BROOKLYN READING WORKS: FEATURED WRITER: KIM LARSEN

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.

Labor Day weekend, 1995: Laurel and I sit in my little green Neon laughing uproariously. Anya and Abe, aged five months and seven months, are belted into their car seats in the back. The car is parked at a shopping center in Hudson, a river town in upstate New York, a short drive from the borrowed house in which we are staying for the weekend. The weather is cloudy, unseasonably cool, and a mischievous shopping cart has made off with our senses. The cart is unmanned and rolling (purposefully, it seems, and self-propelling), on a trajectory to bash another cart (the one we just unloaded and abandoned), as if determined to settle a score. Laurel and I are done in by this unexpected glimpse of the inner lives of shopping carts. Laughter consumes us.

I remember Laurel’s vivid face and the sky and the variation from routine represented by the rural setting and our reliance on my car and how that variation somehow reinforced the grooved repetition of mommy life. Mommy of a young child especially. An infant in particular. First baby, no less. Two such specimens propped and harnessed in the backseat; two 18-pound bags of bones, useless and voracious, passively (or not) sucking up every last measure of energy in a room. Laurel and I arrived almost simultaneously in the land of Mother Love, where the heart rezones because its old boundaries are meaningless. Our children scooped the love right out from between our ribs. So what could we do but swan around in our mother roles, fumbling, bored, enraptured -- the usual -- and fill our babies’ days with what we hoped was adequate compensation for the miracle of their existence? Still, the demands of the role, and even the accumulating rewards, were wildly disorienting.

At some point, that day in the parking lot, Laurel and I remember ourselves, and then the babies. We turn to check on them. They are examining us. Anya and Abe have four of the most glorious eyes ever to look our way -- Anya with her big black liquid orbs, Abe with his shimmering blue marbles. The sight of the two of them peering magisterially over the seat at their drooling, hiccupping mothers triggers a relapse of dementia in us. We laugh all over again, and the babies don’t seem to mind. Laurel and I are so mutually attuned to the clang of motherhood that this unhinged interlude feels almost like a form of prayer, an appeal from both of us to a clarifying higher order.

Fast-forward seven-plus years. Laurel is in the hospital, near the end of her life; Anya is at our house for the night. She and Abe have finished their dinner and bolted upstairs to play. I putter in the kitchen until their silence pulls me up after them. Here is what I find: Anya lying on her back on the couch, eyes closed, head in Abe’s lap; Abe squinting down at her, resting a folded washcloth on her brow. I tilt my head inquiringly. “She’s got a headache,” he explains in a quiet voice. I am undone by the tenderness of the scene; by her trust, his attentiveness, their independence.

Laurel’s official diagnosis did not arrive til March 2002, though months before she’d been informed that a mouth lesion her dentist had removed was “pre-cancerous,” and that they’d have to monitor it closely. There was no reprieve in this, just the start of a gloomy vigilance. I recall discussing it with her in my car, upstate again, this time in Redhook, cresting a ridge to greet a magnificent autumnal view of the Catskills. “Let’s focus on the good news,” I said. “You don’t have cancer.” We both pondered my useless remark in silence. I was almost as afraid of how Laurel would take a cancer diagnosis as I was of the diagnosis itself. She could be prickly. Her sense of personal justice was minutely calibrated, her sensitivity to minor inconvenience acute. Cancer was colossally unjust; a major inconvenience. But in the end, Laurel proved my worry profoundly misguided.

Even before she lost her tongue, Laurel’s ability to speak came and went during her illness, depending on treatment. The healing process that followed certain less drastic surgical procedures meant days or weeks without speech, and her rounds of daily radiation in the summer of 2002 turned the simple acts of sipping water or saying hello into painful ordeals. One day Laurel e-mailed me to ask if I might schedule a haircut for her and then escort her to the appointment, so I could explain to the hairdresser what kind of cut she wanted. It struck me as a good sign that she was still making room for pedestrian vanities of this sort. I booked her with a guy I’d been using, Mornay, a stylish blonde South African possessed of a brisk, confident approach with the shears. When Laurel sat down in his chair I explained that she couldn’t speak due to illness. This threw him, briefly. I did my best to convey her wishes, which she’d outlined on paper ahead of time. She didn’t trust haircutters, claiming that few understood her soft, springy corkscrews.

She was in bad shape. Her radiation treatment had ended a few weeks back, but the pain still raged. Probably it was dawning on her that the cure had failed (soon her doctors would say so). She looked so frail in Mornay’s chair. She’d always been thin, but now it was awful, bones jutting everywhere. Yet her lovely brown eyes were lovelier than ever, dominating her face and radiating woe. Mornay examined her hair thoughtfully, rubbing locks and strands between his fingers. When he felt ready, he raised his scissors and sought Laurel’s assent in the mirror. She nodded. I excused myself to run next door for a coffee, take-out. “Do you mind?” I asked. She blinked her permission. I was gone for three minutes, tops, and I came back to find Mornay blithely snipping away. Laurel sat erect and still. But as I drew near and could make out her face in the mirror, I saw tears sliding down her cheeks.

“Laurel?” I said. Her eyes met mine in the glass.

“What’s wrong?” Her _expression didn’t change, but more tears slid. I asked Mornay to excuse us and fished out a notepad from my pocket.

“What?” I asked, producing a pen. She refused the implements and wiped her face

“Is the cut okay?” I ventured. She half-smiled and shrugged, as if to say, who cares?

“Is it the pain?” She shrugged again and flicked her hand, clearly wishing I’d forget about it. Then it dawned on me.

“Were you scared? Is that it? Without me here?” She fluttered her eyelids affirmatively. Sorrow flooded my veins. How could I have left her, even for a minute? She was so helpless. The notion struck me like a blow. Helpless? Laurel was 46 years old – not a baby, not elderly – in the thick of it with a seven-year-old and a demanding job and a pile of unread books by her bed. The reassuring ritual of the haircut would not haul her back from the distant planet that disease had rocketed her to. I felt small and useless. Laurel jabbed her thumb toward Mornay, and vigorously hooked it back to point at her head -- a command for him to finish his work.

Laurel’s illness came at a time when our friendship was in flux. The babies weren’t babies anymore; the shared mommy enterprise a more fluid proposition. Downshifting to a lighter, less mutually dependent gear was tricky. More than anything, at a certain point, it was Abe and Anya’s camaraderie that glued us together – Laurel pretty much said so. This made me nuts, but I felt powerless to improve matters, and so did she, apparently. Then, with her diagnosis, just when I was convinced I would fail her once and for all, some kind of grace settled upon us. Communication restored itself; lucid, murk-free, targeted communication. Laurel did not ask for much but she accepted whatever I had to offer. It was a beautiful arrangement. It made me want to give more. Though she did not do all the taking. She never lost interest in news of my life, following up on its particulars each time we met. Often I brought her milkshakes, which for months were all she could eat. Sometimes, when she couldn’t speak and couldn’t eat a thing, I came by for half an hour just to sit and hold her hand. She seemed to like this. Her mind was seething, with matters practical and otherwise. She encountered a Jeff Buckley recording of Leonard Cohen’s stirring, inscrutable “Hallelujah,” and for weeks, she gnawed on the lyrics: I did my best, it wasn't much / I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch / I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you / And even though It all went wrong / I'll stand before the Lord of Song / With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah. She convened a group of friends, including a rabbi, to discuss the song, then invited us back, as if itching to post dispatches from the realm of spiritual wakefulness. An avid secularist, she was surprised but not put out to find herself in that realm.

Laurel was a guide in the last year of her life, inviting others to walk with her as far as they cared to go, pointing out the marvels and monsters along the way. Her hair-raising struggle -- physical, emotional, spiritual -- did not shut her down; on the contrary, it opened her out. She made new friends and immeasurably deepened old ones, even as she prepared to die. She was searingly frank on the subject of her own death, raising the issue long before anyone around her could do so. She wouldn’t force us to dwell on it, but neither would she permit us to promptly avert our gaze. The pact was implicit: She would not give up on life so long as we would not ignore death. She held the two opposing ideas in her mind at once and she did not go crazy. This spectacular feat of balance, of willed sanity, feels oddly commensurate with her chronological age: 46 and dying. The middle years are all about establishing balance, conceding the fact of life’s horizon and tilting, almost imperceptibly, in its direction. The brutal conversion of Laurel’s midlife to its finish seemed to elicit a counterthrust from her, in which she magically summoned the wisdom of all those unlived years, and put it to work.

Frequently, as her condition worsened, I saw Laurel watch Anya enter a room or concentrate on a task. We had long-ago learned to change subjects when the kids barged in, but sometimes Anya caught her mother off guard and Laurel did not have time to rearrange her face. On these occasions Anya seemed irradiated, scorched with meaning as she went about her little-girl activities with Laurel looking on. Sometimes Anya felt her mother’s eyes bore through her.

“What? Why are you staring?” she’d demand. Laurel would shake her head to snap out of it. “You’re beautiful, that’s all,” she’d say with her voice or a pen. Anya would roll her eyes.

More than once Laurel grabbed my sleeve and frantically gestured toward Anya, as if imploring me to do something, anything, about their looming separation.

The day before she died, we sat in her living room. Her breathing was noisy, gurgly – fluid had accumulated in her lungs and infected them. She was taking extra care with something she wanted to say to me. When she finished writing the note she handed it over and watched me read. It asked me to promise that I would always keep Abe in Anya’s life.

“Yes,” I said, “I promise.”

She grabbed me by the collar and brought us nose to nose.

“Are you trying to tell me you mean it?” I asked.

She nodded.

The night Laurel cooked us dinner, a week or two earlier, after she ladled the soup and cut the bread and tossed the salad and poured the wine, then toted her nutrition contraption over to the table and hoisted up her blouse and plugged in the hose to the slot in her midriff; after she shrugged wryly and jotted on her pad: Bon appetit! After I excused myself as casually as I could and fled to the bathroom to reason with my reflection in the mirror that if Laurel could do this then so could I; after I checked on Abe and Anya, who had eaten their dinner earlier and were now curled up together on Josh and Laurel’s bed, mesmerized, watching “The Parent Trap;” after I returned to the table and tasted my soup, which was delicious, and seemed to blaze a trail for more soup to follow; after Jim and Laurel discussed some of the things he’d investigated for her about text-to-voice technology; after Laurel mused on her notepad about the possibility of taking the kids back to Tuscany and renting another villa, as we’d done when they were three; after we cleared the plates and lapsed into silence and said goodnight because we were tired; after we got home and I flung myself into bed, I wondered aloud to Jim:

“What will become of her?”

In a matter of days, we knew.