When your husband is dying from a high-grade brain cancer that is stealing his language as well as the living he derives from it, and your toddler is grasping words in greedy mouthfuls and starting to build meaning from them, what happens? You don’t lose your own powers of expression—well, that’s if Marion Coutts’ memoir, The Iceberg, is anything to go by. Hers soar.
As Coutts watches chunks of Tom Lubbock’s vocabulary crack and fall—and feels the shock waves that come from knowing she is losing her beloved companion—she puts aside her profession as a visual artist and picks up her pen.
The result is a sonorous and unflinching account of the two-and-a-half years it took Lubbock to go from his diagnosis with glioblastoma multiforme to death.
Lubbock was chief art critic for the Independent newspaper for many years. He kept working as a critic for as long as he could. At first he wrote on his own and, later, with the help of others. The work was agonisingly slow, at times, due to his loss of fluency.
Lubbock also wrote his own account of living with a brain tumour published in The Guardian and in his book Until Further Notice, I am Alive.
‘It is a permanent mystery how we summon up a word,’ he wrote in The Guardian. ‘Where are these connections located in the mind? How do we know how we do it and get it right? This mystery only becomes evident when our ability to summon up our words fails.’
Coutts details her husband’s incremental and dramatic decline—describing the seizures and dissecting the stresses the couple face with scalpel-like precision.
Even as she recounts the simplest exchange with their son it’s enough to unsettle me.
‘This morning Ev is making nonsense noises in our bed. Does Dad need pills because he gets his words muddled? Yes. Is that you trying to muddle your words, Ev? No. I am making bubble noises.’
Is it because she doesn’t milk the moment that it gets to me? Anyway, it lands with a thud in my guts. Other descriptions have me in tears or take my breath away due to their accuracy and profound significance.
Here’s one.
‘His vocabulary is filleted. The lapses may be temporary. After a time he can track them down but they are no longer to hand. As I write—no longer to hand—the words are to hand. I know what they are. I know what they mean without thinking about them. I know what order they go in and how to spell them. I know that I can use the phrase to hand without referring literally to my own hand. This is no longer his experience.’
One thing we learn from this memoir is that having a terminal disease and dying (and caring for someone who has a terminal disease and is dying) takes Herculean energy and endless reservoirs of emotional resilience.
‘Tom is months into chemo. He sleeps as a man drugged, but when awake he works and his work goes slower but with great clarity. Not less than normal. Not more than normal. The same. Exhaustion blankets the house. We are always between scans, the one past and the one to come.’
What we see is Coutts’ instinctual focus on survival.
‘At one stroke my ambition has gone private and it has a single goal: to keep us as a family alive so that our formation can continue.’
We also see how driven she is to keep, and to deepen, her connection with her husband—even as conversation is stripped away from them.
‘What else is there apart from language? Let me list: music, touch, the great inter-cosmos of the eyes, running and jumping, sex, cooking, friendship, eating. There must be other things but I have come to a stop. It’s a short list. We will devise another language and in it we will talk.’
The Iceberg won this year’s Wellcome book prize—an award that celebrates fiction and non-fiction that engages with medicine, health or illness. So, don’t be surprised if Coutts’ honesty slices into your deepest fears and puts a specimen or two under the microscope.
Marvel, too, at how skilfully she draws to the surface what often lies submerged.
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