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Between Two Kingdoms
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BetaPart 2, Chapter 33-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 33 Summary: “Doing A Brooke”
Suleika receives advice from Isaac whom she meets in Seattle: “Forgiveness is a refusal to armor your own heart […] Living with that openness means feeling pain. It’s not pretty, but the alternative is to feel nothing at all” (302). Rich, a sculptor in Northern California, tells Suleika his theory about travel: “When we travel, we actually take three trips. There’s the first trip of preparation and anticipation, packing and daydreaming. There’s the trip you’re actually on. And then, there’s the trip you remember” (303). He tells her to be present wherever you are now. She realizes, recalling Isaac and Rich’s advice, that she can’t alter the past. If she could go back, she would wait to date Jon until she had more distance from Will. She texts Jon to talk, planning to break up with him, and they decide to talk over the weekend.
Suleika visits Katherine, whose son Brooke committed suicide. Katherine wrote to Suleika in response to a column: “The power of a story is to heal and to sustain, she wrote, And if we are brave enough to tell our own story, we realize we’re not alone, again and again” (307). Katherine becomes the first person that Suleika tells about her fears for Max and Jon. Katherine tells her that grief isn’t meant to be lived with alone.
Brooke’s death changed Katherine’s relationship with mortality. He wrote a letter before he died, and Katherine invites Suleika to read it. She’s had cancer twice, and she feels courage knowing that her son has found his own way into death, and she can too. To live in the present, Katherine reminds herself of life’s riches from Brooke and many others. That night Suleika journals about her response to grief, death, and mortality, and how she has avoided it. She closes her journal, emails Max, and calls Jon.
Jon tells Suleika that he will meet her in Los Angeles to have their conversation in person. She picks him up at the airport. She raises the idea of breaking up. He asks her if she likes him, and she admits she loves him. He commits to giving her space if that’s what she needs but asks Suleika to stop shutting him out. Suleika visits Max in Los Angeles. He asks, “Does it make you uncomfortable to know I’m dying?” (315). His death terrifies her. Max forgives her and mentions it’s lonely dying so young. She leaves Max and California with the declaration: “I no longer want to protect my heart” (318).
Part 2, Chapter 34 Summary: “Homegoing”
Suleika wakes to snow while camping in the Grand Canyon. She realizes that she is ready to go home but wants to wisely use the time left. She meets a couple who lives in a van in Marfa, Texas. She marvels at how little they live on. They all go camping at Big Bend National Park. They strip off their clothes and jump in a stream. That night she sleeps in her car with the windows down and marvels at the Milky Way. She thinks of Will and wishes for an uncomplicated experience of joy but decides to live with the lack of perfect closure.
She drives across Texas to meet Lil’ GQ. He is on death row. They will meet for eight hours over two days. Suleika and Lil’ GQ exchanged letters before her arrival to get to know each other. For Lil’ GQ, letter writing is something to look forward to and a way to learn from others. She arrives at the prison and keeps making mistakes. She can’t have pen or paper. This is the first time in 10 years that he has had a visitor, and he tells her his life story. Suleika thinks of the Joan Didion quote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Suleika asks Lil’ GQ about death, and he says that he wants to die alone. He doesn’t want to be remembered as he died.
The next day she returns, and he is embarrassed he talked so much and asks her questions. He says that the parallel between her isolation and his waiting on death row compelled him to write her. Suleika observes, “It’s a tricky balance, attempting to find resonance in someone else’s story without reducing your suffering to sameness” (338). At the end, he asks her: “If you could take it all back, would you?” (339). She replies that she doesn’t know.
On her way to New York, she stops to see Unique in Georgia, and she keeps thinking about Lil’ GQ’s question and all the people impacted by her illness. She knows life would have been easier without illness, but she also remembers the words, the letters, and the connections that couldn’t be separated from her leukemia. Jaouad writes, “I would not take back what I suffered to gain this” (341).
Epilogue Summary
When she arrives in New York City something has shifted for Suleika. She moves to Vermont for a few months and begins writing. Max dies, and she visits her friends now through their art: words and watercolors.
Jaouad writes, “Wherever I am, wherever we go, home will always be the in-between place, a wilderness I’ve grown to love” (345). She and Jon move in together and her brother moves into the East Village apartment. Her parents return to Tunisia. Her mother plans to paint and her father plans a road trip when he retires. Suleika buys a VW van and is learning to drive a stick shift.
Part 2, Chapter 33-Epilogue Analysis
In Chapter 33, Suleika receives advice on travel from Rich. His theory mirrors the three selves that Ned mentioned but takes it a step further to being in the present moment. Rich’s idea also links the motif of travel with the theme of living in the present moment. Isaac’s lesson on forgiveness and feeling challenges Suleika’s idea of what it means to be present to herself. She realizes that to live in the present in every situation, she needs to open herself to feelings about the past. This is the only way that she can find a way to forgive herself and others. This is the only way that she will be able to live fully in the now.
Katherine doesn’t tell Suleika what to do, but through her words and actions, she does remind Suleika that grief and pain cannot be carried alone. Suleika remembers that everyone needs support. Reflecting on her time with Katherine, Jaouad writes, “Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you” (312). Katherine lives open to her love and grief in a way that astonishes Suleika. She doesn’t dwell in the fear of the unknown. She uses the knowledge of death to find the gifts of her life.
Suleika learns that there is more than one way to be in a relationship. “I’m not sure what it all means. You can force clarity when there is none to be had” (315). Jon teaches her to live in the present in their relationship just as everyone else is teaching her to embrace grief, love, and mortality through embracing the present. Kit and JR live another version of the in-between life in Marfa, making transience a way of life (322). Suleika strips with them at the river and jumps in the cold water, opening herself to the world and showing others her scars. The stars and the breeze symbolize the freedom she claims now: “Tonight, this feeling is the closest I’ve felt to being at home within myself” (325). She doesn’t know what the result will be with Jon or in her life, but she chooses intimacy and openness over distance and fear.
While visiting Lil’ GQ, Jaouad mentions a quote from Joan Didion that describes the stories we tell ourselves are how we make sense of the past and find a way to live. Suleika experiences this with Katherine. Brooke’s pre-death letter becomes a connection to him and a way for her to make peace with him even after he’s gone. Writing and storytelling are how Lil’ GQ makes meaning of his story in the past and finds a way to live life on death row. That sentiment plays out through Suleika’s correspondence with him.
Sharing her story on the road trip, Suleika begins to accept herself and her circumstances. The distance between her internal world and the past narrows. This opens to her the freedom she desires and the peace to move on and choose new experiences, no longer bound by grief or the death of the relationships and friends in her past. When Lil’ GQ asks her if she would take it all back, her eventual response shows how she is becoming more comfortable with ambiguity, finding a third way in what she saw as a binary choice. The ache and pain of illness and grief can’t be separated from the connections and growth that came from those years.
In the Epilogue, Suleika revisits her friends through their art, and art is, again, a way to bridge distance and bring about connection. Jaouad mentions that each character embraces the present, newness, and freedom in ways that align with their values. The Epilogue doesn’t give finality to the story, but by showing the ways that each character chooses to invest in a new project, this final section models how the story and its characters are findings ways to make peace with the lack of certainty and the lack of a clear future.
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