Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

I have to believe that if I keep striving toward the person I’d like to become—one who is self-sufficient and independent, one who camps fearlessly in the woods—eventually I’ll get there.

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.

As I get older, she stays dead.

I am trying not just to accept my body’s limitations for a change, but to savor the breaks I have to take because of them.

These pit stops end up being some of my favorite moments on the road—shifting me out of my swirling mind and into the present, anchoring me in this strange new body, and in new places where I otherwise would never have gone.

my solitude begins to feel luxurious: I can be fully present in a way I couldn’t be if traveling with a companion.

“Slowly, with enough patience and persistence, you’ll become immersed in life again and, let’s face it, life can be so good.

As we tore off chunks of bread and dipped them into the spicy chili paste, she told me that she’d first learned of me years earlier,

Nitasha leads me through open-air stalls selling mason jars of pickles, luscious heads of lettuce, and artisanal soaps made of goat milk.

A place that nearly died when the car companies downsized and left, but didn’t die, refuses to die. A place where the future is painted upon the palimpsest of a painful past.

I know the psychic is probably telling me what he thinks I want to hear, but I envision my future as a long corridor of closed doors, and with each of his predictions, a door opens and I can see farther ahead.

that I felt an overpowering instinct to self-isolate, like a wounded coyote who deserts its pack when it senses the end is near.

I needed the privacy to fall apart.

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.

some days, someone or something invokes his name unexpectedly, and the hidden parts of the past that live inside me rise up to my eyes, an eddying, swirling flood of regret and rage, until I can see nothing else.

While it’s easy to destroy the past, it’s far more difficult to forget it.

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

my heart feels so haunted that there’s no room for the living—for the possibility of new love, new loss.

With her round, rosy cheeks, and blond hair poking out from beneath a winter hat, she looks like she could be cast in the local Christmas pageant as Mrs. Claus. Her smile splits wide as I get out of the car, and she jumps up and down in her boots and anorak, woo-hooing with infectious enthusiasm. “Welcome to our big-ass, beautiful state! We’ve all been peeing our pants a little at the thought of you coming,” she says, squashing me into her bosom.

Whenever I am feeling lost or stuck, it’s been my pattern to end whatever relationship I am in and immediately find my compass in a new man.

how to get out of a funk: “1) Write a list of things you are grateful for 2) Get your head out of your ass and take a walk outside 3) If you don’t have an eating disorder, get some good fucking chocolate and a strong cup of coffee.”

“I hope you don’t mind vegan food,” he says as I follow him inside. As he bustles around the kitchen, Rich tells me he’s a retired psychologist who now, in his free time, makes sculptures. The house contains several of his creations, twisting statuettes hand-carved from wood.

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.”

Things between us feel tense and pulled taut, and it seems like any day now we might break apart.

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

“Ultimately, the events of the last few years have been a terrible lesson in being present—and not just being present in my own life, but being present in the lives of the people I love,” she says. “Tomorrow may happen, tomorrow may not.”

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?

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.

can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.”

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.

May I be awake enough to notice when love appears and bold enough to pursue it without knowing where it will lead.

As a woman traveling alone, I feel like what Gloria Steinem described as a “celestial bartender”: Strangers welcome me into their homes, share secrets with me that they wouldn’t disclose to a therapist, invite me to partake in their family traditions, and send me off with homemade pies.

All is quiet except for the trembling of juniper trees and the occasional yips and howls of coyotes in the distance. The night sky is powdered with more stars than I’ve ever seen in my life.

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.

I want their blessings to fall in love again, to dream a new future, to move forward. I keep waiting for some kind of sign, or reassurance that it’s okay to go entire days without thinking of them—that it’s necessary to forget a little if I am going to live.

a regiment of squat concrete buildings with hundreds of tiny slit windows. Somewhere, behind one of these windows, Lil’ GQ is in his cell, preparing for our visit.

I don’t know how much of what Lil’ GQ is telling me is true. I’m not searching for holes and inconsistencies, contradictions and repetitions; I’m just listening. This man has already been judged for what he has done, and that’s not why I came here, anyway.