#healing

More things in heaven and earth…. Eve of Midterms.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Two years ago, the country churned towards an angry Presidential election. Now, mid-terms in a foliage season remarkable for vivid yellows, dazzling oranges, the natural world a common good exterior to government.

Two years ago, I (and, hence, my family) entered the medical system’s mighty beast of Ivy League Dartmouth Hitchcock. Just recently, I heard word of a long-ago friend and a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and reflexively I thought how awful, that’s likely the end. Yet I had stage 4, a rotten diagnosis. Two years ago, kind strangers rallied around me, advising me to tidy up, consider your affairs.

My affairs?? Had I become a character in a middling English novel? I had a closet shelf of my kids’ high school handwritten math notebooks, the back side of my house needed painting, no directives and certainly no exit plan, a novel under contract, another book about class in Vermont I hadn’t yet written. I’d left my shoes at work. I’d been going about my life — working and writing, my heart divided in throbbing currents of love and loyalty, of rage and hurt, fear and desire.

Entering this darkening season now, as the days shrink and the nights lengthen, the trees drop their leaves and stick season emerges—the metaphor of light reigns. In that winter of illness, daughters and I had so many speeding drives down the icy interstate, and, always, the glowing red of EMERGENCY was a welcoming beacon, the promise of succor. Bit by bit, we figured out how to navigate the system, how to enter and ask for help, parse the complex layers of staff hierarchy, to learn names and procedures, numbers, billing, to ask questions, to understand when answers were impossible. To gauge risk. To endure, and endure, and endure more.

In all this, to know awe for the skill and art of complex medicine, to be supremely grateful for this first world privilege, and to be awed for so much light that surrounded my tiny family — from friends and strangers, from so much that arrived to me through this writing space: cards and sweets, books, letters, messages, poems.

Two years later, heading into another election, yes, of course, absolutely, politics matter. People in powerful positions weld decisions that affect everyday lives. But there’s that Hamlet line: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy… In this quiet hour, the wind knocking an overgrown rose bush against my window, the woodstove crackling, profound satisfaction to be yet in the chaotic story of this world.

“I used to think healing meant ridding the body and the heart of anything that hurt. It meant putting your pain behind you, leaving it in the past. But I’m learning that’s not how it works. Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers.”
― Suleika Jaouad

After an absence, return.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 28 Comments
Photo by Molly S.

A long while away from this space after a day last week that began easily enough in our kitchen with my daughter and transpired into another Dartmouth ER visit and a prolonged stay. Days and nights chopped into mosaic pieces. MDs and RNs, the revolving cast of the Dartmouth surgical team, my daughters, pain meds, ice chips, me sitting up and begging for a patch-up to get me to my next chemo appointment… Get me out of this chronic patient repeat.

Now, five of the six chemo treatments completed, I am in the final haul. While my in-box filled up (thank you for your patience), and I was moved from room to room by kind people, I kept thinking of this cancer in a narrative arc. I had hit the section of story where the impossible commences. Before, things looked grim. But now, as protagonist in my own story, the arc swerves sharply, the longed-for light-at-the-end of the tunnel snuffs out, the path is hidden.

I’m not a writer for naught, for make-believe or play. I’m a writer because I know our lives tread meaningful albeit sometimes horribly hard paths. Lean in, I counseled myself, my shoulders far skinnier now but just as fierce. Use math. Get to the fifth infusion. Get to the sixth. Count down the finite days to the end of this treatment, which is, thankfully, eradicating the cancer. In the mosaic: my two daughters, the plastic IV tubing, the doctors in their masks, the ER nurse who stayed long past his shift in the middle of the night, holding my hand and assuring me that, yes, indeed, I would endure.

This is my story, but also the human story, in all our infinite variations of human desire, choice, the immutability of fate.

Sunny morning in our kitchen, birdsong, the fierce thrust towards spring.

Four Feet of Mud.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Friday afternoon, when the Fed Ex man drops off a package, I ask what he’s seen on his route, his perception of flood damage and how folks are faring. In places, he says, nearly nothing. In others, houses perch over streams.

This stranger keeps going — and I keep asking questions — about his experience in the national guard, a tour in Iraq, and then a month in New Orleans after Katrina.

We’re back in blistering July, and I’m sweaty and dirty from weeding in the garden. On our sandy hillside, this summer the grass flourishes, a benefit of months of rain. I’ve finally mowed the grass (hardly a top priority these days in our house), and that ineffable and sweetly delicious summer scent of cut grass washes around us.

Our conversation bends back to Vermont and our washed-out valleys, how Hardwick’s Walgreens had four feet of mud. He looks at me and ask how tall I am. It’s true; I’m not that much taller than four feet. For a moment, we stand there, two strangers, contemplating four feet of mud. Then he heads to his truck.

Which pieces of our world will go back together, and which won’t? It’s a metaphor for many of us, perhaps.

All the way I have come

all the way I am going

here in the summer field

— Buson

Wreckage, Human & Otherwise.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 19 Comments

There’s no one around the edges of town on Friday evening, save for a stranger in a brand-new leather jacket. He walks ahead of me.

Two weeks past the July flood, there’s stand-out heroes, and a lot of folks who stepped up in ways that are amazing, admirable, kind of jaw-dropping, honestly. But the flood unearthed all that pandemic misery, and so much more that we’d stuffed down, too. Similar — and yet, different, too. Piece by piece, my state is cleaning, hammering lives back together.

A young fox hurries along the jagged riverbank where lawn now meets abyss. The creature pauses, listens. I’m no threat, me with my hands sunk in my pockets, leaning back on my heels. The fox trots along.

The evening threatens more thunderstorms. I keep thinking of childbirth labor, how those waves of contractions bore me along mightily. Childbirth was the first time I’d understood so inherently that I’m as much a part of the universe as famed Helen of Troy, as that stranger walking ahead of me and disappearing around a broken-down scrapheap of a motel, as you reader, and my dear cats pawing a dropped ball of red yarn. Rain and more rain. Rising rivers. Even as the rain began pelting, I stood there, awestruck.