Suleika Jaouad recently announced that the treatments that had been keeping her leukemia in check are no longer working and that she needs a third bone marrow transplant. As soon as I heard the news, I picked up her memoir Between Two Kingdoms again. In it she details with unflinching honesty her leukemia diagnosis at 22, the countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, a bone marrow transplant and ensuing complications. It’s not what some might call a comfort read, but it has always given me courage; I’ve written about it several times during my own cancer treatment, like this piece about the most important lesson I’ve learned from Suleika. This time I’m rereading the book to remind myself of Suleika’s strength, her ability to face the unimaginable and still find a way through. With each page, I say a prayer for her.
I’m writing to ask for your prayers for Suleika too.
I believe in the power of our prayers, and in advances in research that make breakthroughs possible.
If you’re able to, please donate to a fund that Suleika and her family have set up, the Suleika Jaouad Fund for Leukemia & Stem Cell Transplant Research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
My inspirers, Suleika and Behida
A few months ago, I had the chance to meet Suleika at Rizzoli bookstore in NYC, where she was in conversation with her father, Hédi, celebrating the launch of his book. Arif and I drove up from DC and arrived just as the talk was starting. It was beautiful to see father and daughter discuss their shared love of literature.
Before I left for NY, I wrote Suleika a letter; there was so much I’d been wanting to say to her. I wasn’t sure I’d have the chance to hand it to her after the talk.
It turned out Behida Dolić, the radiant milliner whom I learned about through Suleika’s writing, was there too. (I wrote about meeting Behida at her hat shop in Hudson, NY here.) At the end of the book talk, I hugged Behida hello, and she drew me over to meet Suleika, who was warm and gracious. She messaged me afterwards to thank me for the letter.
I wanted to share a few lines from Suleika’s memoir that I’ve underlined and turn to over and over; I know they’ll touch you too.
1. “If I survive, it has to be for something. I don’t just want a life—I want a good life, an adventurous life, a meaningful one. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
2. “I wanted, in my own way, however small, to contribute something to the world. To leave more than I took.”
3. “Watercolors and words were the drugs we preferred for our pain. We were learning that sometimes the only way to endure suffering is to transform it into art.”
4. “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. It’s a bitter concession but a necessary one. While it might not be possible to move on from illness, I have to start trying to move forward with it.”
5. “I used to think healing meant ridding the body and the heart of anything that hurt. It meant putting your pain behind you, leaving it in the past. But I’m learning that’s not how it works. Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss.”
6. “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 at the edges of my vision—it can all be lost in a moment—but it’s also given me a jeweler’s eye.”
7. “I had no interest in existing as a martyr, forever defined by the worst things that had happened to me. I needed to believe that when your life has become a cage, you can loosen the bars and reclaim your freedom. I told myself again and again, until I believed my own words: It is possible to alter the course of my own becoming.”
8. “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor. “Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
Dear Suleika, thank you for telling the truth so beautifully. Our heartfelt prayers are with you and your family.
With all my love,
Salma
PS: Here’s the link to donate to the Suleika Jaouad Fund for Leukemia & Stem Cell Transplant Research.
This is newsletter #64. If you know anyone who might enjoy this newsletter, they can subscribe for free here. A few past newsletters:
What Abdul El-Sayed’s Grandmother Understood
World Cup, Bad Bunny, Knicks and Collective Effervescence
I Didn’t Make it to Machu Picchu
A million prayers (reflections on Umrah)
It took just six words (this is 59!)
Mom, memory, and finding meaning
Following a story’s thread home
My dad’s wisdom that guides me every day
“You will be someone’s ancestor”
How sharing my story is helping me heal
If the hat fits (This too has passed)
My soundtrack for proton radiation
The unexpected blessings of falling ill