Heartbreaking words and images of a life
Posthumous work records Geneviève Castrée’s fight with pancreatic cancer
MONTREAL — For the last year of her life, the Québécois illustrator, writer and musician Geneviève Castrée existed in a disease-induced isolation.
In a spare room of her home in Washington State, she fought for her life. Part of that fight included documenting what remained of it with heartbreaking images and unflinching words.
Now, two years after her death, the fruits of Castrée’s final labours are being released.
One is a book of poetry, Maman Apprivoisée (Tamed Mother) that was published under her married name, Geneviève Elverum.
In 44 poems that were written in French and translated within the same volume into English, she writes of the elation, hope, disappointment and horror she felt in giving birth in early 2015 and being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four months later, dying 13 months after that, in July 2016.
From the first poem, “Attack,” the tone is set: “I read somewhere/that to give birth/is to get closer to death.”
The rest of the collection charts her approach.
Castrée’s second posthumous publication is a children’s book, A Bubble, that treats the almost physical separation imposed upon her in the final year of her life, as well her great desire to breach the barrier.
“It’s more of a fable. It was like an aspirational drawing that she made where she wanted it to all go away — the things she was struggling with, the isolation she felt and this mortality that was creeping up,” said Phil Elverum, her musician husband who helped get the flurry of work into the hands of publishers.
“The (children’s) book ends with the bubble popping and she gets to go eat ice cream with her daughter. Of course on some level she knew how unlikely that was or impossible, but her way of coping was to draw it into reality.”
Castrée’s experience was harrowing and the work is no less intense.
A Bubble features exquisite illustrations of the author floating inside her transparent orb and her daughter looking on, most often from outside. But the long cord of an oxygen tube snakes through the pages and twists around legs, slips around her ears and into her nose.
The poetry deals with the minutiae of her everyday struggle, from having to ween her child off of breast milk ahead of chemotherapy treatments to deciding to cut off her hair before it falls out.
“For the time being/I look like Joan of Arc,/hearing voices/and going to war,” she writes.
She describes her belly filling with liquids due to blocked veins, experimental operations, jaundice and her turn toward spirituality, which allowed her to cling to something while the hope of medical science faded away.
Her tumours, she described as “meat balls ... in my lungs/ my pancreas/and scattered here and there in my body.”
“Once the meat is attacked/ my health will come back.” But it never did. That so much creativity has emerged from the process of destruction is both a final blessing and an enduring tragedy.
Elverum said that he is still putting together another book of his late wife’s poetry as well as a monograph of her illustra- tions that includes an unfinished project that she was working on at the time of her death.
Elverum, better known as his musical alter ego, Mount Eerie, has also released two equally haunting albums, A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only, processing the illness, death and grieving process from his own perspective.
“I’m the curator of her legacy and everything, but I’m hes- itant to attach myself to it,” he explained.
“When she was alive we were both artists and really productive people, but we didn’t really share our creative worlds with each other very much.”
In fact, Elverum said, Castrée lived much of life in an artistic bubble.
“She lived as this Frenchspeaking person in Washington State, in a small town, and always sort of talked about herself as this alien or unicorn like the only one of her kind, who couldn’t really relate and sang all these songs in French,” he said.
In one of Castrée’s poems, she tells of eavesdropping on her husband as he sings to their daughter a lullaby from the old Québécois children’s show Passe-Partout.
“I am touched,/I shed a tear,” she writes. “I sang it so often/to our daughter/that this anglophone/now knows nearly all/the lyrics by heart.”
“Her way of coping was to draw it into reality.”
PHIL ELVERUM MUSICIAN, HUBAND