by Lori Tucker-Sullivan
Though I knew her story, I had never met the writer and artist Suleika Jaouad prior to her art exhibition, The Alchemy of Blood, undertaken with her mother, Anne Francey. For the previous four years, starting just as Covid shut down the world, Jaouad oversaw an online writing community, The Isolation Journals. I participated in daily prompts that either she or a writer friend offered up. In so doing, I staved off my own loneliness as I dealt with lock-down as a widow and mother of adult children living away from home. Despite being a terribly solitary time, each day I looked forward to writing based on that day’s prompt. By the time the daily prompts ended, I had over 50,000 words of fragmented writing which I shared with a subset of the larger TIJ group who had quickly become close friends. The project continues today.
The impetus of The Isolation Journals was Jaouad’s experience during a bone marrow transplant following a leukemia diagnosis. She knew about being isolated and used journaling as an act of survival. Then, in the midst of Covid, she published her first book, Between Two Kingdoms, a memoir of her time as a young leukemia patient who later traveled to meet those who wrote to her via her column in The New York Times. I was working on my own book during that time—profiles of the widows of rock stars and musicians and what they taught me about grief after my husband Kevin died in 2010. Covid sidelined that project, and the daily prompts offered a way to keep writing, and to continue processing grief and loss, along with new feelings of seclusion.
Recently, Jaouad suffered a relapse of the disease. Though she maintained her writing community, this time she turned to art for solace and processing as treatment affected her eyesight, making writing difficult. She took instead to painting, using watercolors to create representations of medicine-induced hallucinations and fever dreams, including images of animals, birds, and fish.
Traveling to the ArtYard in Frechtown, New Jersey, I was excited by the prospect of seeing both Jaouad and her artwork in real life. While each piece of Jaouad and Francey’s art was inspiring in its scope and symbolism (Francey’s pieces included clay “shields” she created during her daughter’s illness), I was immediately drawn to a small room inside the larger gallery space, empty but for a hospital bed.
Projected onto the bed, was a video of Jaouad holding a large stack of papers. We first see her leafing through the papers as she reads the contents: “Chemotherapy treatment, fourteen thousand, two hundred dollars.” The video continues and Jaouad illustrates long-term illness, as documented by hospital bills, insurance rejection letters, a Do Not Resuscitate order, and more. As she speaks, we watch Jaouad, clad in white, walking through a cemetery, creating a path with the papers she discards as she walks. We see a caterpillar inching across the papers; a bird flies under a branch as Jaouad makes her way between cement headstones. Using this representation of all of the costs (physical, financial, psychological) of long-term illness, she creates a trail that exists between the before and after of sickness, between life and death itself.
I did not expect the physical reaction I experienced in watching the video. Tears welled and I steadied myself with the bed’s metal rail. These are, on the one hand, simply pieces of paper. Yet they are also representative of experiences—both good and awful—that came to define this person’s life. My visceral response was the result of my own stack of identical paperwork currently residing in a closet. Through two moves, the opening and subsequent emptying of a storage unit, and fourteen years’ time, I had not been able to rid myself of my late husband’s medical paperwork. A blue plastic bin holds hundreds of similar sheets—bills, insurance letters, medical records, recipes for cancer diets. Ridding myself of this paper has always seemed to be the ultimate betrayal. The papers represent the autobiography of my husband’s last two years. Though I hate them and everything they represent, I also cannot destroy them. It’s a terrible no-win situation, and so I shove them to the back of a closet, hoping for resolution. What I saw in that video was an artist creating agency in a time when all feels out of control. There was both inherent understanding of the precariousness of life and death and knowing that we can create our own reaction to it. I found myself wanting to scream that this is the true yet unacknowledged cost of illness, a cost born by families and communities, a cost ignored by the healthy, a cost we turn our eyes away from hoping to avoid.
While traveling to attend Jaouad’s exhibition, I read Maggie Smith’s book You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Popular since its release in 2023, it spent months on the New York Times Bestseller List. Reviews were wonderful, extolling the way in which Smith writes about the breakup of her marriage, which happened, in part, after her poem, “Good Bones,” went viral during Covid. As her then-husband struggled with Smith’s new literary fame, she discovered he’d been unfaithful and wanted out of their marriage. The book is a reflection on Smith’s grief at the ending of her relationship to a man she’d loved since college.
I’d approached the book to learn of her experience and also to learn from Smith as a writer. I was intrigued by the multitude of divorce books currently on the bestseller list, this being perhaps the most well-known. I enjoyed Smith’s style—pages often contained only one or two paragraphs; several contain only one line: this is the lyrical storytelling of a poet. But I also found something nagging as I read—the idea of grieving a broken marriage. As a widow, I’ve worked hard and have been encouraged (rightly or wrongly) to get past my grief, to move on, to live my life. Yet here was a book celebrated for its embrace of grieving a loss. Perhaps we have never given divorce its place as a “grievable” life event. Perhaps we’ve wrongly assumed both parties are equally glad to be out of the relationship as soon as the decree is signed. We wrongly believe all feelings are mutual. Still, I found it challenging to reconcile these emotions, especially given their juxtaposition with the wave of grief for my husband felt through Jaouad’s artistry.
My marriage wasn’t perfect. Yet we did the work. We compromised, we learned about each other. We held grudges and we forgave. We managed to stay in love. I’ve learned that a huge part of grieving is reconciling the loss of the future you’d once planned. Sure, that is given up in divorce, but it was ripped from my hands by my husband’s death. I had no choice, no trying again, no working it out. He’s gone, never to return, never to see his fiftieth year. I raised two devastated children without a co-parent. He should be here. My marriage should be here.
This juxtaposition caused me to compare losses. My husband and I didn’t divide up friends, many of them left after feeling uncomfortable with my grief. To whom do I direct my anger and bitterness? There’s no one, save the universe, which doesn’t answer back. I wish I had one person with whom to be angry, or to have a place for blame to take purchase. Grieving death is difficult work, and it hurts that I was made to do it in midlife.
Loss is loss; it comes in many forms, and impacts everyone, whether from a marriage torn asunder by deception or by death, or an illness that robs one of time. I attempt to think through this sudden recurrence of resentment I thought I’d dealt with through years of therapy. Comparisons aren’t useful, I tell myself. Maybe, the root of it is jealousy. Am I jealous that another person’s loss, though great, is less great than mine? Am I jealous that someone turned that loss into creative fuel while I’m told that spending time there is unhealthy? I return to Suleika Jaouad who, in interviews, said she, too, felt envious of peers who were starting careers and enjoying the milestones of young adulthood while she was trapped in a hospital room. Yes, we compare and we envy those who avoid suffering or whose suffering we can deem as less than our own.
Viewing Jaouad’s work, especially the video, I felt seen. As though reaching across the void created by long-term illness, caregiving, and grief, I was acknowledged by one who alchemized that pain into art. I do not feel that same sense of reflection and transformation from Smith’s memoir. Instead, I feel an outsider whose successful yet tragic marriage doesn’t quite fit. While self-expression, rather than audience acceptance, may have been motivational for both, it is Jaouad’s art through which I feel fully recognized.
Lori Tucker-Sullivan’s writing appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Sun, and others. Her book I Can’t Remember if I Cried: Rock Widows on Life, Love and Legacy was published in June. A two-time Pushcart nominee, her essay “Detroit, 2015” was a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2015.
After the Art 