Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

It was my first indication that cancer is uncomfortable for the people around you, and that when people don’t know what to say, they often say nothing at all.

Medicine, I was learning, was more of an art than a science in cases like mine.

Illness complicated everything, even—maybe, especially—prayer.

Cancer spoke for me before I could say the first word, and rooms went quiet when I walked in.

Suffering can make you selfish, turn you cruel. It can make you feel like there is nothing but you and your anger,

I understood now why so many writers and artists, while in the thick of illness, became memoirists. It provided a sense of control, a way to reshape your circumstances on your own terms, in your own words.

For the person facing death, mourning begins in the present tense, in a series of private, preemptive goodbyes that take place long before the body’s last breath.

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 like the uncertainty and the happy accidents that you get with watercolors. I like how you don’t have total control, like life,”

As a patient, there was pressure to perform, to be someone who suffers well, to act with heroism, and to put on a stoic façade all the time.

To be a patient is to relinquish control—to your medical team and their decisions, to your body and its unscheduled breakdowns. Caregivers, by proxy, suffer a similar fate.

When you survive something that was thought to be unsurvivable, the obvious is gained. You have your life—you have time. But it’s only when you get there that you realize your survival has come at a cost.

Cancer no longer lives in my blood, but it lives on in other ways, dominating my identity, my relationships, my work, and my thoughts.

The harder I try to find my place among the well, and to live up to my expectations of the survivor’s journey, the more I experience a dissonance between what should be and what is.

While it might not be possible to move on from illness, I have to start trying to move forward with it.

travel can hurtle you out of old ways of being and create conditions for new ones to emerge.

Though the word may suggest otherwise, recovery is not about salvaging the old at all. It’s about accepting that you must forsake a familiar self forever, in favor of one that is being newly born.

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.

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

Sometimes the treatments you receive to get better make you worse in the long run, requiring further care, exposing you to yet more complications and side effects. It is a maddening cycle.

We were prepared for the possibility that things could take a turn. But when the body betrays you again and again, it obliterates whatever nascent trust you’ve restored in the universe and your place in it. Each time, it becomes harder to recover your sense of safety.

After you’ve had the ceiling cave in on you—whether through illness or some other catastrophe—you don’t assume structural stability. You must learn to live on fault lines.

Perhaps the greatest test of love is the way we act in times of need.

“The death bit doesn’t scare me. It’s the suffering that’s hard.”

Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss.

Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.”

but I no longer want to protect my heart. You can’t guarantee that people won’t hurt or betray you—they will, be it a breakup or something as big and blinding as death. But evading heartbreak is how we miss our people, our purpose.

Although my twenties have been wrenching, confusing, difficult—to the point of sometimes feeling unendurably painful—they have also been the most formative years of my life, a time imbued with the sweet grace of a second chance, and an inundation of luck, if such a concept can be said to exist at all.

Wherever I am, wherever we go, home will always be the in-between place, a wilderness I’ve grown to love.