FROM: "WHEN THE MIDDLE IS THE END:"
Jan. 06
Laurel put a meal together for my family and me a couple of weeks before she died. The main dish was a Tuscan soup -- beans, pasta, tomatoes. Delicious. There was bread and a salad and wine. I saw a note she’d jotted to her husband, the word “wine” followed by an exclamation point. The apartment was littered with such notes, not all of them concise. Pen to paper was her mode of communication now that she no longer possessed a tongue -- it had been surgically removed six weeks earlier in what would shortly prove a vain attempt to root out the cancer encamped at the base of the organ. Laurel’s handwriting was nearly illegible, a forward-slanting scrawl, and we all marveled to see how expertly her seven-year-old daughter Anya deciphered it. More remarkably, sometimes Anya could blithely interpret her mother’s attempts at speech. To anyone else Laurel’s words were unintelligible -- guttural starts followed by featureless nasal incantation. The will to speak still drove her, but it was useless. Anya’s uncanny ability to understand her mother even occasionally represented some kind of umbilical magic. That they both took it in stride increased the dazzle of the little girl’s feat.
It had been Laurel’s idea to cook us dinner. She’d suggested it in an e-mail. “Are you sure?” I replied. She was sure. It would be normalizing. What could be more normal than Jim, Abe and I sharing a meal with Laurel, Josh and Anya? We’d done it routinely, at their place or ours, since the kids were born, two months apart, nearly eight years before. The missing tongue, of course, meant that Laurel would not be consuming any of the food she prepared that night. Her sustenance now came from a nutritionally calibrated brew that found its way to her stomach through a tube she attached to a peg that had been surgically implanted in the side of her belly. “Sure,” I told her, “We’ll come. What time?”
Laurel and I had known each other for more than 20 years, first as acquaintances in a loosely knit post-college urban circle, then later more intimately when work and fate threw us together in Africa for a spell. Thereafter, back in New York, we met when we could for dinner or drinks or a movie. But it was our overlapping pregnancies and near-simultaneous migrations to Park Slope, Brooklyn that soldered the friendship. With swelling tummies and surging hormones, we prowled our promising new neighborhood and tucked into a tight, sustaining alliance. I introduced Abe to Anya in utero one March afternoon, holding his tiny three-week-old nose up to Laurel’s big expectant belly and telling him, “Meet your new pal.” It was a fortuitous introduction. More than a decade later, Abe and Anya remain the fastest of friends. They will tell anyone who cares to listen that they’re sister and brother.
The night Laurel cooked us the dinner she couldn’t eat, she laughed (her laugh was intact, accented but unmistakable), explaining how irksome yet amusing it had been to give up the taste-testing authority to Josh as she’d prepared the soup. Garlic and basil aromas floated from the kitchen. Laurel, in lipstick and a slinky blouse, sat bent over her writing pad, telling a funny story. Or rather, an unspeakably sad story about which we all chose to laugh. Flares of euphoria criss-crossed my ribcage. With Laurel’s tongue had gone her pain. Now her face was unclenched from the months of physical torment, her eyes unclouded from the morphine intended to blunt the pain. This return to brute serenity felt, absurdly, like a favor to me. For months I’d pawed and prodded at the closed shell of her agony. The tongue extraction had little to no bearing on her prognosis -- specialists in Boston had advised her not even to bother. But, with Anya in the mix, the vaporous hope for recovery the glossectomy held out was enough to compel Laurel to go through with it. In the end, pain eradication was the best and only reason for the procedure. It brought her back, if only briefly. It cracked open the shell, a revelation inside.
