Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [44]
“Ayoh, what is this?” she said, cutting him off, her eyes round with alarm, brows shooting up and her mouth a perfect O. She pointed at the bloody trephine and the open textbook resting by Sister Mary Joseph Praise's belly. “Books and whatnots?” She swiped them aside, and they clattered to the floor, the sound reverberating off the walls.
The probationer's heart hammered against her breast like a moth in a lamp. Not knowing where to put her hands, she stuffed them in her pockets. She reassured herself that she had no part in the books and whatnots. Her failure (and she was beginning to see this) was a failure of Sound Nursing Sense; she'd missed the gravity of Sister Mary Joseph Praise's condition when she delivered Stone's message. She'd assumed that others would look in on Sister Mary Joseph Praise. No one had been aware that Sister Mary Joseph Praise was that ill, and no one had told Matron.
SISTER MARY JOSEPH PRAISE moved her head, and Matron believed that she was at least transiently aware that Matron held her hand. But so relentless was her pain that Sister couldn't acknowledge Matron's kindness.
In his hands I saw a large golden spear and at its iron tip there seemed to be a point of fire.
Matron's guess from the fragments she could understand was that Sister Mary Joseph Praise's mumbled words were perhaps the words of St. Teresa that they both knew so well.
I felt as if he plunged it into my heart several times, so that it penetrated all the way to my entrails. When he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out, and left me inflamed with a great love for God. The pain was so severe, it made me moan several times. The sweetness of this intense pain is so extreme, there is no wanting it to end, and the soul is not satisfied with anything less than God.
But unlike St. Teresa of Avila, Sister Mary Joseph Praise surely did want the pain to end, and just then, Matron said, the pain seemed to loosen its grip on her belly, and Sister sighed and clearly said, “I marvel, Lord, at your mercy. It is not something I deserve.”
A brief period of lucidity with roving eye movements followed, along with more attempts at speech, but it was unintelligible. Light splashed into the room, and Matron said it was as if a shroud that had formed in front of her face melted away. In that moment, as Sister Mary Joseph Praise looked around OT3—her operating theater for all these years— Matron thought the young nun realized that she was now the patient to be operated on and that the odds were against her.
“Perhaps she felt she deserved to die,” Matron said, guessing at my mother's thoughts. “If faith and grace were meant to balance the sinful nature of all humans, hers had been insufficient, and so what she felt was shame. Still she must have believed, even with all her imperfections, that God loved her and forgiveness awaited her in His abode, if not on earth.”
Matron wondered if it scared my mother that she might die in Africa, a continent away from her birthplace. Perhaps deep in her— perhaps deep in every being—there lingers a desire to bring the circle of life back to its starting point, which in her case was Cochin.
Then Matron heard my mother clearly whisper “Miserere mei, Deus” before sound left her. Matron carried her through the rest of the psalm in Latin, serving as her voice box while Sister Mary Joseph Praise's lips moved: “… Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me … Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow …”
When she finished, Matron said the shroud was back. The light was slipping away from her world.
“PICK UP THE STOOL, Stone,” Hema barked. “And you,” Hema said, snapping her fingers at