78 pages • 2 hours read
Suleika JaouadBetween Two Kingdoms
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Mortality and Death
Mortality and death are ever-present realities in Between Two Kingdoms. Even though Suleika is a recent college graduate, the seriousness of her illness and the hospital settings contrast with her youth and weave a narrative of questions and purpose. The first mention of death occurs when Suleika enters Mt. Sinai for her first chemotherapy treatment. The woman in the room next to Suleika sleeps often: “She was so skeletal she looked almost cadaverous” (72). One day Suleika hears a guttural cry. She says, “grief pierced the wall between our rooms,” and notes that soon after “another patient had taken her place” (72). This shuffle of life and death, its odd normalcy, brings mortality into Suleika’s view. Death becomes personal several weeks later when she learns from Younique that Dennis and Yehya are “gone.” Death is no longer anonymous. Jaouad writes that all she could think is: “I’m next” (89). The moment Suleika finds out about Yehya and Dennis coincides with a near-fatal fever and infection. Mortality pushes her and Will toward decisions that they otherwise would not have considered. Suleika tells Will that she would like to get married, and Jaouad reflects, “I worried that if we waited, we’d never get the chance” (88). The weight of death introduces an intensity and depth into their relationship that drew them together and pushed them apart.
When Suleika transfers to Sloan Kettering, she meets young people in similar situations to herself. They call themselves the cancer crew, and their shared sense of mortality is what draws them to one another. When Melissa finds out that cancer has spread to her lungs, Jaouad writes,
Death never comes at a good time, but getting a death sentence when you’re young is a breach of contract with the natural order of things. After years of being sick, Melissa and I had learned to coexist with the threat of death as best we could. Mortality was a stench we couldn’t wash off, no matter how hard we tried (189).
Death is never normalized for them. The reality of illness is always in conflict with their age. The injustice and nonsensical nature of death settle into Suleika both as deep sadness and guilt for her survival. One morning, she is walking Oscar in her pajamas and smoking a cigarette. A man she’s acquainted with stops her on the street and says, “Wake up princess. […] Death is the last resort” (215). This moment wakes her to the reality of her life. Life remains precarious yet she is alive Only three of her 10 friends who have cancer are still alive, and at this moment, she decides that she must embrace her life.
Even though the scene on the street shifted her attitude toward mortality, her illness drives her to leave her mark through writing:
My mortality shadowed each breath, each step that I took, more present now than it had ever been. A manic energy hummed through me. I worked around the clock for a month to draft thirteen columns before I entered the transplant unit, fueled by the knowledge that it was going to be a long time before I was well enough to write or walk or do much of anything else again. What would you write about if you knew you might die soon? (119).
Jaouad reflects that everyone will die. Death is not an “if” but a “when” in the plot of our lives. Her writing becomes a way to engage the uncertainties of her illness. She sees how creativity provides a sense of purpose to others who suffer from isolation and uncertainty. Lil’ GQ’s antidote to isolation and mortality is to write. Suleika sees in him how writing and telling our stories are a way to make sense of life even as death stays ever in the future. Through words, Suleika finds a way to engage with the inevitability of death, connect to her friends, and share her reflections and experiences however long her life lasts.
Fear and Anxiety
Fear is a force in Between Two Kingdoms, reminding Suleika of her body’s limitations and the imminence or possibility of death. On her first night in the bone marrow transplant unit, Jaouad writes, “My fear was alive. I could smell its wet fur in the room and feel the chuffing of its breath, hot on my skin” (120). Fear comes through in the beeping machines and the isolation imposed on her. Everyone feels its presence. When Adam visits her in the transplant unit, She says, “Like my parents and everyone who entered this sterile Bubble, he concealed his worry behind a mask” (128). Her family and friends try to suppress their fears for Suleika’s life, but every layer of sanitation and separation between them manifests the fear in the room. Fear may be masked, but it cannot be extricated.
Melissa’s defiant attitude toward fear challenges Suleika’s caution and hesitancy after her illness. Melissa decides to go to India when her cancer spreads, and Suleika expresses concern for her health and the risk of being so far away from her doctors. Melissa responds, “What’s the worst that can happen? […] Suleika, for the first time, I feel like I’m going to die” (159). In the face of mortality, Melissa sets aside the fear that she might have and determines that she will live her life. During the aftermath of her illness, Suleika’s fear manifests through alienating Jon and her parents by trying to be self-sufficient: “I’ve grown afraid of the world and my ability to navigate it alone. I want to expect nothing. To ask for nothing. To depend on no one” (220). This impulse toward independence pushes her to travel and find a way to trust herself and maybe others again. On her trip to India, Jaouad reflects, “I’m beginning to understand that no matter how much time passes, my body may never fully recover to what it once was—that I can’t keep waiting until I’m ‘well enough’ to start living again” (217). Suleika knows that she needs to begin learning how to live with uncertainty. Fear, in some form, may be her constant companion, and she can’t wait until go goes away to live. When Suleika visits Salsa and her family, she notices how they metabolize their fear: “For this family, the idea of disaster breeds closeness and generosity. In the fear of death, they have found a source not of alienation, but of intimacy” (300). What appears to be self-sufficiency requires the contributions of everyone on the ranch. Their response to fear models an alternative to her response of isolation and self-preservation, replacing fear-informed responses with closeness, support, and community.
Perseverance and Survival
Perseverance and survival are deeply embedded in Suleika’s narrative. She introduces the themes in Chapter 1 through her education. Suleika and her classmates’ efforts to finish their senior year and enjoy their last moments together: “Graduation was on the horizon, and we were determined to savor these final weeks together before we all scattered, even if that meant pushing our bodies to their limits” (4-5). Suleika’s pattern for getting through her early leukemia symptom and the early days of treatment borrow from those collegiate methods of perseverance and survival. Hustle, too, is deeply embedded in her family’s values. Her mother and father both immigrated to the US. Her mother worked multiple jobs to sustain her life as an artist in New York. Jaouad writes, “Hustle is our family’s defining trait” (36). This family grit and determination hold Suleika together during her illness, but she notes at several points how the same work ethic that saves her also puts unexpected pressures on her body and relationships. On the night before an interview, she comes down with a fever and cough. Will and her mother ask her to not do the interview, but Suleika decides to do it anyway. Her cold worsens after the interview and sends her to the emergency room. Reflecting on her decisions, Jaouad writes, “My desperation to participate in the world often clouded my judgment, meaning Will regularly had to take on the unpleasant role of enforcer” (280). The drive for survival often burdens those around her with the responsibility to help her care for her after overexertion, and only too late does she realize how her means of getting through illness must include paying attention to what her body needs.
Jaouad writes, “I decided to reimagine my survival as a creative act” (109). This reaction is a response to Frida Kahlo’s words: “‘Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?’” (109). The 100-day journaling project spurred Suleika to research others who have approached survival with this same attitude. She finds Frida Kahlo, Henri Matisse, and other artists who created through illness. She determines that the beauty and meaning of their work are inseparable from their limitations and illness. Later, when she meets Melissa and Max, the link between creativity and survival takes on a personal tone. During her last visit with Max in California, Max comments: “Every time I’ve had a significant trauma, my writing has grown, I’ve grown […] It’s been delightful to see it all flower so quickly […] Nothing is missing. But I would much rather have had a slow burn” (317).
His and Melissa’s art acts as a friend to Suleika, even though it can’t return her friends to her. The art survives, persisting and taking on a life of its own even after they are gone.
Living with Uncertainty and the In-Betweens
When illness disrupts Suleika’s life, uncertainty mires her decisions, relationships, and future. Only by finding a way to exist within the uncertainty, living in the in-betweens, does Suleika make peace with the mysteries of illness and her future. The first few chapters follow Suleika’s growing list of symptoms and the lack of clarity on the cause. She writes, “I found myself back in the clinic’s dreary waiting room, where I returned half a dozen times to be treated for various colds, bouts of bronchitis, and urinary tract infections. […] Each time I gave my medical history anew” (28). The repetition of symptoms compounds Suleika’s uncertainty, and she still has no answers as to what’s wrong. When she gets the diagnosis, her life stops in a way. She quits her job and moves back to the US with the singular goal of treatment, but her treatment bombards her with a set of new questions: Will she find a blood marrow donor? Does she want children? Will she be able to have children? Will she survive and be able to consider the future? Jaouad writes,
Time was a waiting room—waiting for doctors, waiting for blood transfusions and test results, waiting for better days. I tried to focus on the preciousness of the present […] But try as I might, I couldn’t help but feel an incipient grief and guilt as my thoughts turned, inevitably, to what would happen to Will and my family if I didn’t survive (91).
When her treatments drag on and Will gets a job in the city, Suleika feels her waiting as stuckness. In her journal, she writes, “The world is moving forward and I am stuck” (93). The indeterminable illness dominates her days and sends her into a deep malaise.
The uncertainty directly affects Will and Suleika’s relationship. Will and Suleika decide that they will keep their relationship in a box to protect it from the illness (53), but their future, day-to-day plans, and living situations are largely determined by the unpredictability of illness. They are forced to live by its whims. When they decide to get married, the social worker at the hospital advises them against it due to insurance. Jaouad writes, “The wedding was postponed, joining the countless other plans and goals and projects that had been relegated to purgatory until further notice. No one spoke of it again” (96). The constant uncertainty leads Suleika to resent Will and his ability to leave the illness, go to work, and have a life. She observes, “Will, the social worker, everyone else who was out there participating in the world—they weren’t the enemy, the disease was. I knew that, but with each day, each dream deferred, it got harder and harder to tell the difference” (96). Cancer ravaged their relationship, and the way forward as a couple no longer was clear.
Suleika’s friendship with Melissa invites a new stance toward uncertainty. They danced, went to parks, and wore makeup and wigs. And she dreamed again: “We planned itineraries to faraway lands. […] Two skinny girls, all elbows and knees, protruding cheekbones, and buzzed heads full of desperate dreams of the future—any future, as long as we could be there” (158). When Melissa visits India she texts Suleika, “I’ve never felt more alive.” After she finishes her treatments, Suleika tries to wall off her feelings to protect herself, but on her road trip around the country, she begins to let herself turn outward again. When she visits Niagara Falls, Jaouad notes the ways that illness focused and isolated her: “Over time my field of vision narrowed to the size of a ward, then a bed. Walled off from the outside, I had no choice but to turn my gaze inward” (258). A few weeks later, Isaac and Rich’s advice seeps deep into her, and she decides that she must live with openness to all her feelings, even pain, and that openness is essential to be present at whatever place she is, with all its uncertainties.
