Between Two Kingdoms—I lived it

I didn’t just listen to Between Two Kingdoms—I lived it. I stumbled across this audiobook on a day when I wasn’t looking for anything heavy. Just something to keep me company on a long drive, something interesting but not too demanding. Then, I hit play. And suddenly, I was no longer in my car. I was in the hospital room with Suleika Jaouad, feeling every needle prick, every hope, every devastation. Suleika doesn’t just read her memoir—she breathes it. Her voice carries the weight of her story, steady but never detached, raw yet never self-indulgent. The way she tells it, you don’t just hear about her life. You feel it in your bones. And once you step into her world, you can’t walk away unchanged. This book isn’t just about illness. It’s about survival, identity, and the impossible task of figuring out how to live after you’ve been told you might not. It’s about what it means to exist between two worlds—the before and after, the sick and the well, the known and the unknown. Here are eight lessons that gripped me, shook me, and refused to let go.

1. We Are All Living in a ‘Before’—Until We’re Not: Suleika was 22, just stepping into adulthood, when leukemia ambushed her. One day, she was a young woman with dreams and plans. The next, she was a patient. Life has a way of drawing a hard line between before and after—and none of us know when that line will come. This hit me hard. We move through life assuming there will always be time—time to chase dreams, fix relationships, become the person we want to be. But what if time is shorter than we think? Between Two Kingdoms forces you to ask: What would you do differently if you knew your ‘before’ was about to end?

2. Illness Doesn’t Just Affect the Body—It Rearranges Everything: Suleika’s cancer wasn’t just a medical diagnosis. It infiltrated every part of her existence—her relationships, her sense of self, the way people looked at her. Suddenly, she wasn’t just Suleika. She was Suleika with cancer. Listening to her describe how the world began to treat her differently was eye-opening. People fumbled for the right words. Some disappeared. Others tried to wrap her in suffocating kindness. It made me think: How often do we reduce people to the hardest thing they’re going through? And how can we do better?

3. Survival Is Only the First Battle: The world loves survival stories, but what happens after the miracle? Suleika takes us past the moment when the doctors declare her cancer-free—into the uncharted, messy territory of trying to live again. This was one of the most unexpected gut-punches of the book. We think beating illness is the happy ending. But she shows us that healing is complicated. The body recovers before the mind catches up. The world moves on while you’re still learning how to exist outside of survival mode. It made me realize: Some battles don’t end when we think they do.

4. Sometimes, Healing Requires Distance: After years in hospitals, Suleika embarked on a road trip across the country, visiting strangers who had written to her during her illness. She needed to step away from everything familiar to understand who she was now. Hearing her recount those miles, those encounters, I couldn’t help but think—how often do we expect ourselves to heal in the same place where we were broken? Maybe, sometimes, we need distance. A change of scenery. A new rhythm. Healing doesn’t always happen where we expect it to.

5. Not Everyone Knows How to Show Up—And That’s Okay: One of the hardest parts of Suleika’s journey was realizing that some people she loved simply couldn’t handle her illness. Some friends pulled away. Others didn’t know what to say, so they said nothing at all. It hurt. But eventually, she learned to accept it. This lesson struck me deeply. When we’re in pain, we expect the people in our lives to show up. And when they don’t, it feels like another wound. But Suleika’s story taught me something freeing: People’s inability to show up is about them, not about you. Sometimes, they’re dealing with their own fears, their own limits. And sometimes, learning to forgive them is part of the healing.

6. You Can Find Connection in the Most Unexpected Places: As Suleika traveled, she met people from all walks of life—each carrying their own stories, their own wounds. And in those strangers, she found reflections of herself. It made me realize how often we underestimate the power of shared experience. The people who help us the most aren’t always the ones we expect. Sometimes, the deepest conversations, the most healing moments, happen with someone you meet on the road, in a letter, in a chance encounter.

7. Grief and Gratitude Can Exist Side by Side: Suleika doesn’t sugarcoat the pain of her experience. She lets us into the darkest corners—her anger, her fear, the way cancer stole years of her youth. But she also shows us moments of breathtaking beauty. Laughter in hospital rooms. Friendships forged in shared struggle. The way even the worst seasons of life can hold unexpected gifts. Listening to her voice shift between pain and joy, I understood something profound: We don’t have to choose between grief and gratitude. We can hold both. We can mourn what we’ve lost while still being in awe of what remains.

8. Life After Survival Is About Reclaiming, Not Resuming: By the end of the book, Suleika doesn’t magically return to her old life. She can’t. That life no longer exists. Instead, she learns to build something new—not as the person she was before, but as the person she’s become. This lesson stayed with me. We can’t go back to who we were before hardship. But maybe that’s not the goal. Maybe the goal is to take what we’ve been through and use it to shape something even richer, even more intentional.

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