It’s not every day you get to have breakfast with one of your favorite authors, but Boca magazine did today when I attended MorseLife Health System’s 16th Literary Society Series “Breakfast with the Authors” at The Colony Hotel in Palm Beach. Today the featured author Abraham Verghese, who wrote Cutting For Stone, and The Covenant of Water, two novels that have solidified his status as a master story teller of our time, merging the worlds of medicine and history and literature to craft books that became best sellers, and are also very fine pieces of work.
Verghese, born in India and raised in Ethiopia, is a doctor who specializes in infectious diseases and also founded The Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in 2002, with a focus described as “developing medical humanities as a way to preserve doctors’ innate empathy and sensitivities.” He is now a tenured professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, but the emphasis on the patient experience and a patient-doctor connection, is paramount.
This approach to medicine, to connection and to empathy, may help explain his warm and forgiving tales of family and secrets and overcoming tragedy. Verghese began his talk with a quote from Napoleon that “Geography is destiny” by way of explaining why his books are based first, in Ethiopia, where he was raised (Cutting For Stone) and then in Kerala, India (The Covenant of Water) where he was born. As described by the MorseLife event announcement, The Covenant of Water “begins in 1900, as a 12-year-old girl in what is now the state of Kerala, in southwest India, prepares for an unwanted arranged marriage. It ends in 1977 when that girl’s physician granddaughter arrives at a shocking discovery. The book chronicles so many tragedies in a tone that never deviates from hope. Verghese takes his time to reveal how everything, like the waterways there, is connected and eventually flows together.”
Verghese also spoke to how this book was sourced from a manuscript his mother created over time of all the childhood anecdotes she could remember. He concluded early on in the narrative that “Unavoidably, the story must be about families.” And secrets, of course, which wind their way throughout the book.
Verghese decided to become a writer after his experience treating AIDS patients and hearing their stories in Tennessee. He was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop and that’s when it all began. In terms of medicine, a stint at a county hospital on El Paso, Texas, for 11 years was invaluable. “I learned more there than anywhere else,” he said. And he felt as if he’d made “a palpable difference” in the lives he touched there.
There was more, of course. He read two passages from Covenant, including one detailing the primary three rules of matchmaking from the words of the character Broker Aniyan. This rules are: 1) Set a date, 2) There are no impediments (to any match) and 3), Look for character, not beauty. This is how two people make a lasting connection, the broker says.
And connection is clearly something Verghese knows something about.
MorseLife recently celebrated its 40th anniversary milestone and is embarking on a 40th anniversary campaign that was announced on December 15. The nonprofit remains devoted to its mission to improve the lives of seniors through innovative and compassionate health care, housing and supportive services. As a charitable, not-for-profit organization, its programs include independent and assisted living, short-term rehabilitation, memory long-term term care, private and skilled home health care, Hospice, palliative care, meals-on-wheels, Cannabis-based therapies, care management and counseling, homebound Mitzvah program, MorseLife Foundation and PACE – Program for All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly, which touches the lives of 3,600 seniors each day.
Attendance at the breakfast with authors series is by invitation only when joining MorseLife’s Annual Giving Society. For more information about MorseLife Health System or the Literary Society Series, visit www.morselife.org, email events@morselife.org or call 561.242.4661.
