DRAWING OUTSIDE THE LINES
TEVA HARRISON’S CANCER MEMOIR SHADES IN THE LONELY REALITIES OF LIVING WITH ILLNESS
‘ONCE THE STORY WAS OUTSIDE MY HEAD, I COULD LET GO A LITTLE’
In- Between Days: A Memoir About Living With Cancer Teva Harrison House of Anansi Press 128 pp; $19.95
Cancer is a lonely thing. It’s nights alone with your thoughts, l ying between sleeping and waking, considering the space you occupy between life and death. The thoughts are difficult to share, even with a partner you love, who supports you like no one else but can sometimes only tiredly say, “Try to get some sleep.”
In her new graphic memoir, In- Between Days ( parts of which were originally serialized in The Walrus), Teva Harrison brings us into these uncertain spaces between sleep and wakefulness, between pain and wellness, between life and death that she has occupied since she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2013. It is an honest look into a deeply personal experience that even the most empathetic of us can struggle to understand.
Harrison began sketching these comics after visits to one of the doctors on her oncological team. As she says in her book’s introduction, she was looking for a way to define the uncertain emotions and thoughts she was feeling. “Once the story was outside my head,” she explains, “I could let go a little.”
The comics, with their heavy, sometimes unfinished lines, maintain the rough, sketchbook quality of their origin. The short written sections that follow each comic, somewhere between a personal essay and a diary entry, reinforce that feel. There is a loose structure — the book is divided into thematic sections such as family, fears and treatment — and some narrative cohesion, but for the most part In- Between Days reads like a private notebook; the sort of thing you can dip into at any point and see someone working out the personal worries of that moment.
Harrison shares the uncertainty of her days, and the constant awareness of life between wellness and sickness. In one comic, after she goes to work in her garden, she takes a break and then wonders if she is resting more than she did the previous year, before she began to live with cancer. Then she thinks of other reasons she might be inclined to rest: the garden is bigger than it was then, for instance, and also there is new, comfortable lawn furniture that makes a rest more appealing. Or has cancer made her more aware of her body? A small ache, unnoticed a year before, is now something she has to worry about. Living with cancer has put her in a space of uncertainty, where even a good day is tempered by awareness that bad ones are to come.
And there are days, of course, when things are indisputably bad. When decisions have to be made between living with pain or living with a clear head. Days when she can’t help but wonder if she did something to deserve the cancer, despite the fact that she knows — and all her doctors confirm — that its cause is genetic. Days when all there is to do is rest and try not to let the anxiety of wasted time overwhelm her. Days when she has built up hope, after hearing too much positivity in the comments of a nurse, only to have it taken away when she discovers the cancer has spread.
But in the face of all the potential negatives, Harrison finds the little positive moments offered up to those who are looking for them. During a midnight trip to have an MRI, lying alone in the claustrophobic plastic tube, she opens her eyes and sees a sticker left by a kindly nurse — Dora the Explorer, waving down at her. She remains hopeful that joy is just around the corner, so she can endure a day spent crying in bed, knowing the next will be better. This practical optimism extends even to the cancer itself, which she refers to as “currently incurable,” while she participates in clinical trials in the hopes that one day she will refer to it simply as “curable.” Between optimism and the sober assessment of reality, Harrison always seems to err on the side of hope, because, as she writes, what does she have to lose?
We all exist in the space between life and death, but Harrison is reminded of it more often than most. She lives through her days of wellness and sickness just as she lives through her days of hope and her days of despair — never knowing how close she is to crossing over the edge of one space and into another. In her heartbreakingly honest exploration of these spaces in- between, Harrison provides a useful guide for those who cannot know the thoughts and fears of someone living with chronic illness; and for those experiencing a similar situation, the book shows that even in the most personal of journeys, you are not alone.
At its heart, In- Between Days is a firm statement that joy and hope can exist in the same space as anxiety and fear; that each day we are given should be lived, as Harrison says, “With a sense of wonder and delight.”