SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Every week, a guest draws a card from NPR's Wild Card deck and answers a big question about their life. Suleika Jaouad has lived with cancer since her early 20s. Her latest project, "The Book Of Alchemy," is a guide to journaling, which helped her through her illness. Jaouad talked to Wild Card host Rachel Martin about the community of friends that also helped her.
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RACHEL MARTIN: When do you feel connected to the people you've lost?
SULEIKA JAOUAD: This is such a good one. You know, I've lost a lot of people. I had the great joy and privilege when I was 22 and I was sick of befriending some fellow patients. I was desperate for friends who understood what I was going through. And as someone who was often decades younger than the other adult cancer patients, anytime I saw someone under the age of 30 at the hospital...
MARTIN: Be my friend.
JAOUAD: ...I would pounce on them and be like, can we please hang out? And what that yielded was this incredible friend group - my friend Max Ritvo, who's a brilliant poet, my friend Melissa Carroll, who's an incredible artist. And most of my friends died by the end of my 20s, I think. Two out of those 10 friends are alive...
MARTIN: Wow.
JAOUAD: ...Now. And so I went through a lot of loss at a young age. And I think when you experience that kind of deep loss, there's a way in which it can make you want to guard your heart...
MARTIN: Yeah.
JAOUAD: ...Because to open yourself up to new love is inevitably to also open yourself up to new loss. And the truth is, you know, I would experience any amount of grief to experience those loves.
MARTIN: You know, I wonder how is it to be the person who got to live longer? Was that a struggle to be the person who survived?
JAOUAD: I think every major milestone in my life, I feel that kind of bittersweet twinge of - you know, getting married, in the back of my mind, I'm thinking to myself, oh, this person will never get married. With every birthday as I get older, it's that sense of moving further away from the shared slice of life that you had together while also, you know, feeling that they're with you. And, you know, one thing I loved about Melissa and Max, in particular, and I believe this to be true of myself, which is that my illness is the least interesting thing about me. What I admired about them was not the mere fact that they were sick. Lots of people get sick. It's how they responded...
MARTIN: Yeah.
JAOUAD: ...To their illness. And so, Max, in the last months of his life, published his first poem in The New Yorker and wrote two books. Melissa - she started making these haunting, beautiful self-portraits in watercolor. And so, each of them, I think, are people I look to as I navigate these new challenges now about how I can be the handler of my fears rather than the handled.
DETROW: You can watch a longer conversation with Suleika Jaouad by following @nprwildcard on YouTube. "The Book Of Alchemy" is out now. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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