memoir

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.

Giving the slip….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 23 Comments

Back again at Dartmouth, anyone entering my room dons a yellow gown, inadvertently hiding staff name tags. Two nurses enter yesterday and pause. My daughter and her boyfriend stand at my bed’s foot.

A nurse asks, Are you two the main medical team?

The three of us look at each other. In these days where not much has been funny at all, I’m tempted to roll with this, but my daughter jumps in and says, We’re family.

Oh, the nurse says, the Main Team. You looked so intent.

I add, Talking politics….

I’d been in the ER for two nights. The fact that I didn’t care is evidence of how lousy I felt. Due to my contagious infection, I’d been squirreled away. Wheeled through the hallways, I see how jammed this place is, people waiting in hallways, tucked into corners.

In these days, my daughters arrive with their cheery energy, with stories of their lives, their patience with me. I tell them my dream to start walking again…. A few warm days and I’m imagining the four feet of snow have vanished into mud. Not so.

My girls laugh. We’re going to have to Apple chip our mother so she doesn’t wander off….

No fear of my wandering in the (very near) future. But how I’m hungering for that. Just where, exactly, would I look for that chip? Under my boot sole? In the hem of my jacket? So I can give the slip when spring calls…..

We are every experience we’ve ever had…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A sunny morning, I’m at a place I’ve never been before, a sizable post-and-beam gallery at the end of a road. A fenced vegetable and flower garden shines orange and gold. A marble bust smiles mysteriously.

I love this about Vermont: these unexpected pockets of mighty talent. The woman’s house is built around the gallery — a beauty of wood and stone and glass. We talk for a while, and we discover that her artist parents were from the same midwest area as my father — Detroit — and then she opens the gallery and takes me in. Let me say here: I’ve been around the block a few times, seen my share of museums and art; I’m also feeling this sunny morning like the dirt road my Subaru tires pounded into, driving uphill.

The gallery ceiling soars in a peak. The wooden space holds the owner’s and her deceased parents’ work. She allows me walk through the metal sculptures wordlessly. Then I stand beside an oil portrait of a woman wearing a black and red dress that reminds me of a velvet blouse I bought for a friend, many years ago, when she graduated from college. The woman in the painting rests her chin on her fist.

The owner looks at me. “It’s always the females who are drawn to her.”

“She’s me.” Woman of a thousand and one sleepless nights, bread baker, hearth tender, the woman who swam under the luscious full harvest moon. Woman hard as these back roads, fragile as coreopsis.

We walk upstairs and finish the tour. Before I leave, though, I stand again before this portrait, a long soulful moment. “Gracious,” I say, “gracious.”

“…we are everything, every experience we’ve ever had, and in some of us, a lot of it translates and makes patterns, poems. But, my God, we don’t even began to touch upon it. There’s an enormous amount, but we can touch such a little.” – Ruth Stone

Saving…. Who?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

One recent morning, on the lawn of the former schoolhouse where I work, signs appeared on the triangle green: Save Town Hall. Shortly afterward, with black spray paint, someone altered the signs to: Save Town.

This building has been around since before Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914. The entire top floor is a gymnasium, the middle floor four classrooms, the basement originally must have housed a coal furnace. After a $14k heading bill one winter for a building largely empty, I urged the Selectboard to consider other options. Oh, the furor that suggestion has now caused.

All summer, walking into the basement, I kept saying, I smell mold, I can’t work in a basement, I can’t think straight, can’t breathe, in a repetition that was doubtlessly whiny and certainly dull. But like the people arguing around this building, the building isn’t stagnant, either. I take my laptop upstairs to the empty rooms, where it’s me and the dusty windows, the paint shedding from the pressed tin walls and ceilings, the beadboard molding higher than my head.

In this wet, wet summer, mold blooms, and I rally the tiny office staff. Let’s move! I grab my jade plant. In a few hours, we’ve moved upstairs into the empty rooms, opening the windows and letting in the sunlight and breeze. I prop open the doors and sweep up cobwebs. Behind us, we leave so much. In our rouge occupation, we women set up housekeeping. I take off my shoes and walk barefoot over the maple floors .

We hire a crew to move the heavy things, and the men walk around remembering when they went to school in these rooms. Art classroom here, lunch there. All day long, with the doors open, the public wanders in and offers suggestions and stories.

A woman asks what we need. I’d like a pair of kittens here, frankly, or maybe a small old dog who wouldn’t mind sleeping on the rug in the sunlight.

Save Town? A question that opens up into a Jacob’s Ladder of questions….. in the meantime, we’re at least moving up into the light….

Imagining a fox, two strangers in a canoe…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A fox runs out in front of me as I leave the library, so quick the creature might have been my imaginings in the night. Upstairs, people are still talking and laughing, remnants from the Selectboard meeting. Behind me, the man who lives down the road, with neither water nor electricity and is often at the library at night, his phone plugged into an outlet in the foyer that’s left unlocked, perhaps for this reason, says, “Saw it, huh? Fox.”

The sunset has simmered down to a liquified gold spill in the darkness. I pull into the beach. I’m alone here, and I get out of my Subaru and lie down on the wet sand. I can feel the damp sand clump into my hair. The waves lap. The spill of light shrinks. The crickets are doing their sizzling thing, and goddamn, here it is again, end of August, a goodbye to the sunflowers not far in the offing.

I spent so many hours of my mothering life at this beach, and now this summer has slipped by without a single visit to this particular beach. The sun goes down. And here’s the weird thing: while I’m lying there, dampening, dampening, wondering what’s up with the universe anyway? Why does it always feel like loss, loss, loss, a canoe paddles by. In a funk, I don’t bother to sit up and chat with strangers, but the couple steers their craft right onto the shore and asks what’s up with me….

So, I sit up and talk.

Turns out, even strangers, we have strangely similar intersecting points. In the dark, the lake lapping at their canoe, we stand talking while the stars blink on, just a few, in the cloudy night. Then, instinctively, as if in some kind of pact, we reach out and shake hands. Then I’m off to my home and my hungry cats, and the couple paddles on…. maybe an imagining, maybe not….