Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

They were the ones with the medical degrees, not me.

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.

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

needed to find a way to take control of what was happening to me, and I decided that the more I could glean about my disease,

But mostly I wanted to ease the worry clouding my parents’ and Will’s faces—to convince them I was going to be okay.

for the first time in my life, no one expected anything of me. I had the liberty to pass the time as I wanted.

Worse were the disaster tourists: those whom I didn’t know well but who came out of the woodwork, showing up unannounced at my hospital room door with an overzealous desire to help or to bear witness to the medical carnival that my life had become.

I’d find myself having to console them.

Suffering can make you selfish, turn you cruel. It can make you feel like there is nothing but you and your anger,

“That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is,” Jeanette Winterson wrote. “It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”

Could these masterpieces ever have been painted by someone who was well? I wondered. Could they have been created by someone who hadn’t been forced to confront the terrible fragility of the human body? I wasn’t sure.

decided to reimagine my survival as a creative act.

My fear was alive. I could smell its wet fur in the room and feel the chuffing of its breath, hot on my skin.

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. —

As a patient, there was pressure to perform, to be someone who suffers well, to act with heroism, and to put on a stoic façade all the time.

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 has introduced me to the role of ritual in mourning—the ceremonies that allow us to shoulder complicated feelings and confront loss; that make room for the seemingly paradoxical act of acknowledging the past as a path toward the future.

A place where the future is painted upon the palimpsest of a painful past.