life

Backaches and all.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

Snow returns to Vermont; I remember an April 1st years ago when the snow fell so mightily our sugarhouse was hidden. I worried our toddler might get lost in the drifts.

These (early spring) afternoons, I walk around my garden where last autumn’s sunflower stalks still stand. The robins, those cheery birds, cluster. Redwing blackbirds sing joyously.

I’m nearly at my last chemo session – yes, counting down day by day, my simple math calculations and not-so-simple life. Mornings, I pull myself together to work; afternoons, I lie on the couch with my cat and read. The town library orders me interlibrary books. Recently, Blue, an illustrated memoir of St. Bart’s that I read in a few hours, a sojourn into a Caribbean vacation with a sweet family. I will be traveling nowhere outside the country, anytime soon, although I dream…

Where I am now is different terrain. My house has sheltered me (and my family) so warmly and kindly during this winter of disease. Now, I see where our house needs tending – paint on the barn, boards hammered back on the porch where the ice crashed. Every spring and summer, too, I plant more in the gardens, cultivating good living for birds and pollinators, not necessarily the woodchucks who come, unbidden. There will be no wars on my patch of hillside.

The bigger work for me now is healing; how happily I’ll shed medical appointments, the world of sickness, and savor my long walks again. My oncologist told me last fall that someday I’d forget I ever had lymphoma, and I’d forget him, too. Maybe someday if dementia drills into me (many many years from now). I would need to live a long long life if I were to forget this year.

In these winter months of cancer suffering, I’ve longed for many things, but prominent among these desires is to imbue this cancer with meaning. So now, as I’m beginning to contemplate my next steps, the spring and recovery phase, I’m determined to not slip into old habits or careless living. I mean nothing sentimental about this, as if plastering a gratitude sticker on my life will fix up my world.

Which way this will go is yet to be determined. Certainly, planting more perennials.

Stacking wood today

I thought how much I loved this life,

Backaches and all.

~ John Straley

Beyond words.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 25 Comments

A few days of streaming sunlight. I wander around outside, over the crusty remains of snow, the thawing grass. The garden yet lies covered. A junco picks at seed scattered beneath the feeder. This far along in the chemo, staring at the end, I’m hard used up, muscles withered, fat trimmed near to my bones. But here, here, alive.

My life – physically, mentally, economically, spiritually – has been crumpled up by disease. Now, ahead, lies the unfolding, the remapping. A friend visiting with her three-year-old, with daffodils and chocolate, points out what I’ve recently reckoned with: that my fierce independence, my raving insistence to live my life, on my own terms and never shaped to the pattern of any man (as Tillie Olsen wrote), has long been my lifeline, the way through lean times, betrayal, uncertainty. But cancer, that mighty devil, flipped that in my face and revealed it as my hollow weakness, too.

Day by day here, determined to remain free from the hospital, to finish to the final drop this course of so-called treatment, glean back what I can salvage. Four months ago, I didn’t think I would live to see this season’s Chionodoxa blue flowers. This afternoon, my daughter and I remarked that the walnut tree I planted seven years ago as a mere twig has plump buds on its lengthy branches. Buds, blossoms, leaves. Beyond words.

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.” ~ Rilke

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.

Go for a walk around the block?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 16 Comments

March 7, my father’s 88th birthday today in what is doubtlessly sunny New Mexico. So much for my plans, months ago, to visit him on this day.

Here’s the thing about living such a long life — I could pick countless numbers of things to write about, but what I woke up thinking about this morning was how my dad would often say, “Let’s go for a walk around the block.” At any time of day, we’d set off. Sometimes just up the street and actually around the block, or other afternoons on hours-long rambles through the woods behind our neighborhood. We walked in sunny days, through sleet, through knee-deep snow, in the sweet spring rain. It’s a habit all three of his children have continued our whole lives, and his four grandchildren, too.

Sunny, here, in northern Vermont, too, a day of such optimism that the blue sky choruses the inevitable promise of spring. And for my father, one of our favorite poems from the unmatchable Hayden Carruth.

Birthday Cake

For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you
had left uneaten for five days
and would have left five more before throwing it away.
It is early March now. The winter of illness
is ending. Across the valley
patches of remaining snow make patterns among the hill farms,
among fields and knolls and woodlots,
like forms in a painting, as sure and significant as forms
in a painting. The cake was stale.
But I like stale cake, I even prefer it, which you don’t
understand, as I don’t understand how you can open
a new box of cereal when the old one is still unfinished.
So many differences. You a woman, I a man,
you still young at forty-two and I growing old at seventy.
Yet how much we love one another.
It seems a miracle. Not mystical, nothing occult,
just the ordinary improbability that occurs
over and over, the stupendousness
of life. Out on the highway on the pavement wet
with snow-melt, cars go whistling past. 
And our poetry, yours short-lined and sounding
beautifully vulgar and bluesy
in your woman’s bitterness, and mine almost 
anything, unpredictable, though people say
too ready a harkening back
to the useless expressiveness and ardor of another
era. But how lovely it was, that time
in my restless memory.
This is the season of mud and thrash, broken limbs and crushed briers
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, articulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another. We love this house
and this hillside by the highway in upstate New York.
I am too old to write love songs now. I no longer
assert that I love you, but that you love me,
confident in my amazement. The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.

Finding Jesus with the star sunglasses…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Home again and somewhat shocked to see an ice floe leering off my back roof, not exactly the size of A23a Iceberg, but approximating it….

I’m under strict orders to drink broth, eat saltines, lie on the couch and read — the last two I’ve been perfecting for months now. As for the rest of the order (this is the only thing you should be doing, Brett), I’ve been quietly breaking rules for years. Now, intimate with cancer and my mortality, I push myself to obey the orders, stick with the plan, follow the course precisely.

The winter thaws. The iceberg chips, shifts. I step outside and lean against my house in my down jacket that is now limp and beaten down, a sad thing that, this quarantined winter, I’ve used so little. How will my thousand words a day fit into these orders? A grant deadline looms. When will I put on my clean shoes and that linen sweater I knitted and return to work? A cardinal perches on the railing.

In those 48 hours I spent in the Dartmouth ER, in a beige isolation room, an upbeat nurse with amazing eyelashes occasionally stopped in to cheer me and whoever of my daughters was there. On the TV, which we never turned on, she pointed out a tiny orange plastic duck, and told us someone had placed small figurines all over the hospital. “I found Jesus,” she said. “I know that’s weird, to go around a hospital saying I’ve found the Man, but really…” She reached in her pocket and pulled out an inch-high plastic Jesus in a long robe, black curls, gold star sunglasses. He smiled so widely his teeth gleamed.

In that same room, I spied a second duck, brought the ducks home with me and lined them up on the bathroom mirror beside the wooden blue elephant from the Metropolitan Museum my daughter gave me. Two tiny things that arrived in my pocket, after a week of manifold things, after months of many manifold more. All day, it will rain, the warmth softening that iceberg on my roof, falling on the deck and breaking the wood, or not. If it’s broken, we’ll repair it this summer. If not, we’ll move on to the next thing.

And utterly seasonally inappropriate, here’s a Galway Kinnell poem I’ve been loving:

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

Small town, rural hospital, snapshot, tinge of the seventies.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 16 Comments

Driving into the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, the soaring buildings with their blue-green windows inspire confidence. They’re just so darn topnotch, cream of the crest, but (in the cancer journey) I also use the nearby hospital, too.

At the local hospital, not far from our house, we arrive again in the dark, the crimson EMERGENCY sign glowing. My daughter leaves me at the door and disappears around the corner to park. Inside, it’s the same receptionist, who nods a little sadly to see me again. In the waiting room, there’s no one but me and the Mountain Dew machine, my reflection in the windows.

Months into this cancer, I’m familiar with the process (don’t ever put your feet on the ER floor without shoes!) of questions and fluids and meds, a room far away from the day’s flu and Covid patients. Here’s what has changed: the ER doctor and I know each other now. My brilliant oncologist calls me and thinks aloud, what’s going on now? and orders an unusual set of tests. The ER doctor listens, nods, yes, let’s try that. My daughter’s boyfriend appears. The three of us talk about xc skiing and DOGE.

I’ve crammed my backpack with my laptop and notebook, two books, and a few clothes. In the middle of the night, I’m admitted. The woman who takes me upstairs knows a longtime friend of mine. She tells me about growing up in eastern Montana. Wherever you go, she tells me, the sky is infinite. Vermont’s so small, I feel like I could put it in my pocket.

Having lived in the West, too, I sometimes chafe against the pocket-sidedness of Vermont but mostly I love it. I keep thinking of this woman’s description for these few days again, in this rural hospital that’s about the size of double pocket in the front of hoodie sweatshirt. The census is so low here the rooms are all singles. Each of the rooms where I’ve stayed seems to be finished with unique salvaged materials. Beadboard cabinets in my last room, painted glossy cobalt, line one entire wall. In this room, the window is trimmed with wooden rosette corners, the sill plastic faux marble.

The medical world is hurry up and wait, but this hospital leans back towards the 1970s. I drink Shasta ginger ale and chat with the LNA about the cold and maple sugaring. Here’s what changed in me: I see these people throwing everything they have at me. The hospitalist who advised me, just a day after the cancer was discovered, do not stay in bed; be part of the world. The social worker stops in and asks my daughter about her job. The chaplain and I talk Dostoyevsky and cats. The nurses who have survived their own savage cancers share their stories and let me ask my questions. I have so many questions. The questions narrow down to one: how will I survive?

Then I ask to leave. My daughter stops at the pharmacy for another prescription and texts that it will be a few minutes. I open the door and lean against her winter-salted car. I’ve been at this crossroads in this unremarkable section of town so many times. Across the road was the department store Ames where I bought this daughter her first pink ball so we could roll it between us, the baby version of Catch. In the Price Chopper parking lot, I used to meet people to exchange boxes of wedding favors in leaf or heart-shaped bottles, tied up with ribbons, for checks. Afterwards, I’d take my girls into Price Chopper and buy ice cream. Behind the pharmacy is a home center, where I’ll never go again, after my ex-husband absconded with his customers’ money and stiffed the home center… how many tens of thousands of dollars I never knew. I’d severed that cord by then. On the other side of the crossroads stands the hardware store where the girls and I used our pandemic stimulus money to buy a glass table and red umbrella for our back porch. We use those things every summer, nearly everyday.

Behind Price Chopper, craggy Elmore Mountain looms, where I and the girls and their friends have camped and hiked and swam for years. The gentlest of snowfalls sifts down, swirling. My long-legged daughter crosses the lot, shades on despite the overcast sky, grinning.