ARTWORK BY TEVA HARRISON
David Leonard is senior director of 6 Degrees at the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.
Grief is a slippery thing. On good days I feel like the path in front of me is clear and I have things under control. And then, suddenly or gradually, I feel myself sliding. A fog descends, and finding the road forward feels impossible. So much of grief is about wandering through that fog, grasping for what we have lost – even if it’s just a fleeting connection. My grief is no different.
My wife, Teva Harrison, died nine months ago of metastatic breast cancer. She was just 42 years old. She was a writer, artist, and an advocate for people with chronic illnesses. Her work dealt with her cancer, but her focus was to try to live joyfully despite the obstacles in front of her.
Teva was diagnosed six years ago. The doctors told us that we should plan for the worst, but that the median survival rate was about two or two-and-a-half years. She defied those odds, and died five-and-half-years after that, living a life filled with travel, love, friendship, beauty and hope. Year after year, she kept surprising her doctors and beating the odds, until one day she didn’t. She wrote widely about seeking a joyful life, but also about the mundane drudgery of cancer – her “in-between days” in waiting rooms and between scans, the fact that we were only able to make short-term plans because we never knew what was around the corner. She wrote her truth, about the things she didn’t find when she was looking for stories to help her understand her own situation.
She used this constant liminal space and time to write and draw memoirs, to make art and create poems. She also used her time to speak up for the international metastatic community as a fierce advocate for awareness and funding. She knew that cancer meant that she wouldn’t be able to choose the manner of her death. But she could choose the way she lived her life. She chose to live as fully as possible. We chose to live that way together.
This is her gift, and although my grief is whole and all-consuming, Teva, and the work she left behind, are examples to me in how to deal with it. Since her death, I have become the primary sufferer. She is gone, and I’m here, but I still look to her for guidance. She grieved fully and unashamedly for the limitations cancer brought to her, but she also lived boldly, with a thirst for the time that she had remaining. Teva felt the fragility of life, and that gave her reason to go on. It also gave her even more reason to be kind and compassionate and to live with grace toward others who might be experiencing unseen challenges. The lessons from her writing and the way she lived her life are guiding me to live with gusto, to care for myself and the people around me, to simply keep going.
A few weeks before her death, she completed the manuscript of a book of poetry and drawings, Not One of These Poems Is About You, and as I write this, her posthumous book – her last work – sits beside me. It’s infused with her, and I can hear the familiar timbre of her voice in my head as I read her words.
Having this book and seeing Teva’s talent manifested punctuates her absence, but she knew that this book would speak for her when she couldn’t. She also hoped that the way she lived her life and made her art could be an example of how to face questions of mortality and live with purpose.
In A Pocketful of Stones, a poem in her new collection, she writes about grieving for the women she had met after her diagnosis who also had metastatic cancer. This group of mutually supportive women were joined by the knowledge that their diagnoses made their friendships both temporary and permanent. They all died before Teva, and she wrote “I’m left behind, moving among the living. Alive.” She felt that to honour them, she needed to live the days that they could not. “Suck the marrow out of life,” as she memorably put it in her memoirs.
She learned how to live through her grief for herself and her friends, how to persist. Teva’s hope and optimism remained her cornerstone. We didn’t talk often about what might happen after her death, but she always insisted that she only had one request of me. She asked me to promise to keep living my life, and to embrace each day that she’d miss. She asked me to promise to keep living as fully as possible and not to waste the time I had.
She also knew, though, that I would feel the hardship of grief and the pain of loss. The most frequent thing I’ve heard from people is that grief isn’t linear, that it sneaks up on you. I’ve been rightly told that there will be good days and bad days, days of normalcy and days lost to anguish. What I didn’t hear much about was the subtle ways that grief would seep into my entire life, change my capacities, challenge my own identity, shroud its fog over everything. This is where Teva continues to teach me. As I reread her writing and her comics and the poems, I see her navigating so many of the same obstacles I’m encountering. She writes about the awkwardness of social situations, about the lack of energy, the gap you feel between who you were and who you are. I find myself turning to her writing to help me as I encounter these same situations. The parallels between her illness and my grief are illuminating and surprising.
Grief manifests like an injury. It needs rehab in the form of therapy or medication or self-care or the simple passage of time, but it doesn’t necessarily heal. There is no cure. The absence left by the loss of a loved one lingers, and becomes something to accommodate. I’m having to strengthen the rest of myself to work around my injured heart. It may lessen with time, but the hole remains. I’m reminded, constantly, that accommodating a chronic condition like grief can be like accommodating a chronic illness. I must be gentle and I must be kind to myself.
Teva understood – out of necessity with her terminal diagnosis – that she had a low probability of curing her cancer, and that she had to accommodate it in her life. She knew she had to adjust to the new normal while doing her best to thrive. A central part of that meant being gentle and forgiving with herself when she felt the gap between what she felt she should do and what she could do. That gentle reckoning with the change in her capacity for living the life she lived before cancer, gave her a way to not give in and fall apart. She let herself off the hook, prioritizing the things she loved most. Because she discovered a way to live with hope and beauty despite the challenges of cancer, Teva is supporting me as I navigate my grief. She tapped into some universal truths about what makes a life, and what is important, and it is invaluable to me.
The truth of Teva’s life and writing has compelled me to be honest about the gravity of grief and the challenges of navigating it. It’s forced me to be ruthlessly honest with myself. Grief is like unrequited love – it all goes out, with none coming back to you – but the lessons she shares in the pages of her books may yet help put me back together.
These truths aren’t only helpful to widowers, or people living with cancer. These lessons are a response to living through adversity. Her work resonates with people because she dealt with the big questions – of love and legacy and fear and death – but also because she made the choice to confront the bad things and to live in hope despite them. It’s easy to lose hope when we’re faced with calamity, but Teva made art during the darkest time in her life because the making itself was an act of optimism.
“I believe in the magic of everyday things,” she wrote. She believed in the importance of revelling in the simple, beautiful moments of life, of nature, of people. I believe it, too.
A lot has been written about the one-sided conversations that people have with the people they’ve lost, and I am fortunate to have Teva’s words to carry on her end of the dialogue. The speeches she gave can be streamed online, her voice reads the audiobook of her memoirs, her writing speaks about me and to me. The mark she left is indelible.
In the conversations I have with Teva, she reminds me to be kind and forgiving, to be hopeful and bold. Those lessons are also in the work she left behind. For the countless people reckoning with chronic illness who have seen something of themselves in the truth of her poetry, or the rest of us trying to make sense of a difficult and sometimes painful world, her example is a good place to start. For me, in my grief, the light she left for us to carry continues to guide me, and her message of hope for a better world is a reason to keep going.
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