Sarah Leavitt illustrates the tender and complex grief of her partner's assisted death
CBC Books | Posted: December 4, 2024 4:49 PM | Last Updated: December 12
The Vancouver writer and illustrator discussed her comic Something, Not Nothing on Bookends with Mattea Roach
Vancouver comics creator Sarah Leavitt is no stranger to exploring personal stories through her art.
Her first book, Tangles, tells the story of how Alzheimer's transformed her quick-witted and outspoken mother into a scared, forgetful woman — and illustrates the moments both heartbreaking and silly that strengthened their bond amongst all this change.
Something, Not Nothing, her latest work, also highlights Leavitt's talent for capturing powerful and raw experiences and describes the grief of losing her partner of 22 years and the sparkling love they shared.
"Leavitt translates some of her own massive and hard-to-describe feelings into something concrete in her new collection of comics," said Mattea Roach in the introduction to their interview.
"She weaves together unconventional comic panels filled with poetry and these abstract images drawn in different mediums, including ink, watercolour and coloured pencils. It's a graphic novel done in a way that I had never seen before."
On Bookends, Leavitt told Roach about life with her late partner and using art to confront grief in Something, Not Nothing.
Mattea Roach: I want to know more from your perspective about your relationship with Donimo. What was she like?
Sarah Leavitt: We met in 1998 and she was somebody that I'd seen around in our small queer Vancouver community, but I didn't know her. We met through a mutual friend and it sounds so cheesy whenever I talk about it, but I immediately knew that she was this really important person. In my memory of meeting her, there was this glow around her and I just thought she was so beautiful and so compelling. Then it turned out that she was also really goofy and I asked her out in this incredibly uncool way. We went out for dinner and I really didn't expect her to be funny and nerdy and a little bit awkward.
In my memory of meeting her, there was this glow around her and I just thought she was so beautiful and so compelling. - Sarah Leavitt
We were together for 22 years, which just seems like a really long time, which I guess it is. In a lot of ways, I feel like I really grew up with her. As a teenager, she had started having chronic pain — she had fibromyalgia — and so she was kind of one of the few people who was actually diagnosed by a doctor with fibromyalgia in the 80s.
There's still a lot of skepticism around fibromyalgia and related conditions, but definitely at that time it was there. Different things happened over her life and she lived with constant, quite high levels of pain. So that was part of our relationship as well, was navigating that.
She was an artist. She made horrible puns all the time. She did not like the word butch, but she was definitely like a masculine looking and acting woman. I think it was how she would describe herself. Very clear. She rode a motorcycle until she couldn't anymore. Things like that.
MR: One thing that's very central to this work and to the story of Donimo's death is that she opted to pursue medical assistance in dying. And so you knew exactly how and when she was going to die, which is not the kind of conventional grief narrative I've seen. It's a very new way to die and new for us to be able to speak about. What was that experience like?
SL: The way I think about it is there's very few people who know the exact time and way they're going to die. So people who are choosing MAID, people who are going to be, I hate to say it, executed, or people who have maybe planned their own suicide. I think that's really it. So there were certainly dark parts leading up to it where I felt really horrible about planning her death.
I would think things to myself like, well, how is it that we can all sit there and watch the doctor put an I.V. in her arm knowing that it's going to kill her? It kind of goes against our natural instincts. It's still this thing that I am blown away that she could do. How do you kind of walk through the day knowing that you are going to be dead in a few days? I'm so in awe of her moving forward very intentionally.
I'm so in awe of her moving forward very intentionally. - Sarah Leavitt
There were also really beautiful parts of it. She had the opportunity to hear from so many people who just loved her and were able to write her emails or, since it was the beginning of COVID, sometimes people would come over and be outside under her bedroom window and talk to her on the phone just so she could see them out the window. There were all these really beautiful opportunities.
And I mean, I don't know if this answers your question, but in some ways I still cannot wrap my mind around it.
MR: In the author's note, you write that Donimo had this foresight that you would make art about the experience of grief and loss. But at the time where she was telling you this, you didn't think you could do it. What changed for you?
SL: Her death. There was a way in which I couldn't see what life might be like after her death. Once I got to the other side of this incredible divide, there were things that I thought I wouldn't be able to do that I could. I think it was about a month after her death that I started drawing with more focus.
I think it was about a month after her death that I started drawing with more focus. - Sarah Leavitt
I think of the beginning of this project as an online workshop that Teresa Wong did about Drawing Your Pandemic Life. And so the prompt was to draw four things that you can see around you in your kind of isolated pandemic life. And I chose things that reminded me of Donimo. And then I kind of did a few more comics of like, "things that remind me of you." And I started posting them on Instagram and connecting with people through that.
As time went on, I started experimenting more with watercolours and other materials. My drawings started just being single images or a few panels. And then I started doing these like 12 and 16 panel pages.
The other thing that had happened was my friend AJ, who paints, asked me to have weekly drawing nights — art nights — on Friday night. And that was a huge part of doing this. I have a really hard time focusing and sitting down and doing work. Friday night became this really important time and place for me where I could just kind of make this work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Lisa Mathews.