22/05/25
Catharsis: A Grief Drawn Out – book review
“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” writes Susan Sontag in her essay Illness as Metaphor. Not everyone, however, knows what it is like to use the “bad passport” early in life. I certainly do. I have lived my life with one foot permanently in either camp: the living and well myself, but caring for others who are dying; and the sick and dying myself, being cared for dutifully by others. Together, my parents and I have danced a dance of being primarily on one side or the other. As the carer for her terminally ill husband for nearly two decades, the former Studio International editor Janet McKenzie certainly knows life in both kingdoms as well.
In On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf writes: “[L]et a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him.” There is no language for pain. It is, therefore, hardly a surprise, that, being an artist as well as a writer, McKenzie should have turned to the visual as an outlet for her chronic anticipatory grief and purgatory of bereavement, as her husband, Michael Spens, outlived his six-weeks-to live (or should that be six-weeks-to-die?) cancer prognosis by 15 years. Although unaware of their significance or healing potential at the time, McKenzie has now turned to her wordsmithery to begin to analyse her drawings and paintings made over the last two decades. In the preface to the resulting book-cum-memoir, Catharsis: A Grief Drawn Out, she writes: “With hindsight I realised that my drawings were created from deep within to insinuate love, loss, and fear … In describing or interrogating the drawings, I hoped I would be able to confront and accept the trauma over the 20-year period and move forward.”
Read my full review here