disease

Pig farm, glass buildings, moss.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments
Photo by Molly S.

The man who swept and cleaned my room at Dartmouth-Hitchcock lives in a nearby farmhouse where he grew up. All this complex here, all these buildings, he says, unrolling trash bags, was once a pig farm. Marooned in bed, IV-ed with multiple lines, I ask questions. His family raised beef, milked, had sheep, their own pigs, a chicken-and-egg empire run by the family women.

We talk food – garden canning, slaughtering and freezing, how his mother’s cookstove had a can of grease they used for eggs, steaks, day-old biscuits. That stuff in a box we eat now, with too many ingredients, that’s not food.

We get to gravy recipes, boiling water and how much flour to paste in. Then we wish each other well. Done for the day, he trundles his cart down the hall.

Home, I’m less cloudy for a few morning hours. By afternoon, the cats and I retreat to lying down, reading, slipping in and out of sleep, where I dream of an enormous pig farm where those tall glass buildings now tower over the surrounding woods. I dream myself back to early girlhood, sick, sick, playing paper dolls in bed. I weld my paring knife, skinning a Chioggia beet. For one long piercing moment, I ache to pull on my jacket and boots, slip wordlessly out the door and along the brambly path – a solitary walk to clear my mind. How I’d relish stepping from frosty twilight into my warm house. Patience, patience: my lesson now.

Friends text photos of sunsets, lakes, moss, running streams. Cell phone photos once so common to me, I study these, proof of a winter day. Mail arrives. Half insurance bills, half gorgeous cards – flowers, a paper wreath, snowy mountains – and so many welcome words. Late afternoon, I cook a pot of rice, my first contribution to a meal in weeks, save setting out forks and spoons like a toddler.

I like the juicy stem of grass that grows

within the coarser leaf folded round,

and the butteryellow glow

in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory   

opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

– Denise Levertov

Brutal and Brilliant Lights.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

My brother drives us out of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock conglomeration of soaring windows. Somewhere in the afternoon, the gloaming sifts down through the interstate traffic. The stream of trucks bends south. We head north. Evergreen and gray, a pale blue of mountains ahead. Midwinter, I mutter, but it’s yet late fall, the solstice ahead.

All the way back home, up and down the ribboned swell of interstate, coal night tapping down, I’m jumbled in an unbroken stream of searing hospital lights, the sparklingness of The Good Doctor who sits beside me and then phones me with good news, that the lymphoma and I are parting ways, disease shedding from my unseen flesh.

Now home again, drifting in and out of this perpetual river — of appointments and results, in an unfamiliar body swollen with water that, trickle by trickle, the chemo poisons are doing their fierce work to keep me alive, thrust me towards full health — the strangeness of not being able to lift a piece of birch to feed my stove, kindle my own hearth.

Grave illness is the void. The void is always with us. I know this even as I write with my tabby purring at my knee, epitome of domestic bliss. Maybe that’s why I was compelled to write so savagely in this place about terror. Late summer, as I’d descended into this cancer, without knowing that I was sickening, I could feel myself gyrating in a sucking whirlpool of negativity — from my own particular life and in this unusual time we inhabit. On the eve of the election, the cancer word smashed into my life. A levee burst in me. For me, a woman with cancer (this is no flip joke), these are fraught days, months, more months. But even in illness I’m part of the whirling flux of this time. As we drove out of that glass complex for the first of what will certainly be many times, I was imbued with a sense of magnitude, the mightiness of the tension between life and death and the mightiness of our collective lives, each dear, each interwoven.

I left Dartmouth with a bright red card in my hand from a kind stranger. At home, the sky was overcast. The stars were shrouded. Our dear white clapboard house twinkled with colored and white lights. I stumbled on the top step and fell. My daughter lifted me up and helped me in.

“You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.”
― Denise Levertov