How We Spend Our Time…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Sunday, I ask a friend to take a walk. It’s been a morning of housekeeping and writing chores, vacuuming and laundry, and the easiest thing would be to lie on my couch all afternoon and read. A light snow falls — pretty flakes and scant accumulation. As we walk, I pull off my hat and take off my mittens. It’s not the swimming season, not an afternoon where we meet at #10 Pond and talk about kids and work, about old parents and gardening, the loons calling and the sunlight thick with pollen. November is the honed-down season, stick and bone season, where your eye admires the landscape’s starkness. On these back roads, we pass farms, fields scattered with equipment, the shorn-down remains of last summer’s crops.

For so much of my life, I seemingly always had somewhere to be — and, raising kids, I probably did. I hurried to work and home to make dinner, or to pick up a daughter at school or a soccer game. Now, my girls are grown, with their own places to be; how hungrily I’m anticipating the abundance of our small family and apple pie this holiday. But this Sunday, I leave my post-it list on the kitchen table, check the woodstove dampers, and lace up my boots.

A year ago, I was for the first time in the Dartmouth-Hitchcock ER, in the trauma room with my daughters and the first oncologist I met. I was so new to the cancer patient world that I did not yet understand IVs and fluids and pain meds. That night, a surgeon told me I had to have surgery right now, immediately or I may not live, and I might not live through the surgery, either. It was the first time I had gone under in an operating room and woke in a dim recovery room and wondered, what now?

What now is the privilege of the living, and my god, I embrace that.

A year later, a few hours in the afternoon on a slippery dirt road. Later, I arrive home as twilight falls, the darkness so impenetrable in late autumn, back to my clean house and the cats who insist upon their dinner immediately, my solitary and sometimes un-solitary life, and what I’m making of my mortal time: fiercely writing, keeping the cats and myself fed, the hearth glowing, a holiday meal imminent. These earthly joys.

“… how we seek to spend our time may depend on how much time we perceive ourselves to have.” — Atul Gawande

Disease as Teacher.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

About a year ago, a friend asked to borrow knitting needles, a request I almost certainly ignored as I could hardly walk up the stairs in my house, and forget the effort of opening the closet door and searching through my needles. A year ago, my family moved my bed downstairs, and I wondered, Well, is that? Am I now confined to one floor like an old woman? I was not, thankfully.

Half a year out from chemo and surgery, my family moved my bed back upstairs. The first morning I wake, I stand at the window looking down at the mock orange planted decades ago. In June, this giant bush is covered with small white blossoms, but in November, the bush is mostly sticks, save for a few withered leaves.

Standing there staring down, I felt suffused with profound grief. Almost immediately, I chastised myself. Why grieve when I survived a terrible illness? When this might have easily gone otherwise? And yet, grief.

Nearing the holidays, I think often of my mother who died not so long ago. She and I had years ago separated our lives for reasons both silly and profound. Only at the end of her life did I begin to have empathy for her and see her not merely as my mother but a woman in her own right. So that morning, thinking of her, my grief is for her absence, for what might have been between her and my daughters and myself. So many years I invited her to holiday meals, and all those years, she refused to join us. How I would love to invite her this year. Surviving cancer (thus far) broke me in so many ways, shoved me right up against the fragility of the world, revealed my own meager strength, but it also allowed me to grieve the loss upon loss that is not endemic to me but woven integrally through our mortal lives. Cancer empowered me to hold that grief without rage, to acknowledge simply what is.

But sadness, of course, is one variation of the complex symphony of our lives. Yesterday, walking along a hillside dirt road in the November sunlight, hat pulled off my head and in my hand, eyes on the spine of the Green Mountains in the distance freshly covered with snow, pure joy suffused me at simply being in the world. Six months ago, my companion had walked with me from my house to Main Street. It wasn’t at all certain to me that I could manage that short walk there and back. Now, the two of us moved quickly through the world, talking poetry and plans. How remarkable is that?

What if we embraced the messy, evolving, surprising, out-of-control happening that is life and reckoned with its proximity and relationship to death? What if, instead of being afraid of even talking about death, we saw our lives in some ways as preparation for it? What if we were taught to ponder it and reflect on it and talk about it and enter it and rehearse it and try it on? What if our lives were precious only up to a point? What if we held them loosely and understood that there were no guarantees? So that when you got sick you weren’t a stage but in a process? And cancer, just like having your heart broken, or getting a new job, or going to school, were a teacher? — Eve Ensler

Stopping in the Snowy Forest.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

In the woods, I hear voices and pause, thinking a cluster of children might emerge over the hill. Instead, a flock of clangorous geese wings low overhead, then a second V, a third. Town traffic sounds filter into the woods. I am not in the deep wilderness, not so far from high school and road and village, but for this hour, it’s just me and the sweep of wind and drifting snow and the human and dog prints of whoever walked here before me.

As a kid, my father was never one to be daunted by adversity. Evenings, he often set down his coffee cup and took us on walks to the library or around the block, and around the block often meant across a thin-grass soccer field to the woods. Who owned those woods, I never knew. We jumped across the stream and along worn logging roads, past the piles of New Hampshire boulders and stone walls in the forest where fields had dominated not so many years ago. The woods were alive with rabbits and deer, birds and ferns. We wondered about the Natives who lived here and the colonists who cut down the trees, and then the trees grew up again.

On this twilight Monday, I lean against a hemlock, snow in my eyelashes, remembering when my daughters filled their snowsuit pockets with tiny hemlock cones. Intentionally or not, my father instilled love and not fear of the forest in his kids, the understanding that our feet could carry us to unexpected and miraculous places.

Here’s that classic New Hampshire poem threading through my childhood, my daughters’, and so many others:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

The Survivable.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

It’s dark as the inside of my fist at five o’clock. I’m driving into spitting snow, my brand-new studded snow tires grinding. My companion and I are talking about all kinds of things — how language shapes our worldview and the personalities of tuxedo cats and dentists. I’m driving more by faith than anything else, not particularly fast, headlight beams filled with snow. As if cued, a deer waits in the forested roadside. I slow, then stop, people and deer staring at each other. Then the deer vanishes into the woods.

On this backroad, I’ve passed no other vehicle save a UPS truck, so I wait for a moment for the deer to return, for a companion to leap across the road.

My passenger says, apropros of some conversational thread, that I’ve shed bad karma in my months of cancer treatment, of struggling to survive. My devotion has always been my pencil or keyboard, not the meditation cushion. And yet…

I roll my car forward through the swirling snow. I’ve long adhered to that ancient Aristotelian notion that action defines character. When I realized I had cancer, a year ago, I was rapidly veering towards sepsis. I could not indulge any opinion. To survive, I had to strip away illusion. What were the facts? What was the wisest way forward? None of this was simple.

Cancer narrowed my world. Through weakness and the possibility of a fatal infection, I was confined to my few downstairs rooms, to Emergency Rooms, and hospital rooms. But unexpectedly, cancer widened my life, too, gave me the gift of friendships forged in rough experiences, reinforced for me that this world is propelled by cause-and-effect, that actions have consequences, and that I often grasp only the slenderest knowledge.

New England November drives us into the season of early darkness, blackness so profound our eyes struggle to navigate. When I left Dartmouth-Hitchcock after that last long stay, I felt old, aged in bone and flesh, and concurrently, miraculously restored to my twenties, those years when my lust for living and creating was ravenous and I did not yet comprehend the immutability of time. At the end of this evening drive, I stand for a few moments in this velvety and freezing darkness, snow hissing on the hot car hood, a slender strand of white lights twinkling in my kitchen window. I clench my mittens in my cold hands. Around me, beguiling night.

“When you survive something that was thought to be unsurvivable, the obvious is gained. You have your life—you have time. But it’s only when you get there that you realize your survival has come at a cost.”
― Suleika Jaouad

And last… my story “Tiny Towns” appears in the new collection: 2050: Vermonters Take a Swipe at the Future. Reading tonight in St. Johnsbury….

Town Plow, Wind Chimes.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Orange lights from the town plow sweep through my house, followed by the truck’s backup beeping. While I’ve been reading, the rain has fattened to snow. I stand in my kitchen, listening to the truck, wind jangling chimes hung on my back porch. All last winter, enduring through broken-sleep cancer, the plow’s whirling lights and safety backup were constants, a reminder that I was not the only one awake in town.

Again, winter.

I switch on the porch light and stand outside. Snow falls in infinite ways. This is not lacy and lazy flakes but dense wet bits. Quickly, quickly, the snow streams down. A new set of chimes this winter — not a replacement but a fresh voice for counterpoint — would be wise. This place no longer smells of broken leaf, damp earth, fragile fallen leaves turning to rot. Unstoppable, the falling snow shimmers in the lamplight, background of childhood delight.

Auto Mirror

In the rear-view mirror suddenly
I saw the bulk of the Beauvais Cathedral;
great things dwell in small ones
for a moment.

Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass

Peering Through a Window.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

As a grad student, I lived for a few years in Bellingham, Washington, where the sunny summers (I kid you not) were a steady 75 degrees. The winters were New England dark, but lacked the drama of the deep cold, how (save for the conifers), the green gives way to sooty gray, flat white.

November, and I remind myself that I love Vermont in myriad ways, and one of those is how the seasons’ shift reflects our changing lives, too. In my walks along the river, it’s just me and two deer, a flock of starlings. The wildflowers have withered to dry stalks.

I have a bone scan at the local hospital (no major deal, a routine baseline). Afterwards, I walk around this building in the mid-afternoon light that’s already darkening towards dusk. Cold drizzle. Exactly a year ago, I was a patient here, and I find the window of the room where I stayed. That first morning, a social worker and nurse came into my room. The social worker gently suggested I write a will, stat. The nurse empathized with my diagnosis. Was I dismissive? She said, I have stage 4 cancer, and here I am, working again. It was not a comeuppance, but a widening.

A friend stops by with dinner. I slice apples and bake crisp. November, season of hearth.

The sick are ourselves, was a thing his father [also a country doctor] had said. When you stop understanding that, take your name off the wall and throw your bag in the river. It was advice he had only sometimes forgotten. ~ Niall Williams, Time of the Child