family

“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”

Start again…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Twenty years ago, I wandered on an early morning walk. Mightily pregnant, I didn’t go far, merely down to our sugarhouse and through the white pines. I looped back through the garden. I was about to have a second baby — that very day — and, second time around, I knew those solitary walks would — for an undetermined time — be a distant memory.

In a break in the rainy weather, a friend walks me through the cemetery, past the little league field, and down the hill into town. At Front Seat Coffee, she buys cookies, and we sit in the courtyard, eating and talking, the courtyard where I’ve passed so many hours with my laptop. Slowly, we walk back up the hill. Three robins perch on the elementary school’s fence.

Six weeks ago, another friend walked me to the Galaxy Bookshop, the first walk I’d taken to town since last November. I picked up a copy of Dostoyevsky at the Galaxy, and finished the novel in Dartmouth, waiting for surgery. The surgeons teased me, Why such light reading?

One more lesson from cancer: how intensified the world becomes. Slip back, start again. Repeat, repeat. But isn’t that one way of the world? There’s plenty more ways — a crash, a sudden halt, a perilous nonstop descent — but often our lives are fits and starts.

I remind myself, Try to learn something.

This day dawns overcast, broody with the promise of rain, the world lush with spring green and birdsong. To keep myself and my cats happy, I light a fire in my stove, brew coffee, consider the day. As I recover, my old demons of uncertainty have woken, too. My walking companion counseled me to narrow my energy to the actual day. Help was recently sent fortuitously to me; this morning, as I mixed powdered sugar and butter for cake frosting, I reminded myself, Be grateful; use your luck wisely. Savor this day.

At Twenty-Eight

By Amy Fleury

It seems I get by on more luck than sense,

not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood,

breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud.

I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance.

At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance

as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude

she counts as daylight virtue and muted

evenings, the inventory of absence.

But this is no sorry spinster story,

just the way days string together a life.

Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan.

Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry.

I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights,

singing like only a lucky girl can.

And another turn in the plot…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 40 Comments

My body falls apart again, and my daughter drives me to Dartmouth. “My car only goes to this ER,” she tells me when I hint at negotiating a closer ER. She asks her blunt and even-toned questions, “What are you afraid of?”

Among other things, I’m afraid of waiting, in pain, which is what happens, and I survive that, of course. The hours in the ER waiting room introduce us to an intimate slice of others’ lives. The man who drove a screwdriver into his hand and didn’t seek antibiotics (not a good choice), another who crammed his hand between his two fighting dogs (the hand lost), a woman with a damaged foot who phones her mother on speakerphone. Across the large room, listening, I wince at the painful distance in that relationship.

Eventually, I’m given a bed in what’s labeled Hall 3. Shift change, a kind nurse hustles to give me meds. In the hallway, we are yet in the swirling mix of others’ lives. A hall mate (not a roommate) who I never see but who’s recently widowed; his companion struggles to figure out his meds. Later, my daughter steps outside and sees a prisoner who’s a patient run through the parking lot, high drama. She leaves after midnight. “Drive safely,” I say, “text me when you’re home.”

In the night, the surgeons stop in, and again the next morning, when the surgeons and the Good Doctor my oncologist meet in my room. Like a rushing train, surgery is coming rapidly and unavoidably towards me. Much as I’d rather not, really rather not, I begin to accept this. I think: get my tools together to survive this. Print out my manuscript, collect books and a knitting project. In all these countless hours in varying hospital rooms and hallways, I’ve never been bored. Frustrated and weeping, laughing and curious, but never dull. Another thing to be grateful for.

I’d rather not, but here’s another bend in my story, as with my hall mate and waiting room companions…

The crying moments…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 43 Comments

I’ve written frequently in this space about living with cancer and cancer treatment since I was diagnosed with lymphoma last November. From the beginning, I was determined to hold myself together. Some of this was simply shock; I could not believe I had been walking around, working, going to birthday parties, hanging with family and my friends while cancer was devouring my body. By the time I ended up in the ER, telling the triage nurse I was circling the drain, the cancer had metastasized to stage four. I needed a moment. I was not about to get a moment.

In the long hours of yet another ER visit, my daughter told me that a longtime friend had asked her last November if I actually intended to undergo chemotherapy. I hadn’t heard about this inquiry, and the question stunned me. I’ve been my daughters’ sole parent for a decade now; even in the worst of these cancer nights and days, I remain foremost a mother, unable to relinquish my watchful eye. After diagnosis, it was immediately clear that the cancer was rapidly growing; without some kind of treatment I would die that winter. The lymphoma I have responds well to chemo. My other option, perhaps, was to seek an alternative treatment — where, for how much, and with what likelihood of success — was dubious at best. In my fifties, I was determined to live. My oncologist was clear that the chemo would shove me to the edge of demise. He told me, You are curable. So, in a rare action of trust, I stretched out my arms and said, Infuse me.

As the cancer was so advanced, I suffered numerous complications from the chemo, which resulted in all the hospital stays I’ve referred to in this blog — nearly a dozen — weeks and and weeks and weeks this winter.

Now, April, Easter rising tomorrow, I’m drinking a friend’s homegrown chamomile tea this morning at my kitchen table, watching the small rain feed spring’s green, alive, in remission.

From the get-go, too, I determined not to burrow into the rathole of despair that I’ve seen disease wreck upon individuals and spread to families. This recent ER visit, however, forced me to the crying day. I wept before the kind nurses, the warm hematologist with her sparkly hair, the PA who insisted I not leave even as I connived deals and plans for discharge. I did not cry before the elder hematologist, who had certainly been practicing medicine for most of my life. I said, yes, yes, I understand. And then I wiped my tears with my thumb when he left.

By the late hour when my daughter had left, and I was alone again in the darkened ER room, I’d taken stock of what I’d crammed in my backpack: two books, my laptop and charger, a handful of underwear, my notebook. I’d forgotten my knitting, which was unfortunate. The nightshift nurse brought me water and those eternal saltines. She was a traveler and had last worked in Iowa.

Much later the next night, two nurses wheeled me through the dim and empty hospital halls to another room. Of all the experiences I’ve had at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, I’ve oddly enjoyed these late night journeys through this huge building. So many stories here, so much living and dying, so much richness. By then, I’d finished with my weeping, joined the world again, all of us, doing what we’re doing. 

A driving spring rain
gliding, wending through the trees
speaks in little drops

~ Bashō

Is that church door open?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

About a year before my mother died, I visited my parents in northern New Mexico. My mother was on 24/7 oxygen then, which she understandably chaffed against, and I took her on long drives so she could leave the house. One afternoon, I drove the rural roads to the Lamy train station. Take the Amtrak to Santa Fe, which I’ve done, and you don’t disembark in the quaint plaza town. 20 miles outside the adobe city, there’s the small Lamy station and an old saloon named the Legal Tender, and not much else. I parked at an old church that appeared to be abandoned and told my mother I’d be right back. I called over my shoulder that I wanted to see if the door was open, as church doors often are. When I looked back, my mother had her car door open, one foot on the earth, determined to follow me. She said cheerily, “I’ll come, too.” She was attached to a heavy oxygen tank on tiny wheels. The terrain was rocky, and there was no way I could navigate my mother to that door.

Somehow, I talked her into staying in the car. That was my mother, usually up for an adventure, willing to rattle a locked door, peer through a window, maniacally curious. It’s me, too.

In these brown-grass April days, as I begin to walk again, further and further each day, I think of my mother, how she would search for daffodil buds and admire the blooming snowdrops. Robert Frost is famous for his line, “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.” Bitter, perhaps, or maybe not so. Having faced my own (blessedly at this moment passed over) demise this winter, I’m beyond happy to immerse myself in the stream of life going on…. This life.

I woke this morning with a dream that I’d never had cancer. In the dream, I’d overslept and was late to work…. I was sweating, nightmarish. The dream haunted me all morning, trailing me, while my dear friend visited and brought me birthday presents that reminded me of my mother, and then fetched my library books so I could lie on the couch these afternoons and recover from this last cancer dose. When she’d left, I slept again. When I woke, the dream had broken and lay on the floor like broken glass: rubbish.

Such a labyrinthine world – mothers and daughters and granddaughters – disease, too. In these still days, waiting for spring’s rushing green, I embrace what I know, and that I never will.

… we are all

the dead, I am not apart from you,

for long, except for breath, except for 

everything.

~ Sharon Olds