Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

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.

Some traumas, I learned, refuse to remain in the past, wreaking havoc in the form of triggers and flashbacks, nightmares and fits of rage, until they’ve been processed and given their proper place.

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...To this day, I've never been more prolific. Death can be a great motivator.

Then I howled into my pillow—a deep, blood-vessel-popping howl of frustration and envy directed at Will, at my friends, at everyone else who was out there starting jobs, taking trips, discovering new things—all unencumbered by illness. That everyone’s lives were starting while mine was over before it had begun seemed unspeakably unfair. When I’d run out of air, lungs burning, I stood up and walked across my room to the small wooden desk pushed up against the windows and flipped open my journal. The world is moving forward and I am stuck, I wrote.

Time was a waiting room—waiting for doctors, waiting for blood transfusions and test results, waiting for better days.

Meaning is what’s left when everything else is stripped away.

Imagining a future is a frightening exercise when your life has been upended; it requires hope, which feels risky, even dangerous.

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. But I wasn’t the only one whose life had been interrupted by illness; my loved ones all faced a rupture that was similar in kind, if not in degree. That I wasn’t the only one in the room meant I was one of the lucky ones, I knew.

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.

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.

I’ve spent the past fifteen hundred days working tirelessly toward a single goal—survival. And now that I’ve survived, I’m realizing I don’t know how to live.

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.” This advice, more than any, stays with me.

The idea was that if you wanted to connect with someone out in the world, someone far removed from your own life, someone who maybe even seemed unknowable, you didn’t let the distance stop you—you said what the hell, and you wrote.

That’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.

I want to be released from what won’t let me go. I want uncomplicated joy. But I see now that, without realizing it, I’ve been waiting for permission—from Melissa, from Will, from all the people who have disappeared from my life before a sense of closure could be reached. I want their blessings to fall in love again, to dream a new future, to move forward. I keep waiting for some kind of sign, or reassurance that it’s okay to go entire days without thinking of them—that it’s necessary to forget a little if I am going to live. No matter how many apologies, acts of contrition, or sacrifices I offer up, I’m realizing I need to accept that things may never feel fully resolved—with the living or the dead. —

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

I think of how the Taj embodies both love and grief. So did my friendship with Melissa. In life, I’m realizing, you don’t get one without the other.

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.

I wouldn’t hear from him for many weeks. 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.

The logical mind tries to remind itself that sometimes you must suffer in order to feel better. But the body has its own memory: It remembers who hurt it.

With mortality in the balance, one of life’s most delicious activities when you’re young—imagining your future—had become a frightening, despair-inducing exercise. The future had once seemed infinite with possibility. Now it was shrouded in doom, a dark space ahead filled only with the promise of more poisonous treatments and terrifying unknowns. Thinking about the past stirred a nostalgia I preferred not to dwell on, a painful reminder of all I had lost, was losing: my friends; my youth; my fertility; my hair; the “milestone necklace” my parents had given me on my first day of chemo, which had gone missing somewhere in transit between the hospital and home; my mind, as the chemo made me cloudy and slow; my faith that I would ever make it to transplant.

Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.

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.

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

We were learning that sometimes the only way to endure suffering is to transform it into art. — Melissa

To learn to swim in the ocean of not-knowing—this is my constant work.

It was my first indication that, no matter how brilliant and compassionate my doctors might be, I would have to be proactive and learn to advocate for myself.

Although my twenties have been wrenching, confusing, difficult—to the point of sometimes feeling unendurably painful—they have also been the most formative years of my life, a time imbued with the sweet grace of a second chance, and an inundation of luck, if such a concept can be said to exist at all. The tangling of so much cruelty and beauty has made of my life a strange, discordant landscape. It has left me with an awareness that haunts the edges of my vision—it can all be lost in a moment—but it’s also given me a jeweler’s eye.

I don’t know what will come of my relationship with Jon or if I will ever see Max again, but I no longer want to protect my heart. You can’t guarantee that people won’t hurt or betray you—they will, be it a breakup or something as big and blinding as death. But evading heartbreak is how we miss our people, our purpose. I make a pact with myself and send it off into the desert: May I be awake enough to notice when love appears and bold enough to pursue it without knowing where it will lead.

But for as long as I’ve known him, Jon has been teaching me that sometimes all you can do is show up. And when things are hard, to keep on showing up.