Bluebird, possibly…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 19 Comments

Balminess for April – or maybe it’s just me, happy to be walking, walking, heading out on the path where I once walked nearly every day. I trek through the cemetery; I have friends who shun this space, but I’ve lived near cemeteries for years, with their hidden and true stories. At the top, the grass is all brown, not a hint of spring green yet. A bluebird flies by. I stop, mesmerized. I’ve seen so few bluebirds in Vermont. Could this be a bluebird? I follow the creature as it lands from stone to stone, then darts into an apple tree. A little breeze kicks up. Sunlight spikes through the clouds. Abruptly, I’m ecstatic, as if a magical wind whooshes around me. I might as well be in Portugal or Spain, some country I long to visit, but I’m here, in April-brown Hardwick, Vermont, completely happy.

And for the very first time, I have faith I will survive this cancer, that in fact I am surviving this cancer, that my life will go on in mundane and marvelous ways. I’m meant to be here.

Thank you to those who generously donated to my daughter’s participation in Dartmouth Cancer Center‘s annual fundraiser. I’m beyond touched.

Bluebird
Charles Bukowski

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you….

A fluttering stir like a fledgling first stretching its wings…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

On my way home (again) from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, I’m at a pharmacy, picking up prescriptions. The one I really want – the pain meds – is apparently not available, simply not stocked, which surprises the heck out of me. It’s a common opioid. In my brother’s car, I phone Dartmouth, miraculously reach a nurse who sorts out my problem swiftly. My brother drives down the road, where another pharmacy tells me I’ll need to wait.

In a dusty midafternoon sunlight, I take him on a downtown tour of Barre, around the courthouse where I spent so many hours. I point out the window where I stared at the chickadees in the crabapple trees. We keep going and walk around the Civic Center where my daughter and I went to basketball games. The lot is empty, dirty with winter sand. We talk for a bit about these neighborhoods and where we grew up, our mutual interest and speculation in local history, how towns rise and diminish.

In the Walgreens parking lot again, I pull up my sleeve. Where a nurse recently pulled out an IV, the band-aid is soaked. I show it to my brother. “Don’t touch,” he tells me, as I wince, creeped out. “We’ll clean it when I get you home.”

That blood-soaked band-aid, in a filthy parking lot, feeling beat down to hell and just wanting to head home, wash off the hospital reek and nuzzle a cat, but waiting for pain meds… is a sliver of cancer. In Walgreens, they’ve received my prescription. The pharmacist asks me if this is going to be an ongoing thing or what.

Hello, I think. I am clearly a cancer patient, with my scalp wrapped in a sparkly scarf and my eyes underscored by lines. The backs of my hands are red-dotted with red needle sticks from blood draws. My fingernails are broken by chemo. But there’s enough of me, yet, to lay into the pharmacist and both get my prescription and make him apologize. I know the deal about opioids. I’ve published a book that included Walgreens’ role in the devastating opioid crisis. Nonetheless, I’m determined to get my 21 pills, and I’ll send family back for the remaining allotted 21 pills, and I’m darn grateful for that. This, I tell him, is getting me to the finish line. And I’m going to get there.

I ante up my $4 copay, and then my brother drives north, over the Winooski River, where I happily point out the first spill I’ve seen of coltsfoot this year.

Later, at home again and opening my email, I’m gratified to read that my essay “Red Devil, Survivor Herself,” has been accepted for publication this April, my way of rowing against disease. A line from the essay reads: “Here’s a lesser known side effect of my chemo mixture, cisplatin: lying in bed, a whooshing revolved in my left ear, a fluttering stir like a fledgling first stretching its wings.”

Last, if anyone is so inclined, my youngest has signed up to walk in Dartmouth’s Cancer Center‘s annual fundraiser. Many thanks again, all, for reading my words. Happy April, wherever you may be.

From Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, my hospital read:

And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

An umbrella walks past…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

File this week under “the best-laid plans of mice and men go oft astray,” or, just because I desire something has no factual bearing on reality. (Is there a message for national politics here?)

My sixth and infusion has been delayed, as I’m admitted, again, at Dartmouth-Hitchcock. Two days before that scheduled infusion, I woke around 11 at night and phoned my older daughter who was just getting into bed. I said, “You’ll have to take me back to Dartmouth again.”

In a thick fog, she drove my mother’s blue Subaru down the interstate along the wide river, with sparse traffic and scant words from me. In the ER, late, late, we’re taken into a room, and the usual questions and IV and meds began. The nurse remembered me from my previous visits. In a rocking glider, my daughter slept a bit while I wondered at the light’s hue: amber, or tinged with orange, like heating lamp mixed with a gentle reading light.

Eventually, awake for over 24 hours, my daughter heads home to sleep. My oncologist appears and reassures me. “You’re getting there. A few days later, but getting there.” Our conversation drifts into where I’m heading in this new phase of disease – recovery, oh say that word again, recovery. What will this mean for me, and how will my life change? We talk a little about trust, and he mentions that, once trust is broken, it’s nearly impossible to mend that damage, a fine thing ruined.

So here I am, in yet another bend of this journey, learning patience, learning something more along the tenor of faith, that whatever is not within my sphere of influence is not mine to alter, such as these days here.

April. My younger daughter brings me blooming hyacinths and bulbs in a glass vase. The doctors talk with me about Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and if the federal funding for Vermont’s interlibrary loan system is jeopardized. I tug at the strings of normalcy coming my way: a nurse’s trip to Des Moines a few springs ago and the city’s tulip beds; a friend’s email about dropping a car at airport for her husband; another friend reads Mary Oliver and sends me recordings; will my cat sitter eat whatever I’ve left in the fridge? Small things that stitch our lives together.

Spring rain:

telling stories,

a straw coat and umbrella walk past

~ Yosa Buson

Backaches and all.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

Snow returns to Vermont; I remember an April 1st years ago when the snow fell so mightily our sugarhouse was hidden. I worried our toddler might get lost in the drifts.

These (early spring) afternoons, I walk around my garden where last autumn’s sunflower stalks still stand. The robins, those cheery birds, cluster. Redwing blackbirds sing joyously.

I’m nearly at my last chemo session – yes, counting down day by day, my simple math calculations and not-so-simple life. Mornings, I pull myself together to work; afternoons, I lie on the couch with my cat and read. The town library orders me interlibrary books. Recently, Blue, an illustrated memoir of St. Bart’s that I read in a few hours, a sojourn into a Caribbean vacation with a sweet family. I will be traveling nowhere outside the country, anytime soon, although I dream…

Where I am now is different terrain. My house has sheltered me (and my family) so warmly and kindly during this winter of disease. Now, I see where our house needs tending – paint on the barn, boards hammered back on the porch where the ice crashed. Every spring and summer, too, I plant more in the gardens, cultivating good living for birds and pollinators, not necessarily the woodchucks who come, unbidden. There will be no wars on my patch of hillside.

The bigger work for me now is healing; how happily I’ll shed medical appointments, the world of sickness, and savor my long walks again. My oncologist told me last fall that someday I’d forget I ever had lymphoma, and I’d forget him, too. Maybe someday if dementia drills into me (many many years from now). I would need to live a long long life if I were to forget this year.

In these winter months of cancer suffering, I’ve longed for many things, but prominent among these desires is to imbue this cancer with meaning. So now, as I’m beginning to contemplate my next steps, the spring and recovery phase, I’m determined to not slip into old habits or careless living. I mean nothing sentimental about this, as if plastering a gratitude sticker on my life will fix up my world.

Which way this will go is yet to be determined. Certainly, planting more perennials.

Stacking wood today

I thought how much I loved this life,

Backaches and all.

~ John Straley

“When the electricity shuts off, you boil water, you crack ice.”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

In addition to showing up at Dartmouth-Hitchcock for chemo and consults to save my life, which thankfully appears to be going nicely, I also joined a writing group the hospital offers. Because writing saves lives, too.

Here’s a poem I read in this class, too good not to pass along.

“Chickens” by Kate Gale

I come from hay and barns, raising  
chickens. In spring, lambs come.  

You got to get up, fly early, do the orphan run  
sleep till dawn, start the feeding.  

When the electricity shuts off, you boil water, you crack ice.  
You keep the animals watered.  

You walk through the barn, through the hay smell, 
your hair brittle where you chopped it with scissors  

same ones you use for everything. Your sweater has holes.  
When you feed the ram lambs, you say goodbye.  

Summer, choke cherries; your mouth’s dry. Apples, cider.  
Corn picking. Canning for weeks that feel like years.  

Chopping heads off quail, rabbits, chickens.  
You can pluck a chicken, gut it fast.  

You find unformed eggs, unformed chicks.  
They start chirping day nineteen.  

You make biscuits and gravy for hundred kids  
serve them up good. You’re the chick  

who never got past day nineteen, never found your chick voice.  
You make iced tea. They say, you’re a soldier in the king’s army.  

At night, you say to yourself, Kathy, someday.  
We go walking. We go talking. We find a big story.  

A cracking egg story. A walking girl story.  
A walking out of the woods story. A not slapped silly story.  

A not Jesus story. Hush, Kathy you say, we get out of here.  
We find out where chicks go when they learn to fly.

Beyond words.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 25 Comments

A few days of streaming sunlight. I wander around outside, over the crusty remains of snow, the thawing grass. The garden yet lies covered. A junco picks at seed scattered beneath the feeder. This far along in the chemo, staring at the end, I’m hard used up, muscles withered, fat trimmed near to my bones. But here, here, alive.

My life – physically, mentally, economically, spiritually – has been crumpled up by disease. Now, ahead, lies the unfolding, the remapping. A friend visiting with her three-year-old, with daffodils and chocolate, points out what I’ve recently reckoned with: that my fierce independence, my raving insistence to live my life, on my own terms and never shaped to the pattern of any man (as Tillie Olsen wrote), has long been my lifeline, the way through lean times, betrayal, uncertainty. But cancer, that mighty devil, flipped that in my face and revealed it as my hollow weakness, too.

Day by day here, determined to remain free from the hospital, to finish to the final drop this course of so-called treatment, glean back what I can salvage. Four months ago, I didn’t think I would live to see this season’s Chionodoxa blue flowers. This afternoon, my daughter and I remarked that the walnut tree I planted seven years ago as a mere twig has plump buds on its lengthy branches. Buds, blossoms, leaves. Beyond words.

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.” ~ Rilke