The Unwinding of the Miracle: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything That Comes After: A Read with Jenna Pick

Julie writes beautifully and movingly,. But while she and her initial family certainly faced immense struggles, she and husband Josh existed and thrived in a comfortable bubble most cancer patients can only dream of. His difficulty in processing/accepting the inevitable exposes his privilege until that point.I feel for their loss, it's unfair to anyone. But I wonder how many suffering individuals and families of moderate or low means (the majority of us) can truly identify.I think this book helped Julie more than me. Disappointed.

Compelling.Stark.Devastating.And brutally yet altogether poignantly honest.Those are the first words that spring to mind as I endeavor to describe how it felt to read Julie Yip-Williams chronicle her journey with Stage IV metastatic colon cancer because there was no evasion here. No feigned or reticent anything. She shuffled no platitudes in the face of confronting this deadly disease any more than she shied away from underlining her inauspicious infancy in Vietnam, her blindness. I liked how she wasn't afraid to attack harsh facts, feelings, or even the harshest your-body-won't-beat-this truths throughout her cancer battle. She laid it all out there in raw, somewhat unfiltered terms. She's audacious in that regard. I respect that almost as much as I understand it because sometimes expelling - writing it all down - out - is how some of us come to grips with our problems, with the most horrible and unexpected of circumstances.(Or at least we try to come to grips...as much we can.)I think that's ultimately what Yip-Williams expresses here: the pains she took to reconcile the unreconcilable. I like the messiness of that. The way she grasps at fringes of lightness and darkness from the beginning to the end of her battle, showing how they tangle together constantly, inexplicably, combatively--in varying stages or degrees throughout the end of her life.Emotion is rarely one-pronged under normal circumstances, but especially not when you're combating something chronic or dire, and Julie is unabashed in her attempt to draw attention to that. She's painstakingly up front about it, truthfully.Chaos permeates everything from the way she thinks, to the way she feels, to the way she copes, or does or does not make decisions about her care, and I appreciate the realness of her describing her world tilting again and again because that's what cancer does. So does the reality of imminent death. More importantly, so does life!There's a liberating, uncomfortable kind of courage in Julie's honesty in this which is not only about life and its unfairness, but also about dying. As a result, I consider it to be equal parts admirable, relatable, and sometimes, absolutely wrenching.This memoir is overwhelmingly harrowing, contradictory too, but I think that's what causes her experience to resonate all the more. In her words, "there is incredible value in pain and suffering, if you allow yourself to experience it, to cry, to feel sorrow and grief, to hurt."A bridge exists here between universality and subjectivity and I like how often I found myself toeing that line. The way I could feel myself straddling the place where those things broke down in her words. I think that's how I found myself relating and disconnecting with her simultaneously. I was not merely a reader, a chronic disease sufferer, a newly diagnosed patient, but I - like her - am also a human being who feels, has felt, or who will/can feel at least some of these things.Give it a read. I believe you'll feel something, too.

This is the true story of Julie. She was born in Vietnam almost blind with cataracts, a condition that could not be treated there because the country was in war. When she was 2, she fled the country in a boat to Hong Kong and finally ended in the United States. There she went to college, graduated as a lawyer, travelled the world, and finally got married. When she was 35 she was diagnosed with colorectal cancer stage 4. her two daughters were 2 and 4. In this book, she speaks about her time with cancer, her ideas, thoughts, good and bad moments. It is a book difficult to read because it is written with absolute and raw honesty, but it is enlightening and helps us to put things into perspective. What a brave woman she was!

I’m finding the book to be well-written and interesting, but I can’t help thinking as I read it about all the other people in the world fighting cancer, the vast majority of whom don’t have access to the best health care, or the funds to fight as she did, or the resources to quit their jobs for years as they deal with their disease, or to take long vacations in beautiful parts of the world with their families before they die - to create memories for those they leave behind. I’m reading this now from the perspective of someone who doesn’t have cancer, but if I did have potentially fatal cancer I’m not sure this book would give me much comfort. Her experiences of struggling - with the very best and highest quality resources available to her along with the many privileges in her life - are a reminder of how the top tier in our country is able to live (and die). It’s just not relatable to the vast majority of us.

This is not a book about hard-to- follow twists and turns or multiple characters to remember and keep track of. No, this is a very simple but deeply moving story about a young woman who does everything right, but still succumbs to stage IV colon cancer. She will grab your heart from the first page to the epilogue added by her husband. It's beautifully written and heartbreakingly sad, and for those of you who think if you got a cancer diagnosis, you would fight cancer intelligently, investigating every possible treatment, leaving no stone unturned, well, the author did exactly that, but she succumbed anyway, peacefully, quietly, with an acceptance that was unforgettable.