Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you mid-laugh when you’re at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment, you’ve forgotten. It haunts you until it becomes a part of you, shadowing you breath for breath.

“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.”

People treat suicide as a shameful secret—leave the true cause of death unmentioned in the obituary, just erase it from the family narrative. But talking about the ones we’ve lost keeps them alive.”

evading heartbreak is how we miss our people, our purpose.