Like several of my friends, I was excited to discover the work of Eric Ravilious earlier this year at Dulwich Picture Gallery. His paintings were so powerful and clear that the exhibition reminded me not to dismiss watercolour as a medium. But I came away from seeing this show with more than just a new interest in Ravilious, who died young during the Second World War – he volunteered to be part of an ill-fated sea rescue mission in the waters off Iceland. I also came away with a curiosity about his wife. She died young, too, and her death is more of a mystery.
I walked out of Dulwich Picture Gallery and back into the summer sun wondering if Tirzah Garwood – like me, like my sister and cousins and aunts and grandmother, like Angelina Jolie – had been a carrier of one of the BRCA gene mutations that predispose a tiny proportion of women worldwide to develop breast cancer at an unusually young age. As I have discussed previously, I’ve been lucky so far and have yet to have a cancer diagnosis. I may even be lucky and dodge that bullet for a decade more – or possibly my whole life.
But Tirzah Garwood wasn’t so lucky. An artist and engraver, Eileen Lucy ‘Tirzah’ Garwood married one of her art school teachers, Eric Ravilious, when she was 22. They quickly had three children and somehow during this busy time she also managed to produce a small amount of work. I wish I could thank the curator(s) of the Eric Ravilious exhibition for being specific about the health problem that Tirzah was diagnosed with in 1941, when she was just 33 years old. It was breast cancer. So many exhibitions and even newspaper obituaries are coy about the ailments that beset and kill people. I always want to know!
It would seem that Tirzah had an ’emergency’ mastectomy. Her husband died the following year and in 1946 she remarried. But the cancer came back and she died in 1951, aged 43. Maybe Tirzah’s biography struck a chord with me because I’m roughly the same age as Tirzah was when she died and I feel like I have so much left to do and learn. The picture above was taken in 1951, by Edwin Smith.
There is no way for someone like me, with just basic biographical information of this type, to know whether Tirzah Garwood did or did not harbour – unknowingly – a genetic mutation of the type that runs in my family. But the facts suggest that she’s very likely to have had some type of genetic vulnerability to breast cancer – the early onset and recurrence could have been a sporadic case (ie. one-off bad luck) but chances are against it.
Thinking of Tirzah – and feeling sad for her and her children – I was reminded of a conversation I had almost two years ago with a friend, Mark Daly, who is a genealogist. Mark and I met one evening to discuss my family history and my interest in investigating the lives – and the deaths – of the women on the side of my family that carries our BRCA1 mutation. Mark surprised me by providing new information about one of my great, great aunts. I knew a bit about her – she had been a bit flash, a rule-breaker, and wore the latest frocks. That evening I also learned that my favourite great, great aunt died earlier than I’d been old and that she had had what sounded like a painful death. The death certificate described something that could have been the advanced stages of ovarian cancer – another cancer that BRCA1 carriers often develop.
I will never know exactly what killed my great, great aunt, just like it may never be possible to know if Tirzah Garwood’s early death was linked to a BRCA mutation. But I’m beginning to think that health-focused genealogy coud be an illuminating pursuit for those of us affected by genetic-related health risks. Perhaps I will get up the nerve to ask my friend Mark to finally begin what we talked about almost two years ago – tracing my family’s past to see if the impact of BRCA1 is there to ‘see’.
geneticgrrl 