Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

There is no restitution for people like us, no return to days when our bodies were unscathed, our innocence intact. Recovery isn’t a gentle self-care spree that restores you to a pre-illness state. 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. It is an act of brute, terrifying discovery.

I realize what I’m feeling is profound disappointment. The notion that reentry is an ongoing and difficult process is usually referenced in the context of veterans of war or the formerly incarcerated, not to survivors of illness. Over the last year, I’d imagined Ned settled back into the kingdom of the well, the worries in his letter long behind him, and that he’d now be in a position to guide me. But he, too, is still finding his way, still struggling to carry the collateral damage of illness, and suddenly I realize: We may always be.

And like so many former patients, he lives with a constant hum of vigilance, ears pricked for bad news, eyes ever on alert for signs that disease has re-infiltrated the plot.

The private shame that I carried and the guilt that I bore at how all of this affected those around me. The nagging voice in my head that whispered: Don’t get too comfortable because one day I’m coming back.

When talking with Ned, I noticed how he kept subconsciously referring to himself as split into three selves: pre-diagnosis Ned, sick Ned, and recovering Ned. Whenever I talk about my life, I realize I do the same. Maybe the challenge is to locate a thread that strings these selves together. It strikes me as a challenge better worked out on paper. For the first time in months, I crack open my journal and start to write. I decide to do this daily, to follow the thread where it leads.

At the root of it is a deeper uncertainty: Maybe I’ll still die.

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.

“Slowly, with enough patience and persistence, you’ll become immersed in life again and, let’s face it, life can be so good. But I think it’s most important to find someone

who has the wherewithal to stick it out with you. I owe more to my wife—” His voice catches. “Well, what I owe her, it’s beyond expression.”

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

“I’ve been the recipient of so much support and love and I want desperately to contribute to the world, but I can’t,” he says, his tone suddenly somber.

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.

“I made it through the transplant, I made it through the heart attack, and I’m so fucking lucky to be alive,”

“But each time something happens, it’s a little bit harder to come back, you know?”

“You’re beyond tired and you know that things are probably only going to get worse and yet you have to find some way to keep fighting. But sometimes I can’t help but wonder, What’s the point?

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.

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

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

It’s a lesson in the value of pain.

Loss has left me guarded, spent, and not just the loss of life I’ve witnessed over the last few years. It’s the collateral losses of illness: of Will, of fertility and motherhood as I’d envisioned it, of my identity and my footing in this world. At times, my heart feels so haunted that there’s no room for the living—for the possibility of new love, new loss.

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

The thought of more heartbreak makes me want to cut myself off from the world. I wish to never get close to another person again.

never ceases to surprise me just how many people I encounter who are living with some private struggle. The greater the distance I travel and the more people I encounter, the more convinced I’ve become that these human experiences bridge differences that might otherwise feel insurmountable.