memoir

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

The first green of spring…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Spring fever – and the green is barely beginning in my patch of Vermont. Southernly, along the Connecticut River, we find greening grass in Lebanon, the hillsides washed with fattening buds. Perhaps especially because I am (finally! finally!) beginning to heal, my body aches to rake and tend, to bend down and finger budding flowers. The photo above is a tease. We’re close, but my daffies aren’t yet unfolded.

Too, we are a ways from marsh marigold, that swamp flower with profuse greenery and gold blossoms, but here’s one of my favorite David Budbill poems, so good it’s worth reading over and over…

The First Green of Spring

Our walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh marigold,
this sweet first green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting
to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life,

harbinger of things to come. Now we sit at the table munching
on this message from the dawn which says we and the world
are alive again today, and this is the world’s birthday. And

even though we know we are growing old, we are dying, we
will never be young again, we also know we’re still right here
now, today, and, my oh my! don’t these greens taste good.

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

Determined to do/the only thing you could do…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 24 Comments

When I was six, I dropped a large wooden board on my toe, right where the nail emerges. My mother lifted me up and soaked my foot in the bathroom sink in Epsom salts. I cried fiercely, and my mother said she wished she could take the pain from me. Impossible, of course. Later, I lost the toenail.

The night before my last chemo infusion, I woke thinking of my mother who died nearly a year ago. She never knew I had cancer. Of all my family, only my mother endured chemotherapy, at age 80. Like so many mothers and daughters, we had a tangled and complicated relationship, sometimes fierce, sometimes outright silly and joyous. Not knowing about my cancer was one thing she was spared in her life, at least. No one seeks cancer, but in this long and snowy winter, I was spared the misfortune of being a parent of a sick child. Anything can change in this world, at any moment, but for now….

Recently finished with chemo treatments, how grateful I am to Dartmouth and its staff for their exquisite care. How humbled and thankful I am for the people who wrapped around me – some of whom I’d never met before. To write that cancer changed my life would sound trite. The deeper truth is that this disease will be with me for the remaining days of my life. But my life is in the present tense. I have not changed. I am changing. How blessed I am to be here.

… little by little…
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.

~ Mary Oliver

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

A cup of tea, surrounded by ice, broken boards.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

In the pale blue dawn, I wake with the taste of wild mushrooms in my mouth. In my dream, I’m eating tender stems from a soft paper bag. In the non-dreaming chemo world, I’m temporarily forbidden from dining on fresh anything from the produce world, but in this nubbly dream I munch on, relishing the residual taste of dirt, the forest itself.

I open my eyes. Day 4 – oh, I am counting these 21 days until the sixth of these six chemo sessions – Day 4, and through my window, geese wing across the sky. These past few days, spring blew in, fierce sun. On my back deck, broken by ice, a friend stopped by yesterday. I made tea, and we talked about this and that, kids and disease and politics, when we might plant spring peas. On my desk waits a cardboard box of wildflower seeds, a gift for this summer.

Spring is radiant light and also brokenness. The ash buckets trailing coals, the deck joists smashed by the roof’s ice, the barn still desperately in need of paint. Me, too, broken, with my few hours of clarity in the mornings, the stumbling way I’m heading towards this final treatment. Around me, too, the remains of this winter: people who have helped me more than I could have imagined, others who have distanced themselves, the disease itself, perhaps, too much, the leer of mortality a shivering thing. All that is neither here nor there. The cancer has stolen a share of my vitality, my economic steadiness, a winter of my life. And yet, all these pinwheeling days and nights as I’ve traversed this tunnel – what an infinitely rich journey, one I never would have booked a ticket to join.

My daughter sends word of singing redwing blackbirds. Spring, mightier than winter’s brawn. The season of planning, putting things back together, rearranging and cleaning, of tipping our eyes up to the sun, relishing the light.

…. Ariel Gore repeatedly quotes Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals in her Rehearsals for Dying. In these lines, I was reminded how we each respond to crisis in others’ lives, too, from the soil of our lives.

Each woman responds to the crisis that breast cancer brings to her life out of a whole pattern, which is the design of who she is and how her life has been lived.