I was 11 years old when my aunt, who was 32 at the time, was diagnosed with brain cancer. It was the afternoon, a few hours before her rehearsal dinner, and the day before her wedding to her high-school sweetheart. I was playing in a big white tent, chasing my two-year-old brother underneath the tables and around the head table, when we got the word that Jane had gone to lay down in an upstairs bedroom and could not be revived, at least in the version the adults told me. She was rushed to the local hospital where they medevaced her to the Twin Cities. We would learn that she had a large tumor and that she needed emergency brain surgery. They removed as much as they could—but not all of it, in order to leave her with adequate brain function.

I got to see her after two days of minding my brother around the family area of the hospital ward. Her blonde hair had been shaved away, her face was swollen, and there were stitches that looked like a hairpiece woven all over her scalp. “Hi, I hope you feel better,” was all I managed to say. When I said it, she gave me a large, crooked smile and a little wave, then I was ushered out of the room, because that was “enough” of a visit. The adults had tired her out. Those were the last words I would ever speak to her.

We still had hope then, but Jane would only live for eight more months. She eventually married Tim, and he took her to die in the home he built. I didn’t go to the funeral because no children were allowed.

My mom talks about Jane. She makes sure my brother and sisters know her name and hear her stories, and she shows the pictures to anyone who is around: neighbors, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends. In contrast, my dad doesn’t like to talk about his sister, though in rare moments he’ll say something like “Today’s Jane’s birthday” or “Jane died 18 years ago today.” And so she lives with us, in our family, in this way. Through my mom’s chatter and my dad’s silence and in all our memories.

I don’t talk about Jane—not her death, anyway. If I do talk about her, I talk about her cat named Kirby Puckett or her love for jigsaw puzzles. I talk about missing her and staying the night at her house. But I have never talked about what it was like to be in the hospital for all those days or what it was like to learn that I was not allowed to go to the funeral or what it was like to try to keep a two-year-old occupied and out of trouble in a hospital. All of that I kept inside. It stayed with me until I decided to write about it.

 

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Whenever I write these letters, I talk about the pieces that we’ve chosen and how they interact and intersect. I write about the theme and the part of the human experience that we are tackling, whether it’s the ability to converse or what pain is. I write about writing, or more broadly the arts, and what they do and can do to help us deal with being human. This time, when I tried writing about the intersection of pain and history, of silence and those things that haunt us, I thought about Jane. I saw her image, that moment in the hospital and Jane with her crooked smile and swollen face.

In the course of human life we have a million phantom-limb pains—losing a parent when you’re little, being in a war, even something as dumb as having a mean teacher—and seeing it somehow reflected, whether it’s in our own work or listening to a song, is a way to deal with it. The Greeks knew about it. They called it catharsis, right? And without it, we’re fucked. I think this is the thing that keeps our mental health or emotional health in balance, and we’re born with an impulse toward it.

—Lynda Barry, in The Paris Review

That is a quote from a 2011 Lynda Barry interview with The Paris Review. MK Czerwiec cites her as a seminal influence in her essay in Graphic Medicine Manifesto. She writes that healthcare workers and other high-interaction, high-stress professions (like police, firefighters, and emergency responders) “…bear witness to many profound, often gruesome, disturbing, and painful human experiences, both physical and emotional as a matter of daily course. We are literally bombarded by images.” But she says that art, specifically comics, offers a way to process those images. This explains my need to express the final image I have of Jane. It would be more powerful and more accessible if I were to marry both image and word, because as Meredith Li-Volmmer says, “Comics help me make public health issues, CONCRETE, intimate, accessible, and above all human.” The access that comics provide is unparalleled in the other arts, but all arts can convey the human experience. Maybe Jane will be a comic one day. I think she would like that.

This accessibility and intimacy is one of the reasons I picked The Pervert to review. It achieves intimacy through its images and words and provides access to the trans experience. Comics have long been the voice of those without a platform. It is an egalitarian form tackling many of the taboos that are shunned in the so-called high arts. And while The Pervert may not be everyone’s idea of a light read, it is an important work that could only be communicated adequately in this form, in the marriage of words and images.

The art in our issue is aimed at the communication of our shared experience of being human. The stories are each unique in that in each the protagonist chooses to talk about or not talk about illness, and in each the protagonist’s choice is directly affected by their personal history. It is interesting to me that two pieces, The Way We Say Goodbye and Estate Sale, deal with what we say in a final farewell, and two pieces, Tense and Beating, Like a Drum, talk about the choice to remain silent during a health crisis. But seen another way, Tense and The Way We Say Goodbye both examine the effect that personal history has on what we choose to say—if anything—and both Estate Sale and Beating, Like a Drum exhibit characters trying to cope with the present. What I love above all is that these stories satisfy this call from Karen Armstrong, a British novelist: “Let’s use our stories to encourage listening to one another and to hear not just the good news, but also the pain that lies at the back of a lot of people’s stories and histories.”

The creation of art is desperately needed for this communication, not only to tell the public at large what we have witnessed but also as a way to digest it ourselves. As Czerwiec writes, “Once we have made comics together, the students and I discuss the role that comics can play for healthcare providers in helping them be better at what they do—or even just survive.” We need art to survive. But it can be daunting to sit down at the table or in front of a computer and tap that cathartic vein and spew greatness. One of the wonderful elements of the graphic medicine movement is its insistence that no one is excluded. Play and experimentation is fervently urged. And as I write this, I feel remiss in not partaking. I feel hypocritical writing about a movement that includes everyone without exception from the outside. So, below, you will see my comic. It isn’t great. I’m not going to win any awards. But the advocates of graphic medicine were right, I could do it, it was fun, and (I think) it captured more than images or words alone.

AM Larks is the fiction editor of Please See Me.