She realizes she doesn’t know how to live. She is facing a different kind of battle years after she thought she was done with the disease. The hardest part is not so much the days right after being free from the hospital, but rather having survived for quite some time. She is only allowed to be away from the hospital for 100 days. When she is out of the hospital, she goes on a solo road trip with her dog across the United States, visiting many people who made meaningful contact with her. Her terrier and constant companion and letters from strangers fill her days. It fills your chest with shards of glass ….” At about the time that Melissa dies, she realizes she and Will are finished. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. Losing her best friend, Melissa, a fellow cancer sufferer, she writes, “Grief is a ghost that visits you without warning. She writes as often as she can, with a vomit pail close by. In one week alone she had 20 infusions of “heavy duty” chemotherapy. Jaouad writes of the harrowing time of recovery, “I felt as though I’d entered an alien spaceship.” It had only been one year since her diagnosis however, she couldn’t remember what it was like to be herself. The mystery is not ‘if but when’ death appears in the plotline.” We are all terminal patients on this earth. The well-known author Annie Dillard wrote, “Write as if you were dying. Her brother is a match, and following the procedure, she spends 100 days in the hospital recovering. Told she needs a bone marrow transplant, she shops for a donor, describing this as somewhat like shopping for college. In March 2012 at age 23, she posts a website “A Life Interrupted” and a 1,000-word column for the New York Times Sunday Magazine. It usually strikes people in their 60s and 70s not in their 20s. She battles a complicated and rare bone marrow disorder, myelodysplastic syndrome, which leads to acute anemia, which had been smoldering for some time. Jaouad writes her story passionately and with courage. Will stayed with her throughout the worst of times, as did her parents, who overflowed with hope and excitement during the five years of her illness.

What started as uncontrollable itching on her legs turned into something serious.

She is deeply in love with Will, but doctors in France urge her to go home to her parents with her serious health problems. There is no good age to hear the words “You have cancer.” It is particularly tragic to hear it when you’ve just graduated from college (Princeton, in Jaouad’s case) and found a job as a war correspondent in Paris.

'Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted'

Suleika between two kingdoms