Cutting for Stone

by Abraham Verghese

I learned that St. Teresa’s recurrent vision of the angel was called the transverberation, which the dictionary said was the soul “inflamed” by the love of God, and the heart “pierced” by divine love; the metaphors of her faith were also the metaphors of medicine.

FORTY-SIX AND FOUR YEARS have passed since my birth, and miraculously I have the opportunity to return to that room.

But chair, cardigan, and calendar print of transverberation are still there. I, Marion Stone, have changed, but little else has.

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.

“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.”

Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine. And so I became a surgeon.

My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I have the deepest respect, says, “The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do.”

On one occasion with a patient in grave peril, I begged my father to operate.

I followed. “Dr. Stone,” I said, using his title though I longed to cry out, Father! “An operation is his only chance,” I said. In my heart I knew the chance was infinitesimally small, and the first whiff of anesthesia might end it all. My father put his hand on my shoulder. He spoke to me gently, as if to a junior colleague rather than his son. “Marion, remember the Eleventh Commandment,” he said. “Thou shall not operate on the day of a patient’s death.”

This quote comes early in the book though it is part of the conversation near the end of the story when Marion tries to persuade Stone to operate to save the life of Shiva, dying with a brain bleed after he had survived the surgery where he donated part of his liver to save Marion's life.

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.

my twin brother, Shiva—Dr. Shiva Praise Stone—to

We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

Destiny has brought me back to the precise coordinates of my birth, to the very same operating theater where I was born. My gloved hands share the space above the table in Operating Theater 3 that my mother and father’s hands once occupied.

What I owe Shiva most is this: to tell the story. It is one my mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, did not reveal and my fearless father, Thomas Stone, ran from, and which I had to piece together.

She felt pity for Saintly Amma, whose dream of enlightenment for Africa was vanity that cost Anjali’s life.

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.

Make something beautiful of your life. Wasn’t that the adage Sister Mary Joseph Praise lived by?

“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.”

Harris is a US donor to the Missing hospital. Later, he makes connections for both Stone and eventually Marion in the US.

My mother was dead, and my father a ghost; increasingly I felt disconnected from Shiva and Hema, and guilty for feeling that way. Ghosh, in giving me the stethoscope, was saying, Marion, you can be you. It’s okay. He invited me to a world that wasn’t secret, but it was well hidden. You needed a guide.

You see, your father was a real surgeon. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone better.”

My brother, who once spoke with anklets and whose dance could be as complex as a honeybee’s, didn’t know he would dedicate his life to just such women, the outcasts of society; he

That was Shiva: he hated ambiguity, and he wanted things cut and dried.

I marveled at his gift for distancing himself from what was going on by dancing, or by drawing the motorcycle, or playing with prime numbers. He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him; I was envious.

The old man was right. The slippers in the story mean that everything you see and do and touch, every seed you sow, or don’t sow, becomes part of your destiny

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.”

My genius was to know long ago that money alone wouldn’t make me happy. Or maybe that’s my excuse for not leaving you a huge fortune!

Ghosh to Marion when Ghosh was dying.

To be a good surgeon, you need to commit to being a good surgeon. It’s as simple as that. You need to be meticulous in the small things, not just in the operating room, but outside. A good surgeon would want to redo this knot. You’re going to tie thousands of knots in your lifetime. If you tie each one as well as humanly possible, you’ll experience fewer complications.

The big things in surgery depend on the little things.”

That’s the funny thing about America—the blessed thing. As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others. I’ve had my share of angels. Popsy was one of those.”

This was my first good look at my father.

When he goes to hear Stone speak at the Boston hospital

No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.

The surgical persona was something he had crafted to protect himself. But what he had created was a prison. Anytime he strayed from the professional to the personal, he knew what to expect: pain.

Describing his father, Stone

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

WHEN I REACHED MY QUARTERS, I sat down and spread the letter on my lap, and with shaky hands I dialed Thomas Stone’s number. My father was well past eighty now, an emeritus professor. Deepak said the old man’s eyes were fading, but his touch was so good he could have operated in the dark.

End of the book. Marion has found the long-missing letter from his mother to Stone. It tells of her love for him. Stone apparently never saw the letter. Ghosh had passed it on to Marion who only discovered in the back of old faded St.Teresa poster after he was back in Africa over 25 years later. Then, he calls Stone.