The Unwinding of the Miracle

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The Unwinding of the Miracle Page 17

by Julie Yip-Williams


  Absolution is difficult. Sometimes it just isn’t possible. Pity is one thing. Forgiveness is something else altogether.

  That night, those words, “Please forgive me,” unspoken, hung between my mother and me after she had finished telling her story and after she asked me to not tell anyone what I had just learned. She stood over me with her hands at her sides, waiting. I could not look at her. At some point during her telling of the story—I don’t know when—I had begun to weep. I am not like the other members of my family. I am not good at holding back my tears, suppressing my emotions. I left her room then, feeling enlightened, angry, hurt, confused, sad, but mostly battered, knowing that I would never look at my family, my life, or myself in quite the same way again. Before I left my mother, I thanked her for telling me because I truly was grateful.

  It’s better to know than not know.

  25

  A Day in My Life

  After I graduated from law school, in 2002, I went to work at Cleary Gottlieb, a prominent international law firm, what you would have called a Wall Street law firm back in the day, the kind of firm that represents the great American blue-chip companies and investment banks in their many million- and billion-dollar corporate transactions and lawsuits, which more often than not make the headlines of The Wall Street Journal. Many law school students graduating from the big-name schools work for a few years at a big law firm to pay off school debt and get some experience before heading out to do other things—work for themselves, or take a job with the government, a nonprofit, a smaller firm, or a corporation as an in-house counsel. A small minority have the stamina, desire, and talent to actually vie for a coveted place among the illustrious partnerships of these traditional law firms.

  I stayed longer at Cleary than I ever thought I would, and was still there when I was diagnosed. I was not on the partnership track, as I certainly lacked the stamina and talent to be a partner. After years of slaving away, pulling all-nighters, and living under the intense stress of being an associate at a place like Cleary, I had finally found a comfortable niche that was somewhat conducive to being a mother to young children. And then cancer struck.

  I haven’t worked since I was diagnosed. As varied as my days were in the law, it’s even more remarkable to me now how no day in my life is ever the same. I have no set schedule other than getting the girls ready for, and taking them to, school every morning, and putting them to bed every night. In between, I cook, clean, write, read, research, talk to cancer and noncancer friends, watch TV, occasionally hang out with people, pay bills, fundraise for colorectal cancer research, and stare at the ceiling. I honestly have no idea where all the time goes, a scary thought considering how limited my time is.

  I applaud all those who work while living with active Stage IV disease and even more so those who have young children; I know not working is often not an option; nonetheless, I admire those people’s ability to juggle work on top of the emotionally and physically draining life that is living with cancer.

  On a Monday in early January 2015, when the news of my sobering prognosis was still fresh and painful, I woke up before dawn on the wrong side of the bed. I was plagued by doubts and questions for which I did not have the answers. Should I experiment with cannabis oil? Should I be adding or removing certain supplements? Should I be seeking a second opinion? Should I see another oncologist altogether, someone who specializes in colorectal cancer, someone at the esteemed Memorial Sloan Kettering? Should I be more aggressively pursuing laser surgery in Germany despite my oncologist’s and the lung tumor board’s opinion? That morning, for whatever reason, the worries were overwhelming.

  My younger daughter, three-year-old Isabelle, also seemed to have woken up out of sorts. The darkness outside seemed to match the darkness within us both. Monday mornings during the winter are particularly painful with the kids as I struggle to get them out the door, knowing that we’ll be late, but still striving to arrive within some acceptable limits of tardiness for kindergarten and nursery school. But that Monday morning was exceptionally painful. Isabelle was especially challenging in her refusal to cooperate and in her extreme clinginess to me. When she becomes unusually clingy, I always think she knows something that I don’t, that she can sense the cancer growing inside me. She was like that in December in the weeks before my troubling CEA test and damning scan.

  I kept telling Josh that Isabelle sensed the growth of metastatic disease in me, but he told me I was being ridiculous, that such behavior could be attributable to any number of things. Of course, I was right.

  I always think of Mia as my stunningly beautiful and intellectual child, the kind of girl who will turn—and has already turned—heads with her captivating face and tall grace, and who astounds as she points to an animal in a medieval painting in a museum and declares, “That’s the narwhal, the unicorn of the sea.” While I fear she may battle her own demons born of innate insecurity one day, Mia is my adventurous eater and the one who I suspect will follow in my footsteps in learning multiple languages and traveling to the far reaches of the world.

  But Belle (who is more stubborn than a mule—she would rather starve and faint than eat what she doesn’t want to eat, for instance) is my ageless soul, my uncannily intuitive child, who understands people and life with a precociousness well beyond her years. She is my child who talks to ghosts. When she had just turned two and a half, as I was pushing her off the elevator in her stroller one morning, out of nowhere she asked me, “What happens when we die, Mama?” I didn’t know how to respond, for I would never have expected that kind of question from a two-and-a-half-year-old child.

  It was also around that time that Mia was being especially difficult—so difficult that I felt like she and I were already having those raging fights I’ve heard occur between mothers and their teenage daughters; my mother and I didn’t fight like that. One Sunday night, Mia had pushed me over the brink and I let loose on her, yelling and ordering her to her room. She went running, tears streaming down her cheeks and screams echoing with the slam of the door. I cried hysterically on the couch, beating myself up for being the worst mother ever. Josh told me to retreat to our room so Isabelle wouldn’t have to see me so upset—he thought my crying would scare her. In response, Belle turned to her father and declared in her sweet voice, “Mama is just really tired now. She’s gonna cry for a little bit and then she will be okay.”

  During my illness, the children have witnessed my emotional outbursts—the crying, the screaming, the rage. I’m sure many child psychologists believe that Josh and I should hide our emotions and the truth from our children, that they are fragile flowers that should be protected. Josh and I don’t subscribe to that thinking. We do not believe in hiding from our children. They are not fragile flowers that will wilt under the strain; rather, they are highly intelligent little girls with an enormous capacity to understand and grow stronger with every hard reality that awaits them in their lives. Facing hardship with a solid foundation of familial love from an early age will strengthen them. I know this to be true based on my own life.

  When I lie in bed crying, Mia usually stays away, or she’ll run into my room to grab her stuffed animal Pinky and her blanket and run right out to watch TV—she internalizes her fears, worries, and sadness. Belle, on the other hand, comes to check on me every couple minutes, opening the door ever so quietly to stick her head inside to look at me with her concerned brown eyes. Sometimes, she crawls into bed with me and gives me a hug and kiss. “Mommy, it’s going to be okay,” she reassures me, like she knows all.

  But on that particular Monday morning, Belle was not the reassuring voice she sometimes is. I cried into her neck as she sat on my lap in the hallway outside her classroom. We have to kill thirty minutes every morning between 8:30, when Mia’s class starts, and 9:00, when Belle’s class starts. I sat there on the floor listening to other parents cheerily greeting each other and comparing notes about their holidays a
s if they didn’t have a care in the world. Our holidays had been awful, completely poisoned by cancer. At that moment, the sounds of normalcy were more than I could handle. In our little corner, I tried to hide as I sobbed, holding Belle even tighter. There were no questions or other words this time, no “Mommy, why are you crying?” or “Mommy, it’s going to be okay.” Instead, she just sat staring at a spot on the wall with that look in her eyes that told me she was seeing something I couldn’t see, in a place to which I could not go with her, the look that scares me because I know she knows that there is worsening metastatic disease.

  Her 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 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.

  As I looked at this Bangladeshi woman who had chosen me to ask for directions, all the associations I have with Bangladesh—the juxtaposition of ugliness and beauty, suffering and joy, poverty and generosity—came back to me. My journey through cancer is not so different from my journey through Bangladesh; this cancer journey has been and is one filled with ugliness and beauty, suffering and joy, poverty and generosity. How could I help but think that this Bangladeshi woman’s momentary visit in my life was not random at all?

  26

  Invincibility

  Every time I see Dr. A.C., my vital signs are measured by Tanya. Tanya is an outspoken, middle-aged black woman and mother of two, who likes to wear scrubs printed with different cartoon characters. Like beacons of cheer and light in a place that can be so grim, her scrubs have always entertained me as I expectantly wait to see what character it will be this time. We talk about cartoons, our kids, our vacations, and sometimes we gossip about the staff and even Dr. A.C., because, as I’ve said, I’m very nosy. Such conversations with the various people I encounter at the NYU Cancer Center—Tanya, the receptionists, the nurses, Dr. A.C. himself—lift my spirits; they make me feel like these people care about me and I about them, like they don’t view me as just a cancer patient but as a vital, involved, invested, and interested member of the human race who is more than just her cancer. I think most people would be surprised at how much I laugh in the cancer center.

  It was during one of these conversations with Tanya that I asked casually, “So, you must see really sick people here.” Of course, I had noticed in my frequent stints in the waiting room that I was invariably one of the youngest people there, that I indeed, despite my diagnosis and prognosis, most often looked the healthiest.

  Tanya lowered her voice into a conspiratorial whisper. “Oh, yeah. Some people come in looking like they’re two days away from death asking for treatment, or a second or third or fourth opinion.”

  I was shocked. “Seriously?” In my many hours of hanging out in the waiting room and the exam rooms during the past twenty-one months, not so subtly checking out my fellow cancer patients out of the corner of my eye—or really, most often I stare—I had never seen anyone who looked that sick.

  She nodded solemnly.

  At my following visit, as I was leaving the exam room in which I had just met with Dr. A.C., an EMT was wheeling into my room a sickly old man with a few strands of wispy white hair. He lay there, on a stretcher, unmoving. Tanya rushed in to take his vitals, slamming the door as I made a narrow escape. She hadn’t been exaggerating! People who are very ill from cancer go to the ER or the hospital to address symptoms or complications; they don’t come to visit the oncologist in his office unless they want treatment or an opinion.

  There was something disquieting about that man, about all the other patients near death who come to Dr. A.C.’s office and the offices
of thousands of other oncologists in this country and throughout the world. More disturbing to me was the thought of the many others who go to see pseudodoctors and blatant charlatans in Mexico and Germany and South Africa or even New York City who prey on the desperately sick with their highly questionable treatments at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars and untold physical suffering. Not to mention the emotional trauma at the inevitable failure of such quackery. In the hope of physical salvation, people will spend their last dollars and last days drinking green sludge drawn from a swamp and filling their veins with a clear liquid of who the hell knows what. Desperate people go looking for miracles, and there is a shady industry that caters in said “miracles.”

  I have told my good friend X—or maybe more truthfully I vowed to X—“I will never be one of those people; I will never go to Mexico to drink sludge, no matter what happens.” My friend, this brilliant man with a razor-sharp intellect, replied, “I think I would be one of those people.” I was appalled, horrified, perplexed, and also intrigued by his response. Why indeed would someone so smart do something so dumb? X doesn’t have cancer. Even so, in the cancer world, I’ve seen quite a bit of that—sick people doing crazy things in order to save themselves, and some of them I would say are quite mentally competent and even smart under other circumstances. (Consider, as an example of someone brilliant robbed of rationality, Steve Jobs, who rejected conventional treatments in favor of alternative treatments at a time when his pancreatic cancer was very treatable; even though he subsequently underwent surgery and other traditional therapies, many consider his initial rejection of conventional care to have shortened his life.)

 

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