'Between Two Kingdoms': A memoir of sickness and healing
Also: "Secure Your Own Mask": Poetry
I picked up this book for no other reason than that one of my bosses recommended it enthusiastically. It turned out to be a book I could really identify with.
The path that connects the two kingdoms in the title of Suleika Jaouad’s deeply felt and penned memoir was for her a convoluted one; for me, direct. She was increasingly unwell for years, her condition misunderstood by medical professionals on two continents, before she finally learned she had a type of leukemia, a blood and bone marrow cancer. I felt fine until the evening my mother looked at me across the dinner table and announced that I had a lump in my neck and should see my primary care provider, who promptly referred me to a specialist, who just as promptly informed me I had a type of thyroid cancer.
Both Jaouad and I were in our 20s; though she was near the start of the decade and I was at its tail end, I related instantly to her sense that she was still poised at the entrance to her life, about to step through, when the door suddenly slammed shut.
Instead, as she details in “Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted,” she finds herself exploring a world memorably delineated by writer Susan Sontag: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”
Accepting this is not easy, to say the least. I remember thinking as I watched my mother coping with her ultimately fatal cancer — her unplanned, unwanted journey from one land into the other — that having cancer didn’t necessarily make people more noble, as movies and TV like to insist. It just made them more them.
Jaouad’s biggest revelation during her own sojourn in the kingdom of the sick is that as much as she yearns to go back to the kingdom of the well, her experience has changed her so fundamentally that she may not be able to. And she may not want to.
In her 2018 poetry collection “Secure Your Own Mask,” winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, Shaindel Beers crafts juxtapositions — nature and human nature, sweet and bitter, the mundane and the shocking — to memorable effect.
The birds in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pelican” reflect the kaleidoscope of human experience. If the walls of “This Old House” could talk, they’d speak of some of the worst moments of the narrator’s life — moments that are hard for her to remember, and harder to abandon. The lines of “The (Im)Precision of Language” layer wordplay over matters of life and death:
How far the ring-necked dove is
from wringing a dove’s neck. The way
a stand of trees can hide a deer
stand, concealing the hunter who
will shoot the deer.
Beers’s title originally echoed a flight attendant’s standard spiel about not sacrificing your own safety for others’. Now it’s hard not to assign a pandemic metaphor as well. Either way, these poems ponder the daily dichotomy we call life in a way worth returning to.