Marion Coutts recalls the last months of her husband, art critic Tom Lubbock, after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Excerpted from Coutt’s memoir The Iceberg:
Fast forward to February. The future has arrived early. Tom has a severe fit in the small hours of the morning. He had gone away by himself to get some writing done in a house by the sea and was due home today. It is evening, he is back with us, lying down quietly upstairs. He can talk after a fashion, read a little but he can’t write. He is estranged from himself.
Spring. There is going to be destruction: the obliteration of a person, his intellect, his experience and his agency. I am to watch it. This is my part. It is now March. In one week, Tom will have another scan. This is the one to fear. There have not been so many fits, but outside them complexity is multiplying and thousands of lesser confusions also occur. Words slip out, switches are stumbled over and substitutions made.
