#cancer

Life can only be understood backwards…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Kierkegaard wrote that famous line, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” This is the story of my life, and probably of yours, too. I’m a few weeks shy of a year away from the last chemo session. During those hours of infusion, I dozed, watching cardinals and house wrens through the cancer center window. That night, I slept profoundly, believing done, done, not yet realizing an excruciating surgery would lear up unavoidably a month later, that I would phone my siblings and beg for their arrival, that I needed fresh horses, the calvary’s arrival, that the end to these months of cancer treatment seemed impossible.

A year later, I’m still here, living forward, still waking before dawn to reckon what kind of light might kindle the day. A year ago, I could hardly lift my laptop. Now, I text a friend to borrow a belt sander. I am determined to lean my shoulders and back into revitalizing this old wooden floor that had been hidden for years beneath vinyl.

Cancer reshaped me in multiple ways, diluted my rage, cushioned my prickliness, whetted my fierceness to entertain no truck with catty foolishness. Disease fed my solitude and forced me to reach out and grasp hands. And now a sander.

A friend recorded Vermont’s poet laureate Bianca Stone speaking about Robert Frost. The recording is up for a few weeks on the local radio station, WGDR, on the March 22 Bon Mot show; it will feed your heart.

And one of my favorite Frost poems:

Into My Own

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom. 

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true.

Knock it down, revise your life.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

March, northern Vermont, the long dragged-out amorphousness where winter drags its slushy sulkiness into sodden spring. I long for a few hours of blistering sun. This season was the weather my mother despised most, all those New Hampshire years of my childhood. One afternoon, she pulled over on a back road and instructed my siblings and me to run through a farmer’s soaked pasture, patchily emerged from a winter of snow, and head for the woods at the far end. We did not know who owned the field and argued. Go, she insisted, go. You kids need to run. So we ran.

My novel, Call It Madness, which will be out in at the end of June, in a month when I intend to swim, is about the unvarnished craziness of family, of fiercely knotted threads of desire and thwarted passion, how the stories that shape and mold our lives are buried generationally. The novel is not about my mother, but it’s for my mother, the woman now dead nearly two years. She was mercurial, passionate about love and destruction. In the long-beyond-time stretch of recent cancer treatments, those endless months on the couch, I often thought of her; she was the only family member who had endured the triple violence of cancer-and-chemotherapy-and-surgery, sheer survival tenuous as a snowdrop. My mother surprised me until the very end of her life, the whole range of the unexpected, from sorrow to contentment. As her youngest daughter, how little I knew her, and yet I carry her with me, in my own might and fallibility.

In these months of remission, I’ve learned from yoga that inquiry is a force, a variation of that impossible Socratic dictum, know thyself. Healing, I plot a venture into transforming my kitchen, my home’s heart, and hire a carpenter to take down a wall, open an exterior wall with windows. Am I crazy, I wonder. At the edges at least of madness, recklessly heady with survival, with the raw knowledge of mortality clenched in one fist.

When the vinyl flooring is ripped up, the carpenter and I ponder the hardwood boards, stained and blackened and scraped. The lives of previous occupants rises like mist, mesmerizing, unknowable. What remains are their scars. My cat and I sit on the dusty floor and share a bowl of arugula. Wet snow slides from the roof in the flowerbeds. I planted the gold compass flowers. Who planted the pink roses I’ll never know.

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house…

Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. — Robert Frost, “Directive”

Under the kitchen vinyl.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

While the radio carries in terrible news, the carpenter tears off the vinyl on my kitchen floor. I run my hands over the worn maple boards that are revealed to the daylight again. In one corner, a rotten board where perhaps the sink leaked. The carpenter cut out those pieces, and I look down at the basement’s graveled floor. In another corner, there’s a blackened place where perhaps a woodstove once charred the flooring. He and I stand there, considering, wondering about who once lived in this house. I wonder about their patterns of heat and sustenance, these people who passed from this world, decades ago.

When the carpenter leaves, I vacuum, then sit on the cold floor while the cats sniff curiously. I rub my hands over these boards bruised from living and speculate that I can sand and polish this small space, quicken it again.

I began this project with a desire to take down a wall, open a room, and chase away the dismal memories of illness, to acknowledge that, indeed, this is the house where cancer devoured my body, tore at my flesh and mind. I survived. To continue surviving, I must revise my life, change my patterns of living.

I know a few of the names of the people who lived in this house on a village hillside. Now, barefoot on these cold hard-worn floorboards, I sense the mysterious stream of connection that runs between the dead and myself and those who will someday live here, when I have moved on myself, to other earthly or unearthly places. Who laid this floor I’ll never know, but I’ll put my hands and my muscle to it, lend my energy towards restorative beauty, towards the scantness I can do.

I am beginning to understand that healing is not about returning to what was, but about accepting the change and adapting to the brokenness. This is happening all around us, for people, for the land. People have done damage to the earth and to each other that can’t be undone. We can lament what was, but that won’t help us take care of what we still have. In fact, it might just hold us back. Nature herself keeps giving and never giving up. ~ Helen Whybrow. The Salt Stones

Mired in fog.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

I hole up for the weekend reading Wallace Stegner, a pastoral novel about friendship and mortality, about the pre-internet world when complicated events unraveled perhaps not more kindly but more slowly. Vermont March is the season of live-or-die, the fits and starts of spring, jagged with driving ice, whirling snow, delirious sun.

I drive home from a dinner out in a fog so thick that the car before me pulls off, turns on flashers, and maybe simply intends to wait it out. It’s not late, but there’s no one else out, the wind throwing twigs at my windshield, the radio jingling Lou Reed. I’ve not driven in a fog so profound since I was in my twenties, living in the wooded spine of the Green Mountains, in the years when I was brash with youth and amor. The edges of the road vanish. I pull over at the spring with its pipe where people gather water, and I stand just outside the beam of my headlights, the nearby stream gushing against what remains of its winter ice. I surely can’t stay here for the night, shivering, on the edge of my own mad solitude. The way back, the way forward, all around: pathless, and surely a metaphor for this time.

I’m still shaken to the core by lymphoma, by chemo, by the surgeons who sliced me open and removed those physical scars so I might live. I’m here for this moment, flesh over my slender shoulders, my now bony hips that once carried two babies, and flesh—well, so easily ruined. I spent most of last March in one ED or hospital room or another. While the world spun on, I leaned into treatment, propped up by dear ones, who ferried me to remission.

Now, shivering, nearly blind with fog, I turn off my car and the headlights. The fog wraps around me. I drink it in.

“In the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas, Jesus says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.” — Andrew Solomon

Knock down a wall, survive for a bit

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The advance copies of my novel that will be published at the end of June, Call It Madness, sprinkle out into the world. I print postcards and mail those, too. Email me your mailing address (brettstanciu@gmail.com), and I’ll drop a postcard. The novel will be published June 30, and summer events slowly add up. I imagine sultry July, steamy August, spaghetti strip sundress, tumblers of ice water.

The novel is divided into sections of place: an apartment, a pantry where the protagonist Avah hides, the roadside Blue Lion Motel where Avah tracks down her mother, and Echo Lake—a great gossamer spill, a fat layer of ice…

Places define us. Unbelievably, I am now nearly a year out from chemo. All that long last winter I huddled on my couch, too sick to feed my own woodstove, I kept thinking, I think the kitchen wall removed. I want the small rooms of this old house opened. Now, a year later, holding what will be forever-fatigue in one hand and my strengthening return to health and merriment in the other, I hire a carpenter to remove a wall of early 20th century two by fours and lathe. I return to my dusty and torn-up house in the late afternoon, step in, and think, This is how the house is meant to be.

With the mind of a novelist, I wonder at the calculus of human decision-making: the mixture of numbers, of cost and house value, a stacked rationality. Take that arithmetic, and add to it my fierce desire to re-imagine my future where my garden bounty of jalapeños and garlic meets kitchen cleaver, where I revise another book at my kitchen table, where illness is swept from my house by the spring wind rushing through the open windows, smudging my rooms with the fecund scent of mud, the castanet jingles of mating frogs.

Vermont spring: thaw, fresh snow this morning, stove ashes sprinkled on the icy paths, robins. All the things.

“Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.” — Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

Vermont Town Meeting Day, Mud.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I live in a village with a single blinking yellow light at its intersection. In all those multiple trips to Dartmouth for consultation, treatment, medication, we drove out of town, over the hills, along the Connecticut River, all the way to the Hanover, New Hampshire exit. There, a traffic light greeted us.

For a few months, the village will be rerouted through temporary lights while a crew rebuilds walls to keep the town out of the river and replace a footbridge over the river. For drivers, something to complain about. For walkers, a point of interest.

On town meeting day, in the historic town house, a day of voting, hot emotions, decisions of material import. A school budget voted down.

March is the season of fluctuation between mud and ice. One afternoon, the blowing snow drives bitterly into my eyes; I huddle in my coat. The next afternoon, I tie my coat around my waist, let the breeze push through my hair.

The sun beams with real heat. The earth reveals her immense size. Meanwhile, the humans, with all our passion and fury. I seek both the companionship of people around me — how dearly I treasure this, more and more — and seek solace in solitude, in the chitter of chickadees, the clouds rushing over the sky, the full moon hung over a forested ridgeline, gleaming.

“What I like most about Buddhism really is its fearlessness. So much of what warps people is fear of death and fear of impermanence. So much of what we do is simply strategies to try and hold back death, trying to buy time with material things. So at its best Buddhism provides people with a way of seeing their own frailty: you need less in the way of material objects and fortresses around yourself.”
― Gary Snyder