Between Two Kingdoms: What almost dying taught me about living

by Suleika Jaouad

was supposed to be rejoining the greater gathering.

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. Since finishing treatment, I’d found

But that old Hemingway saw—“the world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places”—is only

To witness your child’s death is a hell too heavy for the fabric of language. Words simply collapse.

“You can’t keep going and doing the same things as before when everything in your life has been turned upside down,” my mom says.

But I’m beginning to understand this: We never know. Life is a foray into mystery.

beauty that transcends anger but also wouldn’t be possible without it. And isn’t that how it always

goes, catastrophe forcing reinvention?

Perhaps the greatest test of love is the way we act in times of need.

But right now my impulse is self-preservation. It’s to withdraw, to hedge against the pain

The thought of more heartbreak makes me want to cut myself off from the world.

“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,”

“The key is to be present wherever you are right now.” This advice,

“Grief isn’t meant to be silenced,” she says, “to live in the body and be carried alone.”

But talking about the ones we’ve lost keeps them alive.”

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?

How do you live in the present when what lies ahead is terrifyingly unknown?