Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

Imagining my future—expansive yet empty—filled me with terror. In moments when I allowed myself to daydream, it thrilled me, too. The possibilities of who I might become and where I might land felt infinite, a spool of ribbon unfurling far beyond what my mind’s eye could see.

He was the kind of guy who makes you look more generously on the parts of yourself that fill you with self-loathing.

I was aware of an exit sign glowing faintly in the distance—and the truth was, I was always on the verge of running for it. I was in love with the idea of being in love. Another way to say it is that I was young: too impulsive and reckless with the emotions of others, too self-involved and focused on figuring out what came next for me to dwell on broken promises.

Naïveté has a shelf life,

With mortality in the balance, one of life’s most delicious activities when you’re young—imagining your future—had become a frightening, despair-inducing exercise.

Time stalked me like prey.

I wanted to understand what had happened to me, to excavate its meaning on my own terms. I wanted the last word to be mine.

I wanted to know if his fear of death was the same as my fear of death.

“Write,” instructs Annie Dillard, “as if you were dying.” We are all terminal patients on this earth—the mystery is not “if” but “when” death appears in the plotline. With my transplant date looming, her words rang loudly.

a dream and a nightmare dancing the tango.

My fear was alive. I could smell its wet fur in the room and feel the chuffing of its breath, hot on my skin.

I nodded eagerly. Melissa was someone I would have hung out with before my diagnosis, and I was thrilled to have made a new friend who was also trying to find ways to creatively engage with illness. We were both forging unlikely careers: Melissa painted self-portraits from bed; I wrote self-portraits from bed. Watercolors and words were the drugs we preferred for our pain. We were learning that sometimes the only way to endure suffering is to transform it into art.

waiting out the tension that had slowly infiltrated our relationship like mold.

Along with the chemo, an ugliness was coursing through my veins. Small violences. Swallowed resentment. Buried humiliations. Displaced fury. And a marrow-deep weariness at a situation that had dragged on far longer than either of us could bear.

A hiccup of genetics had brought us together—all of us bound by rogue, malignant cells and a heightened sense of our mortality—but at some point we’d become more than circumstantial friends. We were family.

In the privacy of our apartment, however, we had the same screaming arguments night after night. Why are you so distant, went my song. I need a break, went his. Oscar took to hiding under the couch until our voices returned to normal decibels.

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 had always believed in a world where love could overcome anything. I believed love could redeem suffering and transform the brutality of a life into something bearable, even beautiful. But I was losing trust that the next time things got hard, he wouldn’t up and leave again. I was losing faith in us.

The only thing that pierced the numbness was the specter of Will. He’d left, but not entirely. I could feel his presence—or rather, his absence—like a phantom limb. Will had been my caregiver, my confidant, my lover, my social buffer, my best friend.

“EVERYONE WHO IS born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor. “Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

wearing the gaunt, zombie look of someone who splits her time between Earth and some other, darker place.

I knew very few people in real life who understood what it was like to be trapped between two worlds.

The detritus of my past litters the streets of Manhattan.

They look like thoroughbreds, athletic and lithe, with long, glossy ponytails and fleece jackets.

We call those who have lost their spouses “widows” and children who have lost their parents “orphans,” but there is no word in the English language to describe a parent who loses a child. Your children are supposed to outlive you by many decades, to confront the burden of mortality only by way of your dying. To witness your child’s death is a hell too heavy for the fabric of language. Words simply collapse.

The final lines of his letter left me weeping. If I believed in the efficacy of prayer, you would be in mine, he wrote. Not being a believer, I nonetheless want you to know miracles do abound in this life, that the human body is capable of coping with things that seem insuperable.

Howard is dressed in a black cashmere sweater and a scarf. If his upper half says dignified intellectual, his lower half, with flip-flops and jeans slung low on his hipbones, says child of the sixties.

I don’t know how it happened, or if it could have been prevented, but at some point in the last few years my entire existence, my identity, even my career, became linked to the worst thing that ever happened to me. My scope of interests shrank in direct proportion to my world.

To love Will now is to appreciate memories of us, without allowing myself to be seduced by their siren call. It’s to resist picking up the phone. It’s to give him the space he needs to reclaim his life. It’s to do what’s hardest. To let him go.

The fucking cancer. The water in the tub felt like it was weighing down my limbs. I slipped beneath the surface again; this time, I closed my eyes and screamed.

The redwoods are the last remaining species of a genus that dates back to as early as the Jurassic period. They’ve managed not only to survive and to adapt, but to make space for others, sprouting and supporting new life, new growth—the hanging gardens of ferns dripping from their branches, the wisps of chartreuse lichen furring their bark, the huckleberry bushes sipping strength from their soil.

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

It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss.

“Every time I’ve had a significant trauma, my writing has grown, I’ve grown,”

But evading heartbreak is how we miss our people, our purpose. I make a pact with myself and send it off into the desert: May I be awake enough to notice when love appears and bold enough to pursue it without knowing where it will lead.

It is possible for me to alter the course of my becoming.

I enjoy writing letters and learning new things from other folks who’ve done way more than I have. You see, I’ve been locked up ever since I was 20 years old and I’m a high school dropout. The epistolary form, he confessed, also served a practical purpose: I stutter so writing letters allows me to express myself without feeling insecure and pissed off when I’m having a hard time saying what I want to say.

Books are a solitary confinement prisoner’s best friend.

LIFE IS NOT a controlled experiment. You can’t time-stamp when one thing turns into another, can’t quantify who impacts you in what way, can’t isolate which combination of factors alchemize into healing.