My mother-in-law undergoes surgery for laryngeal cancer today. It is a radical surgery that will probably result in the loss of her voice. I haven't, until learning that she would need this surgery two weeks ago, thought much about how much a person's voice is bound into our sense of that person's identity, but it is. So often we say "she found her voice" or "she has a strong voice" when we mean that a person has found direction and purpose. We use the word voice to indicate identity or character almost as much as we use the word see to mean "understand."
So today she loses her voice, but I trust not her voice.
My mother-in-law is the most supernaturally patient person I have ever met. Her voice has always reflected this: soft, weathered, concerned. She is a practicing Sikh, an Indian monotheistic faith that teaches, among other things, wise patience with the difficulties of life. It would seem that her whole life has been a preparation for the patient forbearance of cancer and all the suffering it involves. It does not seem possible that anyone could have borne the burden better.
There is no doubt that she would have chosen to let the cancer take its course and face death as patiently and peacefully as she has lived if it had not been for her grandchildren. She feels she owes it to the children in her family to live on. Having lost her own mother when she was very young, she wants her grandchildren to grow up feeling loved. And that is why she will spend 12 hours today under the knife.
This past weekend I spent some time with her, and could not help but think that I would not hear her speak ever again.
Her last words to me? "I cooked you up some catfish so you would have something to eat while I was in the hospital."