A tragedy, a symphony, a love story

Necessary optimism

After the film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, Ms. Jaouad recalled someone in the crowd approaching her and saying how relieved she was, “You’re still here.”

“When it comes to illness stories, we tell them from the perspective that we survived,” Ms. Jaouad said. In that sense, “American Symphony,” which ends with an epilogue in white text and on a black screen and provides no update on Ms. Jaouad’s health, is a correction. “It wasn’t clear that I was going to survive the recording period of this,” she said. The credits roll, but there is no happy ending for Ms. Jaouad and Mr. Batiste.

“None of us know if we will continue to exist in the future, but I have a heightened fear of not existing in the future,” Ms. Jaouad said.

In “Between Two Kingdoms” Ms. Jaouad writes about her conversations with a man named Quintin Jones. Mr. Jones, who introduced himself to her as “Lil GQ,” read her columns while on death row. He had written from a place of recognition: one imprisoned person to another. After her transplant, she visited him in prison. But the week her book was released, he was given an execution date. Mrs. Jaouad was devastated. She joined the movement to commute his death sentence to life imprisonment. It did not work.

On the morning of his execution, Mr. Jones received four hours of phone calls. He spent them with Mr. Batiste and Mrs. Jaouad. “It was incredible because we were speaking in the future tense, knowing that the future would not happen,” Ms. Jaouad said. “He talked about coming to visit us and hanging out in our garden. We all just chose to live in that space. She tried to explain the suspension. Their conscious decision to be out of time.

Lately, Mrs. Jaouad has been forcing herself to make plans. She considers it an act of “necessary optimism” that she has promised to write two more books. One of them will be a painting and prose work that Ms. Jaouad has titled “Drowning Practice.” The second is a book on journaling, which includes writing instructions. Next summer she will show her work in the ArtYard arts center.

A few weeks ago, Ms. Jaouad traveled to Seattle and walked outside suddenly into a heavy rainstorm. Someone rushed to offer her an umbrella. “I was like, ‘No, I’m fine,’” Ms. Jaouad recalled. She wanted to feel the rain on her face. Back in New York, she allowed herself to fantasize. Not about prizes or red carpets, but about a special rain shower in ten years’ time. How incredible it would be not to feel new, she said. “If I’m in the area, I want the umbrella.”