Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

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

Suffering can make you selfish, turn you cruel.

Roald Dahl believed his chronic pain had been the creative springboard for his career as a writer: “I doubt I would have written a line, or would have had the ability to write a line, unless some minor tragedy had sort of twisted my mind out of the normal rut,” he wrote in a letter to a friend.

It was impossible not to feel like a burden.

each day felt like a carpe diem countdown. I felt a need to make the most out of every single thing I did. Every day, every hour, was invaluable and not to be wasted.

Facing my mortality had stripped away any concerns about being cool, and it did not feel embarrassing or too earnest to say that I hoped to make a difference. I wanted, in my own way, however small, to contribute something to the world. To leave more than I took.

“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.

Since her diagnosis, Melissa had gotten dozens of tattoos. It was a trend I’d noticed among young cancer patients: a desire to stake a claim to your body and to take control, to make of it a canvas of your own design.

To be a patient is to relinquish control—to your medical team and their decisions, to your body and its unscheduled breakdowns.

I’m left with the question of how to repatriate myself to the kingdom of the well, and whether I ever fully can.

Survivors, like heroes, have faced mortal danger and undergone impossible trials. Against all odds, they persevere, becoming better, braver for their battle scars. Once victory has been secured, they return to the ordinary world transformed, with accrued wisdom and a renewed appreciation for life.

They taught me that, when life brings you to the floor, there is a choice: 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.

There is no restitution for people like us, no return to days when our bodies were unscathed, our innocence intact. Recovery isn’t a gentle self-care spree that restores you to a pre-illness state. Though the word may suggest otherwise, recovery is not about salvaging the old at all. It’s about accepting that you must forsake a familiar self forever, in favor of one that is being newly born. It is an act of brute, terrifying discovery.

old Hemingway saw—“the world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places”—is only true if you live the possibilities of your newly acquired knowledge.

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

This is the cruel irony of medicine: Sometimes the treatments you receive to get better make you worse in the long run, requiring further care, exposing you to yet more complications and side effects. It is a maddening cycle.

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.”

“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.”

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’s a tricky balance, attempting to find resonance in someone’s story without reducing your suffering to sameness.

Wherever I am, wherever we go, home will always be the in-between place, a wilderness I’ve grown to love.