Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you mid-laugh when you’re at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment, you’ve forgotten. It haunts you until it becomes a part of you, shadowing you breath for breath.

I’ve spent the past fifteen hundred days working tirelessly toward a single goal—survival. And now that I’ve survived, I’m realizing I don’t know how to live.

Some traumas, I learned, refuse to remain in the past, wreaking havoc in the form of triggers and flashbacks, nightmares and fits of rage, until they’ve been processed and given their proper place.

Imagining a future is a frightening exercise when your life has been upended; it requires hope, which feels risky, even dangerous.

Trauma has a way of dividing your view of the world into two camps: those who get it and those who don’t.

“Grief isn’t meant to be silenced,” she says, “to live in the body and be carried alone.”

“He had an extraordinarily powerful mind that was equally powerful in illness,”

I had no interest in existing as a martyr, forever defined by the worst things that had happened to me. I needed to believe that when your life has become a cage, you can loosen the bars and reclaim your freedom. I told myself again and again, until I believed my own words: It is possible for me to alter the course of my becoming.