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.

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.

THERE IS AN impulse to trace a monumental decision—like embarking on a long journey—back to a single epiphany, a flare of inspiration.

“Before, if you had asked me who I was, I would have identified as an athlete,” she says softly. “But now, I’m not so sure, because cancer does a weird thing to you. It takes who you are and what you think you know and throws that all in the trash.”

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.

It is the certainty of never that hurts most.

“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.

If I could take it all back? I’m stunned. “I don’t know,” I say, quietly.