grandfather’s parents had also been born in Hainan, but he himself had been born in Vietnam after his parents immigrated there to start what would become a successful business in trading spices and other valuable commodities, like elephant tusks and rhino horns.” (!!!!) “There was no romantic love between my grandparents, at least not the kind of love I would have wanted.” “When I ask my mother if she loved my father when she married him, she says no; she says that she grew to love him over the years…Growing up, I didn’t see the love…”
From Chapter 44, The Unwinding of The Miracle: “And for any who might be reading this: I am grateful to have had you here, on this journey. I would presume to encourage you to relish your time, to not be disabled by trials or numbed by routine, to say yes as much as you can, and to mock the probabilities. Luxuriate in your sons and daughters, husbands and wives. And live, friends. Just live. Travel. Get some stamps in those passports.” Then she describes her trip to Antarctica in November years ago: “There, in the midst of its vast unearthly beauty, I felt as if I were glimpsing another planet, another dimension, possibly the afterlife…Over the next seven days, I would escape the noise of the ship to kayak, paddling through the deepest quiet and the silkiest waters, waters that rippled with each stroke, waters that perfectly reflected the sky’s mood…In Antarctica, I felt as if we had departed our home planet and were closer to some serious answers about what it all means.One cannot help but think big thoughts in such a place. One cannot help but imagine God–and I use the word God to refer not to the one depicted in any religious teachings but rather to a being that may very well be a force comprised of all the life that has been and is and will be, a force that is incomprehensible to the mind but perhaps perceptible to the soul, the way great poetry eludes logic but overwhelms the emotions…” Julie’s last paragraph that she wrote: “When the time comes, I will happily and with a great sigh of relief climb into my bed knowing that I will never need to get up again. I will surround myself with family and friends, as my grandmother did. I will eagerly greet the end of this miracle, and the beginning of another.”
Her husband, Joshua Williams, wrote the Epilogue. He details her last weeks, getting her home and the Hospice team in place. Allowing her to die as she wanted, with family and friends in her beautiful apartment, enjoying food which she could not eat. He writes, “Nothing can prepare you for what happens after death. Numbness initially protest you from the crushing power of forever, and so in the first weeks and even months after Julie left us, there was a jarring lightness to life. All the shoes had dropped…” And here he writes brutally honestly about their relationship: “In the spirit of that writing, and so that others who are going through ordeals similar to ours might not feel so alone in their suffering, before I finish here I feel that I must mention the toll that disease takes on even the best relationships. As deeply connected and profoundly committed as Julie and I were for the entirety of our time together, as death approached our paths diverged sharply. As she contemplated death and what comes next, I contemplated our daughters and the devastating prospect of life without and beyond Julie. The growing distance had the effect of making us seem alien to each other, like strangers flailing in the face of eternity. We became the focus of each other’s despair. It was often unbearable, and like many couples similarly trapped, we fought terribly and repeatedly. It got so bad that each of us threatened to leave at various times. Divorce was mentioned, brutal things were said. Such is the hurricane of terminal disease–it destroys not only the afflicted, but everyone and everything in its path as well. But we didn’t leave. We didn’t divorce. Pulling back from such a brink when it feels that all in your life is spinning out of control requires an effort that can seem beyond you. But that is what Julie and I did. We faced that hard truth together, reaffirmed the reasons that had brought us together in the first place, and said all the things to each other that needed to be said. The last months of her life and of our life together were lived in tender, loving appreciation…I love you to eternity, sweetheart. Until I see you again.”
What a beautiful, honest, important gift this book is. Thank you, Julie Yip-Williams and Joshua Williams, for writing it. It is truly a gift! Thank you! And Julie, I hope you found Jesus – the lover of your soul, the Omnipotent, All-Powerful, All-Knowing and All-loving God that you hinted at all through your writing, and that you are in His Loving Arms right now, seeing clearly and completely whole and healthy. God bless you, Julie, and thank you for this gift of a book!