cancer survivor

Keeping Company. Neighbors.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

A friend mentions her mother has an art opening that evening in the sprawling building that was once the village inn. We’ve just returned from a walk and stand in a field where, 25 years ago, she sold homemade pies and I sold maple syrup. We each held a nursing baby, in those years.

Her mother lives beside me, so about eight o’clock, the time I’m usually brushing teeth or walking around the house putting water glasses and cat bowls in the kitchen sink, I pull on a sweater (hello, Vermont July) and walk downtown. Monday, hardly anyone is out this evening, as the sunset does its peach-and-rose watercolor magic along the mountains.

I’m amazed, again, at my neighbor’s talent, her unique vision a mixture of O’Keeffe and Cézanne. I stand holding her hand and talking, this woman who lived plenty of lives before I met her. When I weed my front yard garden, she’ll sometimes lean out of her door and holler, “Hello, neighbor!” her hair in plastic curlers.

I walk the long way home through neighborhoods where the children have been called in for the night. Stray teenagers are out; no one else. There’s no glimmer of moon, but the stars are winking into their nightly places. I take an extra loop, and the darkness folds around me.

I’m in this odd place where people I hardly know touch my shoulders, rub my growing-back hair, as if to confirm that, yes, I’m alive. Or I’m looked at silently, uncertainly. The cancer’s made me rougher and gentler. Disinterested in cattiness, willing to visit a neighbor when my body aches to lie down.

At home, I linger on the house steps, the tree frogs serenading. These summer days are long, long, with some hours of work. More than anything, I’m determined to finish a draft of this third novel, determined to sell this book, too. Stubborn my mother would tell me. You’re so stubborn. By now it’s dark, the scattered village lights cupped in the town’s narrow valley, the Milky Way a silent celestial river. My mother despised my stubbornness, this trait that mirrored her. Or maybe I’m completely wrong about that.

I water the hanging plants, and yet I’m not willing to go in for the night, lie down and read, sleep. Last November, I was sitting on these steps in the darkness, the news of having cancer fresh and raw. A different neighbor appeared and sat with me. We talked about opioids and THC. She told me about her husband’s death. In the chilly November, we sat in our coats, a quiet between us, she keeping me company.

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, 
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”
― Czesław Miłosz

Blue Dress, Loving the Liminal.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

I stopped by a friend’s house where I’d not been in over a year. A friend who visited on my worst days, the first hours after chemo when, drugged and miserable, I could barely voice a request, Please, pick up my library books to get me through these days. I leave with my heart full as a flower bouquet, thinking of her mixture of domestic gardens and where the wild slips in…

Now, midsummer, the days as long as anyone could wish for. The cats and I are up with the sun spilling over the horizon, for kibble and coffee and more coffee. My daughters and I meet to do humdrum things, buy cat food and toothpaste. Walking on Vermont Land Trust property where we’d never been, we discover a children’s garden and wander through tunnels of grapevines to a toddler-sized table where we kneel, surrounded by walls of mammoth sunflowers.

It’s an ordinary day. We eat lunch, and my oldest buys chocolate cake, and we keep talking about the things that are unique to Family Us and the things that aren’t, like the news of Stephen Colbert’s imminence disappearance and the mad mad world.

In the sunlight, moving neither quickly nor slowly, we wander into a thrift store. As we wander around, I remember that this is a place where, last fall, I thought I would never return, that these ordinary days that seem so inconsequential would cease with my life.

I buy a summer dress for six one-dollar bills and nod a thank you to the young clerk who wishes me Enjoy!

I hug my daughters, hug them again, and in my own town again I pick up my library books and lie on the couch reading Jane Hirshfield’s words about liminality and poetry. Liminal, liminal, echoes in my mind. I close the book and walk my four-mile route along the river, the water murky and yet sparkling with sunlight shards as the current bends through curves and around rocks. I keep pondering liminal, that threshold between two realms, how I’d been in that thrift store numberless times, sometimes cheery, others frustrated with how the world wears you down, through parenting and worrying and hardship.

Today, I left that store with a folded piece of blue and white cotton, my body and soul electrified as if I had quaffed sunlight. Liminal. My daughter reminded me recently of that long April day that I broke, the day I cried all day long in the Dartmouth emergency room, and she kept going outside to call her sister. In a windowless room, I was desperate for spring sunlight. Hirshfield writes, “The threshold brings its riches, but its barrenness contributes as well.” Liminal.

“On Climbing the Sierra Mountains again after 31 years”

Range after range of mountains
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.

~ Gary Synder

… send what you will, I will listen.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

This winter, I joined a Dartmouth Writing Circle for cancer patients. At that time, my waking hours were pretty much confined to the couch, endeavoring to stay alive, and I thought why not? I’ve kept on with this Circle. Compulsively, I keep writing about disease, but others write about aging parents, children and memories, picking strawberries — the necessary pieces of our everyday lives. Their poems and short essays amaze me. Maybe the lesson is this: suffer from a disease, pay attention, unfold your heart.

So yesterday, another trip to Dartmouth, but this time not to the door of the ER or 3K — the cancer center. My youngest daughter had signed up to walk in The Prouty, a weekend of fundraising. The four of us drove together, my daughters drinking coffee and laughing in the front seat, the boyfriend and I in the back. In the thousands of participants and volunteers, I met a few of my Writing friends as if kismet.

My family ate doughnuts and drank chocolate milk. We walked and ate watermelon and the sandwiches that appeared on tables as if by magic. At a long table, we lingered beneath a white tent, admiring babies and small dogs. It was at once a family event (my family, who pulled me through this winter) and a community embrace. When my daughter signed up (and a HUGE thanks to those who donated to her team), I didn’t, as I could hardly stand two months ago. Walk a few miles? Forget that. Now, my legs gaining muscle, my body healing, I walked between my daughters, so full of youth and quickness, of wit and curiosity. So profoundly of this world.

We live lives of forgetting, but I have not forgotten those long days in 3K’s infusion center, the chemo drugs dripping into my veins while I stared through the window at cardinals in the snow, or that night in the ER when the MDs in scrubs posed the possibility that I couldn’t finish the chemo treatment, that enough was enough for my body which was now, I noticed, described in my chart as frail. An adjective I immediately hated. Fuck frail. By that time, my flesh and my blood was suffused with zofran and dilaudid, lactated ringer’s, with the mighty rituximab…. But even though my bones and my flesh are my domain, my life is not. There’s a tendency in my circle of leftish rural Vermont to look at the medical world askance — an indulgence that immediately dried up for me when I first arrived in the ER. All along, I’ve asked for the data and facts; what am living through now and what might this mean? Beyond this, I was encouraged to embrace the mysterious complexity of disease, data, determination, the universe’s toss of the dice. When I said, go ahead, make me more frail, I’ll endure, the Good Doctor made that possible.

I have not forgotten that I am alive by the grace of medicine and strangers, by my family, by illusive fate itself. I carry this knowledge as all day long I go about my life of writing and working, of watering the flowering nasturtiums, eating peaches, reading novels and poetry and cancer research beneath the apple tree, as I walk through the sultry July twilights, that this will someday — this year, or 30 years from now — change for me, too, as it changes for everyone.

But for now, luscious watermelon. Later, a family dinner on the back porch, summer sweet.

From Ruth Stone:

… send what you will, I will listen.
All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.

“… hard wind and the rain that unsettled the creek…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Evening, I linger on the porch swing, talking with my siblings as the long July day ebbs down to twilight. My neighbor texts me that a bear’s been seen in our neighborhood. As the gloaming, like a tide, washes in, I water the tomato plants. The white hydrangeas hover like magical pompoms in the dusk.

July, Vermont’s growing month. Walking with my neighbor, she points out the height of the wild grasses and flowers around her house. Already, this summer, taller than she’s ever seen. The heat and the rain have propelled immense growth. The box elders rub my house; I’ll need to ask another favor from someone with a saw.

I have not forgotten this winter when I drifted from one variation of cold to another, my body and mind fiercely bent to the intertwined goal of finishing cancer treatments and remaining alive. On the other side, what remains is what plagued me before, my own variation of hard wind and rain. And yet, a whole July hangs like a promise: sunshine all day, pink cottage roses, laughter with my neighbor about the burgeoning woodchucks.

In the late afternoon, I take a long walk in the town forest to the reservoir’s edge. Deer prints press into the mud. On this walk, I don’t see a soul. In the distance, children call to each other.

“Kitchen Sink”
Today she would change nothing,
not even the wallpaper peeling,
like dead bark. Nor, outside, the shadows
approaching the yard where ants
toil like women in their houses of sand.
Never mind that the sun will be setting.
When she was young she felt afraid
of hard wind and the rain that unsettled the creek.
But the earth never left her,
not once did the floods reach her feet.
The reward of a long life is faith
in what’s left. Dishes stacked on a strong table,
Jars of dried beans. Scraps of cloth,
And the ten thousand things of her own thoughts,
Incessant as creek water. She has been able
to lay up her treasures on earth,
as if heaven were here, worth believing.
In the water her hands reach
like roots grown accustomed to living,the roots of the cat-briar that hold to the hillside
and can never be torn free of this earth completely.

~ Kathryn Stripling Byer

Hunger.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments
Curious cat named Acer

A few years back when my youngest was doing odd jobs, she came home with four strawberry plants someone had given her from a garden she weeded. Naturally, I planted these in our garden. The plants spread and have produced beautifully this year. I crouch beside these weedy plants and devour red berries. The crop is so small no berries ever make it into the house. Since it’s usually just me here these days, I eat in the garden. I’m famished for this sweet food. I devour the strawberries, juice dripping down my chin.

I’m ravenous for the sharp June sun, for this morning’s cold dumping rain, for my daily midday reading break, for the purring cats who clamor across my keyboard. Healing from cancer, I’m supposed to sleep (get seven to nine hours!) but, come that glimmer of gold at the horizon, I’m finished with bed, hungry for coffee, oatmeal, maple syrup. Eager to finish my novel revisions.

In those months of chemo, I’d worried my mind and imagination might dull, my fierceness lessen. Six weeks out from surgery, I’m diminished in body but a peculiar power blooms in me. A determination to do what I want. An impatience with artifice. Don’t waste my time.

And yet, the old haste that plagued my days and nights has quelled. Stopping by my neighbor’s, I sink into her armchair, set my feet on her footstool, listen, let the day’s exhaustion drape around me. That fatigue is now familiar to me as the blanket a stranger gifted me at the beginning of this cancer journey. We talk and talk, then wander outside and keep on with these conversational matters, the color of paint she’s considering for her house’s clapboards, how to encourage Columbine to grow among the phlox.

This time, I really want to listen…. I’ve spent my life mistaking instinct for fact, subjective experience for reality. What a waste of time here on earth to spend it as a slave to one story, how boring and repetitive, how many of our days are spent in chains.

From Sarah Gilmartin’s Service.

Small Kindnesses.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Writing a novel, you pay attention to action. What are the characters doing? And why? At the midpoint, the action often switches; the protagonist ceases to react and, instead, acts — and not without mishap, without complications.

I’ve long thought of labor as a metaphor. The mother’s cervix dilates (helped, sure, by walking, by receptivity), followed by the uncertainty of transition just before the mother engages in the pushing phase, the brief or lengthy or sometimes stigmied phase of bringing this child into the world.

I’m in the transition phase again in my life, beneficiary of cancer treatments and so much medical care. Mornings this winter when I woke, I began each day with a survival mindset; I would endure my body’s illness. Now, June, the birds wake me, the feathered creatures intend on nest-building, procreation, survival, maybe the joy of communal singing. In the garden, the tithonia abruptly deepen their green, expand their leaves. The hydrangeas sprawl into a fortress.

At my desk, I lean into my day’s work, hours and hours unspooling.

Late afternoon, my friend arrives with her little girl, and the three of us walk in the cool town forest. The child removes her shoes and runs over the pine-needle-spread paths. She buries her bare feet in the shallow stream’s mucky mud. Yes, June…

Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,

and to say thank you to the person handing it… 

We have so little of each other, now. So far 

from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these

fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,

have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

~ from “Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Laméris