Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

It was my first indication that cancer is uncomfortable for the people around you, and that when people don’t know what to say, they often say nothing at all.

Cancer is an emergency, and oncologists are the first responders: They are trained to beat it, and everything else must take a backseat.

I grew allergic to the looks of pity and the positivity pushers who tried to cheer me up with their get-well cards and their exhausting refrains of “stay strong” and “keep fighting.”

Suffering can make you selfish, turn you cruel. It can make you feel like there is nothing but you and your anger, the crackle of exam table paper beneath bruised limbs, the way your heart pounds into your mouth when the doctor enters the room with the latest biopsy results.

You can allow the worst thing that’s ever happened to you to hijack your remaining days, or you can claw your way back into motion.

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

“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.”

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. Katherine’s experience and her insight sit with me. She went through something

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