Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese REVIEW
“I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest.” – Hippocratic Oath
There are, no doubt, multiple layers to the meaning of this
novel’s title. The main characters are all named Stone (Thomas, Marion and
Shiva Stone) but the title seems to really be rooted in a line from the
Hippocratic Oath. Its meaning at the time it was written was pretty simple; The
physician taking the oath was promising to leave surgery to surgeons. He was
promising not to try something he was not trained to do even if the patient
needed the service. It is interesting that Abraham Verghese is a surgeon who
has taken up the practice of writing. And it may well be that he understands
that surgeons cannot heal what only story tellers can heal. “Yes, I have infinite faith in the craft of surgery,” the novel’s
narrator says at one point in the book,
“but no surgeon can heal the kind of wound that divides two brothers. Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed.”
In a sense, Verghese is “cutting for stone” himself – making the attempt to heal someone’s pain through story rather than through surgery. And it may well be that the “someone” whose pain he is trying to heal is his own. Early in the novel the narrator, Marion Stone, writes,
“WE COME UNBIDDEN into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot. I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound.”
I know from my own experiences of autobiographical writing that the attempt usually both heals and wounds. Ironically, the main characters in this novel, all doctors, all wound themselves or others in their attempt to heal others or themselves. We are constantly confronted with this reality that in life we often bring about healing and hurt no matter how much we try to avoid the later. Explanations of how this happens in the novel would all be plot spoiling contaminations of your reading.
I confess, there are moments while reading this novel where I could feel the pain of my own life’s memories being brought to the surface. And yet always there is the voice of comfort. Under the pain of Veghese’s depiction of suffering - physical, emotional, spiritual – is the background music of grace, whispered in the ear healing, forgiving, redeeming. Patients are healed. Broken relationships are made whole (between Marion and his father, Marion and his brother, Marion and Genet, Ghosh and Thomas Stone, Hema and the same, and even between the living and the dead.) "Forgiveness works through our ongoing willingness to give up certain claims against one another,” says L. Gregory Jones, “to give gifts of ourselves by making innovative gestures that offer a future not bound by the past." Cutting for Stone is a story of deep emotional injuries forgiven.
“I am forced to render some order to the events of my life, to say it began here, and then because of this, that happened, and this is how the end connects to the beginning, and so here I am,” says the narrarator (and we assume, Veghese),
“Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.”
Each of the characters in Cutting for Stone comes to realize how they have been blind to something, and have caused pain to themselves and others by being so. Healing comes when we learn to forgive ourselves and others for not being omniscient in our youth, or even wise, or even something less than stupid. Thomas Stone realizes but too late that a life that tries to replace love with work is a mistake for example. Leaving his children was a mistake. Genet, Shiva, all look back with regret. The only people who don’t are the people who “wake up” in time. But no one is so lucky that they do not live blindly for some period of time. The characters of the novel speak with one voice when they encourage us all to see what is important sooner than they did:
To see that one has a purpose:
“No, Marion,” she said, her gaze soft, reaching for me, her gnarled hands rough on my cheeks. “No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.”
To see that we were made with a need for others as well as God:
“What she couldn’t bear was the feeling that something vital had been plucked out and uprooted from her chest when he walked away. She’d wanted to cling to him, to cry out to him not to leave. She had thought her life in the service of the Lord was complete. There was, she saw now, a void in her life that she’d never known existed.”
To see that we have a need to leave part of ourselves to carry on when we die:
“As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled. She was ashamed that such a simple insight should have eluded her all these years. Make something beautiful of your life. Wasn’t that the adage Sister Mary Joseph Praise lived by? Hema’s second thought was that she, deliverer of countless babies, she who’d rejected the kind of marriage her parents wanted for her, she who felt there were too many children in the world and felt no pressure to add to that number, understood for the first time that having a child was about cheating death. Children were the foot wedged in the closing door, the glimmer of hope that in reincarnation there would be some house to go to, even if one came back as a dog, or a mouse, or a flea that lived on the bodies of men.”
To see that none of us can live out another’s life:
“The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”
To see that every moment of our lives is either significant or has the capacity to be:
“If I hadn’t come to America. If I hadn’t seen Tsige. If I hadn’t opened the door for Genet . . . The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.”
What this book celebrates most is the character trait of attention. Its heroes are the people who see actual people and not “patients” as repositories of illness to be cured. It’s heroes are people who wake up to what their wiser selves are trying to tell them.
“At times it seemed to her they were so focused on disease that patients and suffering were incidental to their work. Thomas Stone was different.”
Cutting For Stone asks us all to be wiser – to realize how powerful is our capacity to harm and heal with our words and actions and to take our responsibility as “surgeons” so armed seriously.
Question for Comment:
“When you look around Addis and see children barefoot and shivering in the rain, when you see the lepers begging for their next morsel, does any of that Monophysitic nonsense matter the least bit?” Matron leaned her head on the windowpane. “God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by”—her voice broke as she thought of Sister Mary Joseph Praise—“by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”
“But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”
How have you contributed to the volume
of brokenness in the world (whether trying to or not) and what are you doing to
bring healing to that volume of brokenness? What brokenness are you leaving to
another generation and in what ways are you empowering the people in your life
to be better healers of that collective human woundedness? In what ways are you still a broken person and where do you expect healing to come from?
Comments