Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

The doctors recommended I enroll in a phase II experimental clinical trial, meaning it was not yet known whether the new chemo drug combination was safe and effective, let alone better than the standard of care. At a time when everything already seemed so uncertain, I didn’t want an experimental trial. I craved hard facts, statistics, and proof that my treatments were worth the havoc they had wreaked on my mental and physical health, and on the lives of my loved ones. As much as I was for scientific research, I had no desire to be a guinea pig. I wanted a cure.

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

Howard is retired, but spends his days reading, taking long walks in the nearby park, and firing off an occasional letter to the editor. He and Meral are grandparents now. They recently celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. And once a week they take ballroom dancing classes together.

This is the cruel irony of medicine: 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.

To be well now is to learn to accept whatever body and mind I currently have.

I used to think healing meant ridding the body and the heart of anything that hurt. It meant putting your pain behind you, leaving it in the past. But I’m learning that’s not how it works. 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.