family

… 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.

Living in the Edge.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

As part of my heal-from-cancer and keep-the-cancer-from-returning approach, I borrow my daughter’s yoga map on Thursday mornings and walk through the cemetery and along Little League field to the village. The studio is above the town’s coffee shop. The windows frame the town’s main intersection of routes 14 and 15, the Lamoille River, flanked by July’s burgeoning green.

As I lie on the polished maple floor, the sound of the traffic comes and goes. This calmness reminds me of those years I lived in Brattleboro, pre-internet, when the main source of my twenties’ activities was walking to the public library or a favorite bar, hiking, or hanging out with my roommates in the house we rented, running our mouths about the state of the world. There was a lot of laughter, a whole lot of discussion about morals and relativity.

This particular Thursday is the anniversary of the floods in 2023 and 2024, exactly a year apart. The class leader repeats a theme of in the edge, that fertile and sticky place between terrains. I think of this summer’s profuse wildflowers – trefoil and asters and Canada lilies – that spread between the river and the fields. Afterwards, I spread out my notebooks and papers and laptop in the coffee shop, plunge into a hard piece of work. I’ve no illusions that yoga will set me floating down any peaceful river. The edge, that complicated habitat, has long been my domain. Friends appear and tell me they’ve sold their house, are pulling up stakes and heading overseas. Around me, people come and go, talking and eating, figuring out or not figuring out parts of their lives.

Later, at home, the catbirds screech. A robin perches on the porch railing and studies me. The woodchucks scurry under the steps from den to woodpile, or have they slowed to a who-gives-a-damn saunter?

Winter, the edge terrain is a cold beast. July, I’m all in…

“Not so much a game
as a sphere,
a mystery.
Held up to light,
a small hole
into another dimension.” ~ Ruth Stone

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

Inoculation, Fallacy, and the Sacred.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

A few years back, I did a joint reading with a woman who claimed she had discovered an inoculation for kids to prevent drug and alcohol addiction. She’s way more famous than me – and has made far more money – but the premise seemed prideful to me. There’s no shot against addiction, no simple fix.

For no particular reason, I was thinking of this on a recent walk. As part of my healing, I’m determined to walk every day, through rain, shine, or wildfire smoke from Canada. Sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. Late afternoon, I was on the wooded trails behind the local high school. Hermit thrush sang their endearing notes. I spent my childhood in the New Hampshire woods. As an adult, I backpacked. My former husband and I sugared for two decades and knew our maple acres in every variation of weather.

Not so many weeks ago, exhausted from chemo and surgery, I walked crooked over. Now, my boots confident on the path, I remembered those winter visits to the ER, more out of my mind than not with pain. A frequent visitor, I requested IV Zofran, Dilaudid, fluids, in that order. The scent of saline washing through the IV tubing became synonymous for me with the near promise of breathing easily again, the temporary ability to inhabit my body.

Dilaudid promises to make whole what’s broken. How well I know this enchantment. For anyone who judges this, I reply, you endure chemotherapy, you endure the way the lymphoma choked my innards, more brutal than childbirth labor. The narcotics pulled me back from pain into the world. There was that subzero night when we drove to the ER, and my daughter and her partner kept leaning against the ER’s wall heater, while the nurses buried me under heated blankets. And the balmy midnight I sat outside the ER entrance, high as hell again, listening to the heat shield rattle on my Subaru as my sister drove around the hospital. Those nights, the dilaudid nights, are all done. May they be finished, forever, for me.

These mornings, I take vitamins, mundane, boring. There’s that trite phrase that we’re all on a journey, but so much of our lives we simply click along. The lymphoma broke that clicking-along for me, the regularity of waking up and going about the day. Now, on these daily walks, I hold to this sacredness, this euphoria.

“One morning in April, I woke up a little sick. I lay there looking at shadows on the white plaster ceiling. I remembered a long time ago, when I lay in bed beside my mother, watching lights from the street move across the ceiling and down the walls. I felt the sharp nostalgia of train whistles, piano music down a city street, burning leaves. A mild degree of junk sickness always brought me the magic of childhood. It never fails, I thought, just like a shot; I wonder if all junkies score for this wonderful stuff.”

~ William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Where are you going?”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 19 Comments

Photo above taken in a courtyard garden at Dartmouth-Hitchcock. Inside the building, there’s a short flight of stairs to a sunroom. Glass doors lead to the garden. Much of this winter, I couldn’t walk those half-dozen steps. When I finally could, I proofread my daughter’s college essays in the sunroom. We stared out at the blowing snow and wondered what grew in the spring garden.

Today, mid-June, an appointment of good news. The Good Doctor reminds me that I’ve finished treatments, that I’m in remission. Go on and live your life. Gain weight and muscle.

I’ve been so far out of the everyday world that, after this appointment, waiting in a gas line, seems like a small event. For some reason, I remembered the gas station a few miles from my father’s house in Santa Fe, New Mexico. On a random summer morning, I pumped gas and then stood for a moment, breathing in the spiciness from the station’s kitchen vent and staring up at the flawlessly blue sky. The desert’s hot breath touched my cheeks, my hands, my bare knees – at once so familiar to me (my birthplace the New Mexican desert) and enchantingly unknown. The day lay before us like a pie that could be cut any which way, and the result would be enjoyable.

That’s how I felt, leaving the cancer center, walking up the stairs in the parking garage – light – as if I had shed that caul of cancer and pain. I mean nothing easy or innocent about this lightness. One afternoon when I could barely walk around the high school, I sat in a friend’s car and imagined myself as gray – my face ashen, my bones crumpling to cinders. I wondered how I would survive. In December, wandering the halls of yet another hospital, I turned around and couldn’t recognize the only other person in the hallway, my friend Jo who was even calling my name. “Brett, where are you going?”

Living with cancer taught me that we are not creatures of the mind; we live in our bodies. Cancer may return in my flesh this summer, two years from now, or never. I may perish falling down stairs, or expire as an old woman in my bed beneath a quilt my mother sewed. Any hubris I once had about eating organic brown rice and my garden’s bounty vanished this winter; mortality’s blade is ubiquitous, final.

Nonetheless, this day…

Driving home on the interstate, my daughter and I mused about hurried drives through snow to the ER, the repeated treks, northward, home, where we scrutinized roadside trees for the faintest blush of spring green. This time, my daughter pointed out patches of lupines, purple and pink and white, sure sign of summer.

You must do something to make the world more beautiful.

~ Barbara Cooney, Miss Rumphius

Under a Thousand Stars.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

Walking home, I spy a smattering of white blossoms among a stand of pines, off the path. That short stretch is a strange area, more sand than soil, unusual on my Vermont hillside. Running theory is that someone stripped the top soil, years ago. Although I haven’t energy in excess, I’ve enough that I wander from the path. The blossoms are wild strawberries. Sweet mark of June.

For those not in New England, the common gripe is the weather. Every weekend, rain. Figures are tossed that there’s not been a fully sunny weekend since December; then I hear November. As for me, recovering, the days and weeks merge. Now, three weeks out from surgery, I’m easing back into work. The cats wake me at early light. In recovery, my old worries rekindle, but so does my drive and curiosity. I get up, eat cereal and maple syrup, brew coffee. I spread the manuscript of my fourth book over the kitchen table, cut, rearrange, stitch.

What’s changed, though, is a new slowness, a willingness to let the course of things unfold, to crouch beside those strawberry blossoms, wondering which birds will snag the tiny crimson berries. In a few weeks, I may wander here and sample this sweet delicacy. Half of this May, I lived in a hospital. Finally, I limped out the door with my brother. While he drove me home, I kept saying, “I’m out, I’m out,” and “The trees are leafing, the forsythia is blooming, the lilacs are opening.”

That surgery and that stay might likely have saved my life, again; and again, how immeasurably capable and kind was the hospital staff. Nonetheless, it’s June. The sky this morning is scrimmed over with smoke from wildfires. Under that dome, I have work to do. A friend will visit. I’ll move through this day, this Wednesday, happy.

I want to lie out

on my back under the thousand stars and think   

my way up among them, through them,   

and a little distance past them, and attain   

a moment of absolute ignorance,

if I can, if human mentality lets us.

I have always intended to live forever;

but not until now, to live now.

~ Galway Kinnell, “The Sekonk Woods”