Just Because: 'The Iceberg: A Memoir'

A friend who recently lost her husband of several decades to cancer told me of an L.A. Times book review that resonated with her. I don't know whether she will read the book, but there was enough of it in the review, apparently, that she was able to glean some comfort from the way it put into words the reality she'd been suffering all this time. In The Iceberg, author Marion Coutts recounts the last two years of her husband's life, starting just before the moment he tells her that he learned he has a brain tumor that is "very likely malignant." Coutts is English, and this memoir came out in Britain to great acclaim last year. The reviewer, Mary Elizabeth Williams, wonders if it will be received the same way here. "Though it will all but certainly be equally praised here in the U.S.," she writes, "it remains to be seen if American audiences—with our fondness for stories that involve a more kicking of butt and taking of names narrative—will embrace Coutts' Kazuo Ishiguro-like gift for intimacy and restraint."

SECTION 1

1.1

A book about the future must be written in advance. Later I won't have the energy to speak. So I will do it now.
   The others are near. I can touch them, call them to me and they are here. We are all here, Tom, my husband, and Ev, our child. Tom is his real name and Ev is not really called Ev but Ev means him. He is eighteen months old and still so fluid that to identify him is futile. We will all be change by this. He the most.
   The home is the arena for our tri-part drama: the set for everything that occurs in the main. We go out, in fact all the time, yet this is where we are most relaxed. This is the place where you will find us most ourselves.
   Something has happened. A piece of news. We have had a diagnosis that has the status of an event. The news makes a rupture with what went before: clean, complete and total save in one respect. It seems that after the event, the decision we make is to remain. Our unit stands. This alone will not save us but whenever we look, it is the case. The decision is joint and tacit and I am surprised to realise this. Though we talked about countless things—talks is all we ever do—we did not address it directly. So not a decision then, more a mode, arrived at together.
   The news is given verbally. We learn something. We are mortal. You might say you know this but you don't. The news falls neatly between one moment and another. You would not think there was a
gap for such a thing. You would not think there was room. The threat has two aspects: a current fact and an obscure outcome—the manifestation of the fact. The first is immediate and the second talks of duration. The fact has coherent force and nothing, no person or thought or thing, escapes its shift. It is as if a new physical law has been described for us bespoke: absolute as all the others are, yet terrifyingly casual. It is a law of perception. It says, You will lose everything that catches your eye. Under this illumination there is no downtime and no off-gaze. For its duration, looking can never be idle. Seeing is active: it is an action like aiming or hitting.
   Yet afterwards—more strangeness—we carry on in many ways as before, but crosswise to what might be expected, we are not plunged into night. It is still day, but the light is unnatural. The glare on daily life is blinding. Everything is equally illumined, without shade.
   These are early days. Our house becomes porous. I am high and bleached and whited out. We are air and the walls are air. On hearing the news, our instinct is to tell it. Once known it cannot be unlearned; once told, not rescinded. So we start to speak, and the family, we three, are dissolved in fluid and drunk up by others. People appear, they come and go. They are always on hand. Ev is in his element and we are in ours. As I say, these are early days. Maybe it will always be like this.
   ...