Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

The truth is, I couldn’t hear Will’s needs above the clamor of my own. I needed constant reassurance that my needs weren’t too much. When my needs did become too much, I made it impossible for him to take the breaks he so desperately needed. In those final months, whenever he accompanied me on yet another trip to the emergency room, the look on his face had been one of exhausted obligation. I took this as evidence that I was indeed a burden, and that he was biding his time until he could finally leave. But in the end, it wasn’t the illness that had driven him away; it was me. It was the countless little ways in which I’d been pushing him away for years, daring him to go until, one day, he finally did.

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. It is the moment of accountability that all relationships seem to arc toward.

“Forgiveness is a refusal to armor your own heart—a refusal to live in a constricted heart,” he said, seemingly as much to himself as to me. “Living with that openness means feeling pain. It’s not pretty, but the alternative is feeling nothing at all.”

When we travel, we actually take three trips. There’s the first trip of preparation and anticipation, packing and daydreaming. There’s the trip you’re actually on. And then, there’s the trip you remember. “The key is to try to keep all three as separate as possible,” he says. “The key is to be present wherever you are right now.”

can’t alter what’s already happened; I must decide what to do now.

The idea was that if you wanted to connect with someone out in the world, someone far removed from your own life, someone who maybe even seemed unknowable, you didn’t let the distance stop you—you said what the hell, and you wrote.

The power of story is to heal and to sustain, she wrote. And if we are brave enough to tell our own story, we realize we’re not alone, again and again.

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

talking about the ones we’ve lost keeps them alive.”

Numbing out on everything from morphine to marathons of Grey’s Anatomy. Denying that it’s there at all. Refusing to let people in. I see now that these tactics have not rid me of my sorrow, just transmuted it, delayed it. What if I stopped thinking of pain as something that needs to be numbed, fixed, dodged, and protected against? What if I tried to honor its presence in my body, to welcome it into the present?

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.

“You have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead on what you love,” she told me before bed. “That’s all you can do in the face of these things. 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.”

“Listen,” Jon says more gently, “maybe it’s okay to not have the answers right now. I want to be with you. Even if that means continuing to give you space. I’m good with that. But what I do need is for you to be open and honest as we figure this out. You gotta stop shutting me out.” Over the last few weeks, I’ve put so much pressure on myself to be either fully in or fully out. I’ve been so caught up in assessing the risks and armoring myself against them that it hasn’t occurred to me that there is a third way: to let things grow and change and evolve, to uncover who we are and what we want along the way—to live in that middle terrain.

You can’t force clarity when there is none to be had yet. But for as long as I’ve known him, Jon has been teaching me that sometimes all you can do is show up. And when things are hard, to keep on showing up.

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. 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.

Gazing up at the Milky Way, I remember when all I wanted is what I have in this moment. Sitting on the kitchen floor of my old apartment, sicker than I’d ever felt, my heart fractured into ten thousand tiny pieces, I needed to believe that there was a truer, more expansive and fulfilling version of my life out there. I had no interest in existing as a martyr, forever defined by the worst things that had happened to me. I needed to believe that when your life has become a cage, you can loosen the bars and reclaim your freedom. I told myself again and again, until I believed my own words: It is possible for me to alter the course of my becoming.

I am alive and as well as I could ever hope to be. I have been entrusted with a life that I am making into my own. Tonight, this feeling is the closest I’ve felt to being at home within myself.

“When you’re abused by someone you trust, it confuses you. When you stay confused, you start to hate yourself.”

When you are forced to confront your mortality, whether it’s because of a diagnosis or a state-mandated death sentence, there’s an urgency to lay claim to your life, to shape your legacy on your own terms, in your own words. To tell stories about your life is to refuse to be reduced to flat inevitability.

If I’m thinking about my illness—abstracted from its impact on the people around me—then the answer is: No, I would not reverse my diagnosis if I could. I would not take back what I suffered to gain this.

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. There is no atlas charting that lonely, moonless stretch of highway between where you start and who you become.