11:11 Angels Message Board

On 19 March 2018, almost five years after being diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer, thirty-eight-year-old Julie Yip-Williams died, leaving behind a husband and two daughters. Her early years had been anything but easy. Born blind in Vietnam, at two months of age she was almost euthanised on the orders of a grandmother who deemed her to be defective; years later, as an older child, she sailed to Hong Kong with her family and hundreds of other refugees in search of a more peaceful life, eventually settling down in the US where her life improved drastically. She was soon given partial sight by a surgeon, studied at Harvard, and became a successful lawyer, but then, in her thirties, she was struck down by the illness that would kill her. It was then that she began to write what would become a posthumously published memoir, The Unwinding of the Miracle. In July 2017, a year before she passed away, Yip-Williams wrote the following letter to her young daughters.

The Letter

Many may disagree, but I have always believed, always, even when I was a precocious little girl crying alone in my bed, that our purpose in this life is to experience everything we possibly can, to understand as much of the human condition as we can squeeze into one lifetime, however long or short that may be. We are here to feel the complex range of emotions that come with being human. And from those experiences, our souls expand and grow and learn and change, and we understand a little more about what it really means to be human. I call it the evolution of the soul.