Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

I began to take uppers the way some people add an extra shot of espresso to their coffee—a means to an end, a way to stave off my deepening exhaustion. In my journal, I wrote: Stay afloat.

I was used to guys who were aggressively forward, armed with an arsenal of slick pickup lines, but Will seemed content just to lie there side by side. When, after several hours he still hadn’t attempted to kiss me, I rolled over to face him and made the first move. In the end, we did have that one-night stand—and then a two- and three-night one. With him, it was different; I left the lights on. I didn’t feel the need to hide anything. He was the kind of guy who makes you look more generously on the parts of yourself that fill you with self-loathing. He was the kind of guy who, if the circumstances had been different, I would have taken my time getting to know.

The transition from my lollipop-pocketed pediatrician who had known me most of my life to this cold, run-down clinic was a jarring reminder that I was now on my own. I wasn’t a kid anymore, but I felt ill-equipped for the fluorescent, bureaucratic world of adulthood.

Skidmore, a small liberal arts college in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Heeyyyyyy near me

Everything is going to be all right.

It is hard being sick and not knowing what is wrong with you.

acute myeloid leukemia.”

How do you react to a cancer diagnosis at age twenty-two? Do you break down in sobs? Do you faint, or scream? In that moment, a feeling flooded through my body, unexpected and perverse: relief. After the bewildering months of misdiagnosis, I finally had an explanation for my itch, for my mouth sores, for my unraveling. I wasn’t a hypochondriac, after all, making up symptoms. My fatigue was not evidence of partying too hard or an inability to cut it in the real world, but something concrete, something utterable that I could wrap my tongue around.

The diagnosis had formed an irreparable fracture: my life before, and after.

We undressed and had sex in my childhood bedroom with its pink walls and posters, careful not to wake up my parents in the room next door. Afterward, Will began to weep. “A lot of bad things are about to happen,” he said. “We need to put our relationship into a box and to protect it with everything we have.”

There, on the list of side effects, sandwiched between vomiting, hair loss, heart damage, and organ failure, I saw something that upset me more than any of the bad news I’d received so far: The cancer treatment that could save my life would also most likely leave me infertile. Since my diagnosis, I had felt relief, followed by shock, confusion, and horror. And now, something else: a wrenching sense of foreclosing.

Whenever I was feeling well enough, Will would help me into the minivan, bundle me in blankets, and we’d go for long drives in the countryside. If I had the energy, we’d go for a walk. Downtown Saratoga was an eight-minute stroll from the house; twenty if you had leukemia.

I call my friend Catherine to cancel my tea time with her tomorrow morning. I want to say: “Catherine, how is this happening to us, to Suleika?” And instead I say this and I say that, I ask about her son and her husband. It makes me feel better and wounded at the same time, because what I have to tell is about transfusions and fatigue and reality. The tears are in my heart but they never come out. Only when Suleika doesn’t speak to me do I lose all strength. Communication, love, laughter, her presence—that’s what makes this bearable, what allows us to keep going like Ulysses.

i cried

“Good Afternoon, You Have Cancer,” on the home page: “Today, as I prepare for a bone marrow transplant, I’ve learned that my biggest challenge might not be physical,” I had written. “It is enduring the boredom, despair, and isolation of being sick and confined to a bed for an indeterminate length of time.”

“Write,” instructs Annie Dillard, “as if you were dying.” We are all terminal patients on this earth—the mystery is not “if” but “when” death appears in the plotline. With my transplant date looming, her words rang loudly. My mortality shadowed each breath, each step that I took, more present now than it had ever been. A manic energy hummed through me.

Will and my parents came down for breakfast and loaded our bags into the car. I felt a sinking sadness as the minivan pulled away from the house, wondering if I would ever return. For the person facing death, mourning begins in the present tense, in a series of private, preemptive goodbyes that take place long before the body’s last breath.

You are a young woman, I am an old man. You are looking ahead, I am looking back. It is likely that we have only our mortality in common, he wrote. Meaning is not found in the material realm—dinner, jazz, cocktails, conversation or whatever. Meaning is what’s left when everything else is stripped away.

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.

It was my fourth and final hospital stay. I was admitted to the eighteenth floor and placed in a room next door to where I had last seen Melissa. It felt like a cruel joke that, out of the hundreds of hospital rooms at Sloan Kettering, I would end up here. Melissa and I even had the same nurse, a woman named Maureen with a fire-hydrant-red pixie and matching lipstick. I begged to be transferred to the leukemia or transplant floor, but the hospital was over capacity, so there was nothing anyone could do. Being forced to sleep just a few feet away from where I had said goodbye to my dead best friend felt personal—a punishment intended to push me over the edge.

But I am certain Melissa would not want them to live in a mausoleum of her old things. In one of our last conversations, when I’d asked Melissa if she was afraid of dying, she replied: “My biggest fear is that my parents’ lives will be ruined forever.”

“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.

Wendy—a legendary Portland actress, comedian, and self-described “senior citizen battling food addiction and ‘CJPD: Chronic Jewish Personality Disorder’ ”—offered sound instructions on 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.”

Great advice

theory: 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.”

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

To keep going, Katherine reminds herself every day of all the ways her life has been enriched—blessed by Brooke and his life, by her daughters and her grandchildren, by Atticus and Blue, and finally by the presence of grief itself. “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.”

“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.”

I’m not sure what it all means. 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.

“It’s incredible to me that you can be alone with your thoughts in a car for so long, when you’ve gone through what you’ve gone through,” he says. “People have been experimenting on you for years and years, and you have the balls to experiment on yourself—to push yourself to grow. Now, that is strength.” “Oh, Max,” I say. I clutch my heart dramatically. “I don’t know what I’d do without your support.” “You are such an inspiration,” he says. “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle,” I say. “Every day is a gift,” he says. With that, he gives me a last, lung-crushing embrace before I step out the door.

I love max.

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.

These unexpected parallels are what initially compelled him to write to me. “You’ve faced death in your own personal prison just like I continue to face death in mine,” Lil’ GQ says. “At the end of the day death is death, doesn’t matter the form it takes.”