life

“Quite Serious”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

My neighbor runs out his back door, shouting and waving his arms. I’m working on my upstairs glassed-in porch. He cranks up the volume on VPR’s Morning Edition. I’m guessing he hopes the young woodchucks burrowing beneath his deck aren’t NPR fans.

Like my neighbor, I am a VPR fan. This morning, news of Iran dominates the air. As I labor to join noun to verb, I notice my heart beating at Steve Inskeep’s words. Eventually, I leave my cat sprawled on the windowsill and head downstairs to wash the dishes. I’ve listened to NPR my entire life. Heck, the radio was probably playing when my parents brought newborn me home from Presbyterian Hospital in Abuquerque. Little these days is good news.

This winter, I’ve written in this space about my obsessive struggle to remain among the living on this planet. Only now—two surgeries, six rounds of chemo, 11 hospitalizations later—do I realize the diciness of my determination to live. A few weeks ago, driving with my daughter, she showed me a lawn where she cried on a bench because I believed my mother would die. Every day now, as I begin by feeding my two cats and drinking coffee, I carry this winter, those months of spitting distance from my grave, within me. As at the beginning, my greatest worry was/is my daughters. So many months later, I understand how my life is connected intrinsically to so many others. That what lies before my eyes are the twig tips of stories.

In my younger, brasher years, I might have written about politics and conflict, but the Mideast is a place I’ve never been, with people I’ve never met, for whom I will never speak. Too, I’ve knocked around this planet long enough to know that violence changes the world, irredeemably. That the combination of deceit and anger and hubris wrecks destruction. And that cruelty wrought can never be undone. We hurtle onward. I keep listening.

June, and pink roses bloom against my house, planted by someone I never knew, perhaps the woman known as Grandma Bea buried in the adjacent cemetery’s crest. My daughters climb a mountain with a view of Vermont’s shimmering Lake Champlain and the emerald patchwork of farms stitched together. They return with a gift for me, a thorny rosebush with fragrant blossoms that fill my cupped hand. In the evening, shortly before dark, I walk in my bare feet, the long grass already cool with dew. High heat is predicted, the planet is surely burning up, but this ruby-and-gold sunset drags in a coolness. Lush, so lush this month. The butternut tree I planted stretches towards the apple someone else carefully cultivated and noted in pencil on the barn’s bottom wall. A record someone held dear.

In 1956, Allen Ginsburg wrote: “America this is quite serious.”

“Everything blooming bows down in the rain…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

We make the trek again to Dartmouth for a surgical consult, the sign-off after surgery. I’ve met numerous members of this team, but not this kind NP, who’s read my history and says, What an ordeal. I’m not expecting these words, and I pause. Last November, when was I first admitted to Dartmouth, I had unplanned surgery. That snowy November night, the surgeon spent so much time with me. Then her Fellow returned and answered my endless questions. In May, I had surgery again. Two bookends – that November night and this sultry summer day. I’ll be treated here for years, but my hope – and none of know squat about the future – is that I’ll never need a surgeon again.

I thank her and the surgical team and student entourage who appeared in all those ER and hospital floor rooms where I stayed – me, the reluctant patient, who tried to negotiate some other outcome than surgery. To my surprise, she’s grateful for my words, too. We try our best but it’s hard to know how we come across to patients. The surgeons who operated on me are trauma surgeons. My surgery was routine, but routine surgeries go south. Mine did not.

Afterwards, my daughter and I stop at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum. There’s a Georgia O’Keefe painting we want to see and two Monets. The current exhibit has mesmerizing photographs. This is a good day and a good visit. We eat sandwiches in King Arthur Flour’s patio, where so many families have pudgy babies tucked into a parent’s arm. We linger, talking about my mother who would have loved eating here.

So many of those drives on the interstate home, I slept, nodding in and out of conversation. My weak days are long passed, and we keep talking, the interstate edging near the Connecticut River and up on the ridge again. In June’s green, the drive no longer seems so desolate. Traffic here is always sparse. We pass a trailer of hay bales, a pickup with three wheelbarrows.

Enduring cancer turned my world (and my family’s world) inside out. In the first five-day continuous course of chemo, I forced myself to wash every morning. In those days, my hair had not yet fallen out. I was too weak to brush my hair, so I tied it at the nape of my neck. That month, my daughter cut what snarled hair remained. Those miserable uncertain November mornings, how grateful I was for hot water and soap, to have access to a brutal but hugely effective treatment, in a sterile hospital in one of the richest states in a phenomenally country. I made my choices, but I had choices.

In the inside-out world where I am now, I’m ticking through my list: profusely thank my oncologists and surgeons for saving my sometimes-surly life, tend my garden, figure out my youngest’s college bill, finish my book, accept the ravenous roaming woodchucks….. my domestic realm.

In our little end-of-the-road neighborhood, visitors come and go on my back deck, gardens on three sides, the wild pressing in on the fourth. My own nexus.

Everything blooming bows down in the rain:

white irises, red peonies; and the poppies

with their black and secret centers

lie shattered on the lawn.

~ Jane Kenyon

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

Seeking the Something New.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

A friend arrives with a box of seedlings, including tithonia, AKA Mexican sunflowers, a tall, brilliantly orange, hopeful plant. A few mornings later, more friends appear with seedlings and a pitchfork. Lucky, lucky me.

I am a gardener who allows the Johnny-jump-ups and forget-me-nots to spread where they like, pulling back a few and nestling in basil, scallions, poppies. Why unroot a flower? Eventually, I weed diligently, ruthlessly. The garden mirrors my approach to novel writing. My friends leave with their boxes filled with forget-me-nots as a gentle rain falls on the tender seedlings.

Every day is a further day from surgery and chemo, the days and night accumulating like pages read in a book. I put away the narcotics, the Tylenol, the ibuprofen. Mornings, I drink a single cup of café au lait. I sauté mushrooms, bake a quiche. I ask for a ride to drop off my car at the garage, worrying about walking up my hill, but picking it up is mostly downhill. I walk.

For a little bit yet, I’m a person of interest in this small town. The postmistress asks me, no, really, how are you? For months, the PO staff has stuffed my box with cards and books and sheaves of medical bills from two hospitals. I’m there to pick up a book of essays (a gift which quickens my heartbeat). I tell her I’m in remission, that word still awkward as it emerges from my throat. I want to add that remission does not mean cured, does not mean that this strange and uninvited cancer beast has left my body – and certainly not my soul. I don’t know this woman at all well, but she looks steadily at me, as if she understands what I’m thinking.

Here’s the thing: how afraid I was of cancer eight months ago; honestly, I’m still fearful of it. Yet, cancer rooted in me, infested my family, my friends, a great wide circle of people around me, including my readers here. This is not unique. In its myriad forms, cancer spreads widely. I lived for years with the putrifying secrets of addiction. I refuse to repeat that with cancer.

Last November, I thought I wouldn’t live to see spring. I did. If jaywalking doesn’t do me in, cancer certainly might. Or I might die as a scrawny old woman from a stroke or heart attack. In this rainy late spring/early summer, I’m grateful for the possibly random dice throw, for plants and gardeners, for an infinitude of people. Among these are the people who’ve shared their stories with me, of decades-ago cancer diagnoses, almost always offered sotte voce, as if not to tempt the fates. Their stories ring clearly: I endured, I transformed, I thrived. This possibility can be mine (maybe yours, too).

From Suleika Jaoad’s The Book of Alchemy:

But there are also moments when our internal compasses tell us it’s time to change course–to leave something behind and build something new…. Rebuilding is not easy…. But to me, rebuilding unfolds alongside becoming. It is crucial, if we want to keep evolving and flourishing, to get rid of things that are no longer serving us and make space for something new to grow.

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”