Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love

“Leavitt gives an intimate, honest depiction of how she moves from the blackest days slowly into the sunlight. There is no way out of grief other than through it.”

Leavitt began these comics, these visual notations, shortly after her partner Donimo's death. She wrote and drew her way into understanding her experience, providing a chronicle of her emotional journey. The words and images are raw and powerful. They present grief at its most elemental.

What's missing is a broader story, an image of Leavitt's life before this blackness. The reader gets the barest sense of either of the characters' lives before the unremitting pain pushes Donimo to choose to end her life. We get scant ideas of where they live, what they do, how they met, how they spent their time together before Donimo's world narrowed to a single bed. Little of that is touched on. Instead, there is a brief description of what's needed to get medical permission to end a life, of how this worked out for the narrator.

"I was the one who called. 'I need some information about medically assisted death.' I filled out the form for her to sign. I had to print it out and I had to fill it in. Please let me die."

There are technical hurdles, the urgent need to find two doctors to sign off on such a request.

"You must be at a point where your natural death has become reasonably foreseeable . . . At this point you were terrified. At this point I was terrified."

It isn't automatic, given the nature of Donimo's illness, but the permission is granted. That is when the real fear and pain begin for Leavitt.

"I can only write about the day she died if I walk up to it sideways, trick myself a little."

What follows is a visual and poetic plunge into the pain and anguish, the inevitable survivor guilt, that comes with the death of a partner. The dark, dense imagery slowly lightens. More and more color seeps into the pages as the reader, like the narrator, emerges from the worst of the pain.

"Stretch your body during grief. Colours will come. They will open your heart. The air will soften. You will move again."

Leavitt gives an intimate, honest depiction of how she moves from the blackest days slowly into the sunlight. There is no way out of grief other than through it. These pages move us through the darkness, with Leavitt as a sensitive, articulate guide, naming the unnameable.