The Death and Life of Julie Yip-Williams (Sponsored Episode)
1/29/19 - What if you knew you were dying? How would you prepare your family, and yourself? In a special episode sponsored by Pineapple Street Media, we talk with Eleanor Kagan, producer and host of a new podcast, Julie, that explores the extraordinary life and death of Julie Yip-Williams.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Destry Maria Sibley
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Ad sales: Midroll
TRANSCRIPT: THE DEATH AND LIFE OF JULIE YIP-WILLIAMS (SPONSORED EPISODE)
Aminatou: Welcome to a sponsored episode of Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: Today's episode is brought to you by Julie: The Unwinding of the Miracle, a podcast from our friends at Pineapple Street Media.
Ann: This podcast chronicles the life and the death of Julie Yip-Williams. The podcast revisits the events of her extraordinary life through hours of intensely personal and revealing conversations. It's an immigrant story, a love story, and a ghost story. The series is a companion to her posthumous memoir which is also called The Unwinding of the Miracle which is out from Random House on February 5th.
[Theme Song]
(1:08)
Aminatou: I'm really excited to listen to this Ann. I think, you know, it's made by somebody who we have a lot of professional respect for.
Ann: Ugh, the incredible Eleanor Kagan.
Aminatou: I know, the queen do podcasts. And the subject matter is also super -- you know, it's hard but it's really good. I think it gives . . . it's that new meaning to gone but not forgotten, so I'm really excited to listen to this.
Ann: Yeah, and also talk about something that is one of the most profound and huge parts of the human experience that there are just not that many narratives about. Especially in audio form. I am so excited to have a deep dive and a deeply personal dive into one woman's experience with this.
(1:52)
Aminatou: I know. Very, very thankful for the journey of Julie Yip-Williams.
Ann: Yeah. And so I talked to Eleanor Kagan of Pineapple Street Media who is the producer of this project.
[Interview Starts]
Ann: Eleanor, welcome to the podcast.
Eleanor: Hey Ann! Thanks for having me.
Ann: So I want to ask you first off who was Julie Yip-Williams?
Eleanor: Julie Yip-Williams was a mom. She was a lawyer. She was a writer. She was diagnosed with cancer when she was 37 and went out trying to find writing, blogs, what have you from other peoples' perspectives to have an idea what she was in for. And she felt like she didn't see her experience represented so she started her own blog. She was a person who was really good at being really honest about everything she was thinking and feeling. The parts that are I guess hopeful in a way but also the parts where she's pissed off and bitter and she kind of just put it all out there which is vulnerable and it's a very beautiful thing to read. So that at least was my awareness of her when I first met her.
Ann: Yeah, all these descriptions of her blog use the word candid.
Eleanor: Yes.
Ann: And I just kept thinking about how that is a coded word for not all positive thinking or not all centered around hope and we will be this and kind of battle metaphors about cancer.
Eleanor: Yes. You know what you're describing, like battle metaphors, it's this thing known in the cancer community as the warrior model. And people have a lot of feelings about it. Some people use that language. Some people think that language is really destructive because it's this idea that if you "lose the battle" with cancer you weren't "strong enough" to beat it which puts the onus on you and not on the reality of disease. But Julie complicated all of that. She used the language. She railed against the language. She questioned why it existed. Nothing was ever clean-cut and I think that's what made her writing -- makes her writing -- so evocative.
(4:10)
Ann: And maybe before we listen to the trailer you can tell me a little bit about how you came to meet Julie or how this part of the project evolved? How we went from she's a blogger and she has this quite popular I believe blog about her experience with cancer to we're listening to her voice on this podcast.
Eleanor: Yeah. Julie got a book deal because of her blog and Julie always planned for the book to come out after she died. Random House proposed the idea of a podcast to be a companion to the book to Julie and she was really excited about it. This was winter 2017 to 2018 and Julie was still alive at that point and, you know, she is a planner and wanted to make everything about her death exactly how she wanted it to be. And she wanted to finish her book and she wanted to make this podcast. She wanted to leave behind this record of her life and herself, particularly for her two young kids and her family but also for anyone who needed to hear her story.
And so I met her and we started making the podcast. Julie died in March of 2018 and that was about two months in as I had been working on the podcast. And so we had made as many plans as we could to sort of understand how to keep working on the show after she had died.
Ann: Okay, let's listen to the trailer first then we'll talk about that.
[Clip Starts]
Julie: Life, July 14th, 2017. Dear Mia and Isabelle, I have solved all the logistical problems resulting from my death that I can think of.
[Music]
Eleanor: If you knew that you were dying how would you prepare for that moment?
Julie: I have left a list of instructions about who your dentist is and when to renew the violin rental contract and the identity of the piano tuner.
Eleanor: Julie Yip-Williams led us into that process before she died of colon cancer at the age of 42.
Julie: In the coming days I will make videos about all the ins and outs of the apartment so that everyone knows where the air filters are and what kind of dog food Chipper eats.
Mia: Chipper, I'm trying to read a story for you.
Julie: But I realized that these things are the low-hanging fruit.
Mia: Hello.
Male: What is your name?
Mia: Mia St. Williams.
Male: What's your favorite color?
Mia: Um . . .
Julie: I realized that I would have failed you greatly as your mother if I didn't at least attempt to address what will likely be the greatest existential question of your young lives. And we are about to go for me to receive treatment hopefully. You will forever be the kids whose mother died of cancer. As your mother I wish I could protect you from that pain but also as your mother I want you to feel the pain, to live it, embrace it, and then learn from it. This is my challenge to you my sweet girls, to take an ugly tragedy and transform it into a source of beauty, love, strength, courage, and wisdom.
Mia: It's a picture of a helicopter. You see it?
Julie: I spent three years planning for my death. This room I designed planning to die here. I have many contingency plans, many lists in my head, many things to write down, many instructions to issue. It was expensive but I splurged because I said you know what? If people are going to come visit me as I'm dying I want to have a nice background. [Laughs] Perhaps these are simply the musings of a person desperately trying to come to terms with her own early death, and yet I can assure you that I feel no desperation other than the desperation to finish all the preparations before it's too late. If anything I feel almost total and complete peace.
Eleanor: Julie's story begins January 25th.
Julie: It's like they're going to miss me so much but they're going to have a podcast. They'll always hear my voice. Mommy's talking to me.
[Clip Ends]
(8:40)
Ann: Ugh, when I hear that I just think she seems so practical. Like that is the word that just keeps coming to the top for me even though I'm sure that's all emotional at the same time and I definitely did feel emotion. It just seems like she's so clearheaded about okay, this is what's got to happen.
Eleanor: Absolutely. She's -- Julie is nothing if not practical and dedicated. The idea of her making videos about how the apartment works to leave behind for her family, I'd never heard anyone talk about that before. And I think yes it's practical but it also is exemplary of the love that she felt for them as well.
Ann: And so maybe now we can go back and talk about process then, about how this sounds different than maybe what you thought it would sound like when you first met Julie and started out with this.
Eleanor: Yeah. The idea of this sort of moment-by-moment experience of dying, how do you capture that? How do you show the rawness and honestly of what that feels like? A little after I started working on the project she got very, very sick and was in hospice and I did do one big recording with her then. It turned out that Julie's editor, Mark Warren at Randall House who is also a very good friend of hers, had been doing all these recordings on his iPhone as they talked about the book because for him as soon as the book was a reality he knew that the way he edits an author is they're constantly in conversation. And so he knew -- and Julie knew that she was going to die and he'd still be editing the book and putting it together so he recorded all these conversations with the intent of keeping that conversation with Julie going and keeping it alive. He would put his iPhone on the couch and they would just talk for hours and I'm very grateful that he shared with us a lot of those tapes where Julie is processing out loud all of these feelings about her death. And so that is a lot of the tape that you hear in the show are these obviously the word intimate is used in podcasting a lot but it is like these conversations between the two of them.
Ann: I know that this is not a story about you but you are a voice that we hear on the podcast kind of, I don't know, walking us through. You're our guide a little bit. And I just have to ask what it was like spending a year immersed in another woman's death.
Eleanor: Whew, it was heavy with the weight of responsibility. I walked into this project not necessarily wanting my voice in it at all. You know, this is Julie's story. It's centering her experience as a mother, as a terminally ill person, as an immigrant, as a woman of color. All of these identities. As a blind person. All these parts of her life that formed the person that she is. And who am I to tell that story? So I saw my role as looking to Julie's recordings and her book and her blog as the guide for what she wanted to say about her life and then just tried to make the space for that story to happen. And so when you hear me in the show I am hopefully just taking the hand of the listener and leading them to Julie and then Julie can tell her own story.
(12:18)
Ann: Would you say that her feelings about death change and evolve? I mean having looked at all that material can you notice big shifts over time or was she kind of always in a fixed state of, you know, let's do the practical things, this is about my daughters, that sort of thing?
Eleanor: There's definitely an evolution. She was diagnosed in 2013 and she died in 2018 so she spent five years with this illness. And it wasn't until about a year-and-a-half in that she learned that it was terminal. So for the first year-and-a-half there was this sense of I'm going to beat this. I can do this. I'm going to kick cancer's ass. In 2014 after she learned that it was terminal that's when her perspective began to shift and she said okay, so if my death is inevitable how am I going to die the way that I want to? How am I going to die in a way that I consider "a good death?" What does that mean? What does that mean to me? You know, what will I do with this time that's left? And so that's when there's a real turning point for her.
Ann: What would you tell people who are listening to this and who are worried that this podcast is relentlessly depressing? Because I think for me I'm like I am interested in the big questions like death.
Eleanor: Yeah.
(13:42)
Ann: But when I think about really engaging super personally with what it is like to die I'm scared or I'm like this sounds like maybe not what I want to bring into my happy alive every day, you know what I mean? I'm curious about the case for this show that you would make.
Eleanor: I feel that. It is heavy and it is real. I guess I would say I find her story very hopeful in a way. She is okay with the fact that she's dying, that she allows us to also be okay with that fact. And she talks so openly and so bluntly about death and dying that it becomes less scary. I mean that was my experience of talking to her and I hope that if we've done our job right that that's the experience of listening is this woman is being so honest and so comfortable with these things that she's saying that I also have permission to be comfortable with this. And she's really funny. That's the other thing is she has an amazing sense -- she's got a great sense of humor and there are some moments of joy and laughter and lightness in the show. But the other thing I'll say is it's okay to not listen right away and it's okay to come to the show when you feel like you're ready. That's totally okay. So I think I invite everyone to see how you feel about the trailer and then it's here for you when you're ready for it.
Ann: And finally I'm going to give you a chance to shout out your co-creators or the vast team of people that made this show happen.
Eleanor: Yes, the podcast never would have happened without Max Linsky and Jenna Weiss-Berman from Pineapple Street Media and producers Jess Hackel and Megan Tan who have spent hours and hours listening through these tapes and reading Julie's blog posts and Joel Lovell our editor. And I also want to mention Henry Molofsky who did a lot of recordings with Julie early on in this project and started the precedent of sitting with her for hours and having these fascinatingly honest, unvarnished conversations.
Ann: Eleanor thanks for being on the show today.
Eleanor: Ann thank you so much for having me and thank you for helping spread the word about Julie's story.
[Interview Ends]
Aminatou: You can listen to Julie: The Unwinding of the Miracle anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. You can find us many places on the Internet, on our website callyourgirlfriend.com, you can download the show anywhere you listen to your favs, or on Apple Podcasts where we would love it if you left us a review. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. We're on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at @callyrgf. You can even leave us a short and sweet voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music is composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs, our logos are by Kenesha Sneed, our associate producer is Destry Maria Sibley. This podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.