Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

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.

it was humiliating to ask someone for help when you had the sense they didn’t really want to give it.

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.

When you survive something that was thought to be unsurvivable, the obvious is gained. You have your life—you have time. But it’s only when you get there that you realize your survival has come at a cost.

“EVERYONE WHO IS born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor. “Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

miracles do abound in this life, that the human body is capable of coping with things that seem insuperable.

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

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.

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.

“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.”

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.”

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

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.