family

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

The Illusion of the Ordinary.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

A year ago, I entered the local ER with acute pain. I’d been there before with my kids for stitches and an allergic reaction, things that could be patched up and remedied. A year ago, an MD told me that a scan revealed metastatic cancer. It was the eve of a contentious election, the nation cracking apart. In my life, however, I suddenly had no time for beliefs or opinions. To survive, I had to lean on facts.

For years, I’d been running not so much as a lone wolf but a mangy coyote, hustling my single mama gig, utterly determined to nourish and protect. But there was no way I was going to weasel through this cancer alone. Almost immediately, I was forced to size up strangers — a surgeon, an oncologist, nurses — and do what I had never done before. I had to trust these strangers with my life. Divorce had school me to be wary; now, disease was forcing me to revise my life, rapidly, on the (incredibly painful) go.

A year later, I’m alive. Some was my stubbornness, the trait that enraged my mother — and yet she herself had taught me stubbornness. Back me into a corner, and, damn, will I fight. But that’s a scrap. The more profound reason I’m alive is that I had access to first world health care. I benefited from medicines and decades of trial-and-error, thanks to researchers and so many suffering patients before me. I had access to that small rural hospital who took me in, over and over, this winter, and to Dartmouth-Hitchcock, such a remarkable cancer center surrounded by New Hampshire woods. We drove down the interstate in multiple snowstorms, and always I was gladdened to see the crimson EMERGENGY sign that never turned off. Entering, I knew I would be treated with compassion, with unflagging skill.

I could not have been treated at Dartmouth without my daughters’ immediate willingness to relinquish nearly a year of their young lives to ferry me through the sheer wretchedness of chemo and the brutal complications, and to keep enduring when I finally broke. They had the patience to stay with me while I put myself together.

I was determined to endure all the chemo to gain the best chance of a cure — and I did, running and then limping and eventually crawling — but I received so much kindness from family, from friends old and new, from many of you here, and from strangers. People brought soup and pot roast, drove me to appointments and blood draws, took me outside on walks, carried in firewood and brewed tea, and insisted that I did not look so terrible at all when I couldn’t even sit up. My post office box filled with lovely cards that I taped on the wall over my bed. A friend texted me photographs nearly every day of the beautiful Vermont winter that I was missing; another dear friend texted me a poem she read every night. Boxes of books and cookies and stollen — such treasures. The end of the chemo was followed by a painful surgery. By then, I had no income, and a check from a friend carried me into the summer and recovery. All these well wishes — all this meant so much to me. Gratitude beyond gratitude.

On the day before this year anniversary, I walked down a dirt road as the darkness fell down. In the gloaming, I could see across the valley a tiny white square I knew was my house where my cats were hungry for dinner. The neighbors’ house glowed orange and yellow with their Halloween lights. An utterly ordinary November day.

What remains with me is a body weakened and damaged, but alive, and the steely secret that the ordinary is luminescent with the extraordinary. Here I was — this small woman stripped down to a t-shirt in a billowy warm November afternoon walking along an empty road. Overhead, a line of cacophonous geese arrowed through the sky. The road dipped down in a wet area, and the mud stunk of rank water and rotting leaves. Ahead of me, mist hovered. What luck! I thought. I strode into the mist. In the spring, Daphne plants grow in these roadside woods where someone too broke or too lazy keeps dumping household trash. By the time I was back at my car, I was in the solid dark, the stars and moon swallowed by clouds. Oh, this messy, unclear, uncertain, marvelous world. What luck.

Crazy-Making.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 20 Comments

Yesterday, my oldest and I made that drive again down I-91 that flanks that Connecticut River. My knitting in my lap, I counted exits, St. Johnsbury first exit, then the second, the third that heads east to New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the fourth Barnet, which I took when I stayed at Karmê Chöling. We talked about fall colors and a meatball recipe and family, of course, all the way down to exit 13, the Norwich and Hanover exit, where we stopped for coffee and scones, as if a good luck charm. Coffee and sweets, not a dash to ER. We watched the time, careful not to be late for what I hoped would be a mere routine check-in.

All summer this day has hovered in my mind — what will this day reveal? — but this past week this coming journey was as near to me as something I held in my hand as I went about my days, doing what needs to be done. The day before, talking with friends, the fear of this day erupts and I hear myself on the verge of screeching, nearly crying. All summer, I’ve relished my good life, learning to walk again and eat again, to read on my back porch in that hand-me-down butterfly chair. To marvel that I am not in pain. That I might sleep and reasonably expect I might wake in the morning exactly as I want, in the pre-dawn darkness drink milky coffee and write. That I will witness the unexpected autumn buds on a yellow rose bush open, these final velvety blossoms of the season.

At Dartmouth, we wait again in 3K, in the cancer center. I am no longer one of the pallid-gray-faced chemo patients, hobbling, enduring. How desperately I never want to return here. My oncologist gently reminds me that he’d assured me I’d pull through this winter, even as I was admitted again and again and again, a dozen times. Add to that, more ER visits.

Later, a friend asks about the scan’s sign-off, but the only rules that matter are what the hidden mysteries of my blood and flesh reveal. The markers are that the lymphoma has not returned. I know that the reaper’s scythe heads towards me as that inarguable blade poises over each of us. But not this day for me. Not yet.

Driving home, people crowd the interstate bridges with RESIST signs. As our car sails beneath the metal and steel, we wave. I’d told the oncologist that my wellness plan was four-fold: eat real food, walk, do my work, and try not to go crazy.

He said, This is crazy-making. Just do your best.

There is only one heart in my body, have mercy
on me…

Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the
sane; thank You for letting me know what this is
like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening
blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without
terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly
lost
with this love

~ Franz Wright

Crossroads.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I park at a dirt crossroads this weekend beside a former tavern and walk up the hill to the Old West Church. The sunny afternoon speckles through the roadside maples, and I meet others doing what I am, in pairs or singly, and we greet each other, cheerily. At the Old West Church, I hear two terrific poets, but on my walk back to the tavern the line that runs through my head is from a Franz Wright poem, There is but one heart in my body, have mercy/on me, an incantation.

I keep thinking of my dead mother on this radiant Sunday, my mother who pulled her last breath a year and a half ago, hardly a hopscotch jump ago. In my mind, I’m building the architecture of what I’ve tagged as this Cancer Atlas I’m writing, scaffolding this book’s bones. The book is about the here-and-now, about living (at least for now) through a terrible disease, about walking along Vermont’s autumn-gold back roads, about pulling up this summer’s frost-killed pepper plants that produced so bountifully this summer. And my mother? As I work, I think so often of her, this woman both generous and mercurial, the double blade I harbor in my own heart. Gracious, how much she’d enjoy this picturesque walk. She was a woman who loved old churches, was fascinated by adjacent cemeteries, who would have relished the art in the tavern.

At the tavern, I linger in an open doorway, talking with a curator, drinking iced tea from a half-pint jar. My mother would have drunk the wine, feasted on the cured meat and seeded crackers. Dust kicks up in the road. Old friends appear, and we joke about winter’s ferocity. It’s always a crossroads, isn’t it?

“We are created by being destroyed.”
― Franz Wright

This Glorious Autumn Light.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My sister, a caner survivor, once told me that a cancer diagnosis was a great leveler. This was years before my own cancer experience, and, sure, I had an intellectual understanding of this. Lymphoma schooled me in many ways, among these that I live in my body. Such a simple, profound thing. I had never lived in a body that couldn’t walk up the stairs in my own house, not just because of a sprained ankle or a new baby in arms, but because of weakness in my bones and flesh. I had never considered that I might never be able to enter the bedroom whose walls I painted, where I have slept for so many years.

These days, after a summer devoted to learning how to eat and sleep again and to walk those stairs, outside as much as possible in this gloriously sunny, perishingly dry Vermont summer, I no longer embody the near-translucence of cancer-and-chemo patient. Such pleasure I have when people ask why I’ve cut my hair, and I can reply that I didn’t snip, I lost. The hair I’ve lost is now returning in a metaphor that I can’t ignore: softer but with my childhood cowlick.

Disease hasn’t magically transformed me; if anything, my thorns have proliferated. But here’s a thing: the world where I live is descending into spectacular autumn. Sure, some years the fall foliage bursts brighter than other years, but always, always, heartstopping in beauty. Autumn’s a reminder of my mortality, your mortality, the dearness of this fleeting world. A reminder to pause in our gardens, on our house steps, the sidewalk, whatever trail we may be following. Take a moment. Breathe in, out, in….

From Stephen Jay Gould’s essay “The Median Isn’t the Message”:

Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die—and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy—and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.

The Might of Flowers.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

My daughter suggests I get coffee before driving home. It’s midnight, balmy. Sprinklers water the grass outside the airport. After the New Mexican desert, the air is redolent with growth. Thinking gas station coffee will be sour, I pass, and buy lemonade instead.

In Burlington, the streetlights blink red, and I drive quickly through town. My daughter lives in a neighborhood where gardens and yards spread into the sidewalks. Hollyhocks lean out from the neighbors’ front porch. I’m reminded of my graduate school days in Bellingham, Washington, when the world seemed chockfull of flowers whose names I had yet to learn.

Then, it’s a long drive home through the darkness, with no traffic and the Daily podcast about The Great Gatsby. In this week, my garden has grown wildly, the hydrangeas pale globes in the dark. For a moment, I stand in the driveway, suitcase in my hand, staring up at the sky and breathing in the wet air. There’s that line in Gatsby about the impossibility of repeating the past — or Gatsby’s wager that, indeed, the past can be salvaged. Returning from New Mexico is always this complicated mixture of past and present. My birthplace, Northern New Mexico holds my earliest memories, of listening to the wind and squeezing red mud between my bare toes. Northern Vermont, where I’ve lived for decades now, is suffused with my bad past of a marriage gone awry, a story I can’t shake.

Yesterday afternoon, talking with a friend, I felt myself slipping into the past again, that sinkhole. But don’t we all have that? Heading into this summer, I believed that nurturing the flower gardens around my house would sweeten my life, balm the ravages of the cancer world. A few years back, I planted compass flowers, the six-foot high plants I wrote into the ending of my last book. The plants are now blooming their sunshiny joy. This morning, goldfinches layered in the leaves and petals. I crouched on the dewy grass, in the here and now, nowhere else.

“The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.”
― Loren Eiseley