Through Chronic Pain, a Transcendent Exploration of Love

• Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love
• Sarah Leavitt
• Arsenal Pulp Press (2024)

[Editor’s note: This essay contains extensive discussion of medically assisted dying and grief.]

“What comes after death?” Vancouver graphic novelist Sarah Leavitt writes in Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love. “For most of my life I mostly thought nothing. The same thing that came before birth. Blankness. Emptiness. The end.”

But things shifted when Donimo Hanson, Leavitt’s partner of 22 years, started thinking about ending her life in 2019. Hanson died beside a river by medically assisted death, surrounded by friends and loved ones, at age 54 on April 21, 2020.

In the time between Hanson’s early explorations of medically assisted death and her decision to end her life, she and Leavitt found an essay by a rabbi about what happens after we die.

Early in his time as a rabbi, he recalled that “he believed there was nothing,” Leavitt wrote.

“He started sitting with people as they died, and watching. He watched for decades, thousands of deaths. He began to believe in the olam habah, the world to come.”

Hanson had lived for years with overlapping chronic health conditions including fibromyalgia, myalgic encephalomyelitis and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, as well as permanent injuries sustained from car accidents.

In 2019, her health declined rapidly. She became bed-bound and was in unrelenting, severe pain. She had exhausted other interventions when she started considering medically assisted death. Still, the doctor’s acceptance of the application was received with shock and, of course, grief.

Leavitt’s book of short comics looks back on the couple’s life together and follows Leavitt as she navigates the days and years following Hanson’s departure from this world, walking the reader through Leavitt’s interior life while making steps into a new one without her partner.

There are beautiful renderings of the small romantic gestures that shaped their days. Each spring in Vancouver when the cherry blossoms bloomed, Hanson would shake the fluffy pink flowers from the branches so they’d fall in Leavitt’s hair. In her final weeks of life, Leavitt would crawl into bed beside her partner to read Hanson to sleep.

At once grounding and expansive, generous and funny, the book will be a balm for anyone who has loved and lost someone. Leavitt’s astute renderings of time passing while in grief, simultaneously disorienting and experienced with hardened clarity, will be particularly resonant to people whose grief may be entangled with stigmatized or unconventional death.

Throughout the years, I have tried to make sense of my own experiences by seeking out grief-related books, music and pieces of art. I remember describing to friends that the city felt poisonous in the days and weeks after my former partner died by suicide in 2013. The streets carried sights and associations that felt physically overwhelming.

Over time, that changed. Some leafy streets and some sights of English Bay will always weigh heavily for me, and today I am grateful for those reminders. But the electric despair I used to feel has given way to something else.

Leavitt shows us how the shape of such grief changes with passing days and years. Her art and writing demonstrate how what feels insurmountable alters its texture on a schedule of its own accord, outside our own realms of influence.

The result arrives as a great gift. Something, Not Nothing is a resonant, deeply felt reflection of the many contours of grief: its darkness, of course, but also how life itself is darkly funny. And life-altering loss offers a new way of understanding the world as it is.

We don’t always have language for how the heaviness of grief can exist alongside tendrils of relief.

“I’ve been thinking about you — how your essence was joy, how life was crushing you,” Leavitt writes.

“Now you are free. I look for you in the sky.”

This intersection of loss and liberation is where the energy of death and the energy of life converge, where one informs the other. Leavitt conveys this in her book with a depth of empathy and courageousness that is as relatable as it is rare.

It’s part of why she is a longtime, beloved professor in the University of British Columbia’s school of creative writing, teaching the next generation of comic artists and, lately, scientists. Leavitt has been newly cross-appointed to teach in a new biomedical visualization and communication certificate program, a partnership between the UBC Hackspace for Innovation and Visualization in Education and the Centre for Digital Media.

Life has an interesting way of carrying us forward, despite what we endure. Another example: 2010’s Tangles, Leavitt’s first book, which chronicles her mother’s journey with Alzheimer’s, is now in production as a feature-length animated film with Giant Ant animation studio, Point Grey Pictures, Lylas Pictures and Monarch Media.

The cast includes Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Abbi Jacobson, Seth Rogen, Wanda Sykes, Bowen Yang and Sarah Silverman. “I honestly suspect this might be a dream,” Leavitt wrote of the celebrity casting news this spring.

One of the most rewarding, memorable and sustaining qualities of Something, Not Nothing lies in Leavitt’s capacity to chronicle the darkest days of grief and, in the process, provide readers with an unexpected gift: perceptive, lasting reflections on what makes life worth living.

Sarah Leavitt celebrates the launch of ‘Something, Not Nothing’ on Sept. 26 at the Heritage Hall in Vancouver.