Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

But the thing about being in love is that you can be anywhere and it feels like an adventure.

Finding the silver lining felt like part of the punishment.

Meaning is not found in the material realm—dinner, jazz, cocktails, conversation or whatever. Meaning is what’s left when everything else is stripped away.

I didn’t want to be anyone’s good deed of the week.

This is the curse of the mixed child who grows up betwixt cultures and countries, creeds and customs: too white, too brown, too exotically named, too ambiguously other to ever fully belong anywhere.

I want to cauterize my grief. I want to burn down my past and to clear land for new growth. This, I think, is how I will start anew.

the world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places”—is

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.

To witness your child’s death is a hell too heavy for the fabric of language.

It is the certainty of never that hurts most.

To be young and sick was unfair, so much so that it had felt unbearable in moments.

Untamed fear consumes you, becomes you, until what you are most afraid of turns alive.

But in the end, it wasn’t the illness that had driven him away; it was me.

No one catcalled as my mother rolled me down the street in a wheelchair. No one’s eyes roved over my skeletal silhouette, unless it was to do a double take at the catheter tubes poking out from above my neckline. If anything, people averted their eyes.

“Forgiveness is a refusal to armor your own heart—a

Right now, I am no redwood. I am a speck, a spore surfing the breeze, directionless and susceptible, blown any which way, without the faintest clue about where I’ll land.

sometimes all you can do is show up. And when things are hard, to keep on showing up.

I needed to believe that when your life has become a cage, you can loosen the bars and reclaim your freedom.