Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [96]
From where we stood, it didn’t look real; set against a murky, polluted sky, the marble shone brilliantly, and the image was reflected in the long, rectangular ponds before it. Most people, when seeing pictures of the Taj Mahal (which means “Crown Palace”), believe it’s constructed of white, unadorned marble; only up close does the detail of each marble block become vivid. Like the Hall of Mirrors—only on a much larger and grander scale—the Taj Mahal is adorned with precious and semiprecious stones, inlaid in the shapes of flowers and vines. After taking pictures, we made the walk to the monument itself and studied the ornamental facade.
“Now that’s a lot of marble,” Micah offered succinctly.
We spent a little more than an hour at the Taj Mahal, which surprisingly sufficed. The Taj, after all, is a crypt; there is not much inside other than the small room where Mumtaz and eventually Shah Jahan were buried, and most attention is directed to the detail of the marble blocks used in the construction. And it is amazing; yet, because the Taj had been built with such mathematical precision, the artistry seemed curiously uninspiring. If you found a design on one side, the exact same design was mechanically replicated on the opposite side. While a marvel of construction, it was strangely repetitious.
Both Micah and I were fascinated by the fact that the son had imprisoned the father and never let him set foot in the Taj Mahal—the crypt of his own mother—during the last years of Shah Jahan’s life.
“You see,” Micah said, with a knowing nod. “That’s exactly what I was talking about. Dad was a lot better father than old Shah Jahan must have been. His kid hated him.”
I nodded in agreement. And yet, as I stared up at the massive monument to Mumtaz, I found myself thinking not about my father, but about my sister.
In January 1993, less than three weeks after I moved to North Carolina, I was back in California.
Right after the new year, my sister had gone to see a new physician; he had ordered a new MRI from a different hospital. MRI scanning machines, at that time, were undergoing rapid technological change, and the newer machines were able to provide images that their predecessors were not. Dana’s image, we were told, had been taken on a dated machine; a new image might provide the answers.
She lay on the bed, put earplugs in, and was rolled into the machine. The machine makes loud clanking noises—like someone banging a pan with a spoon—and within a few hours the scans were ready. And there, plain as day, was something that wasn’t supposed to be there. Dana, we learned, had a brain tumor.
She was scheduled for immediate surgery at UC San Francisco, and I flew out to join Micah and my dad. In the hotel the night before, Micah and I tried to keep the mood upbeat, but my dad was extremely tense throughout the evening. It was only when Micah and I were alone that we felt comfortable enough to talk about our own fears and worries.
Our sister, our younger sister, had a brain tumor. As if losing our mother hadn’t been hard enough, we now had to confront this.
The surgery was scheduled for early in the morning and we brought Dana to the hospital a little before seven. Because of tight schedules, however, the surgery didn’t begin until nearly noon, making the day one of the longest in our lives. It wasn’t until after 7:00 P.M. that the doctor came to talk to us.
He told us the surgery had gone well and that they’d removed as much of the tumor as they could. It hadn’t been possible to remove it all. Parts of the tumor had spread to areas deep within her brain and other parts were intertwined with areas of the brain that performed vital functions. To have removed every speck of the tumor, the doctor informed us, would have left Dana in a vegetative state.
It took a long time for the doctor to explain Dana’s condition to us in a way that we’d eventually understand.