mental-health

Courage Crumbs.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I began my Call It Madness book tour on a steamy June evening, traveled all summer around the state and into New Hampshire, and ended in Greensboro, a ten-minute drive north of where I live, on a late afternoon, the August day promising coolness as the day ended, a room full of people I know and some I don’t know. I was graced with affection and curiosity.

Along the way, I’ve been fortunate to have friends and family make this trek with me, take time from their lives — and sometimes I traveled alone — that well of solitude that both sustains and sometimes frightens me.

At this last reading, in the town where I walked around the lake, beginning to write Call It Madness in my mind, think through this story of a farm lost four generations ago and a young, rough-edged woman seeking her own salvation, the audience asked thoughtful questions. At one point, I heard myself say, when I had cancer, and of course that is not true. The pronunciation of cure, if I am so fortunate, is far yet in the future. But looking around the room, I knew pieces of so many people’s lives — losses of their own dear ones, of addiction and financial duress, of the persistence of juggling a creative life and earning a living.

This morning, reading David Biro‘s One Hundred Days, I chance upon his words (as a physician and patient of a rare blood disorder) that medicine is art and science. I benefitted from both: decades and decades of painstaking research provided me treatment and the complex art of my oncologist ushered me through the nightmare of that treatment. In the deepest nadir, he appeared at my bedside at a time when numbers meant nothing to me: before dawn or late evening, or maybe noon. I told him I didn’t think I could continue, and he simply studied me, silently, while I scraped down into that threadbare pocket of my courage and pulled out another crumb. He waited for my resolve to thicken.

Likewise — and yet utterly different — writing. Late August, the crickets singing down the end of summer, I’ve lucky to have a house of family and friends this weekend, and then perhaps some lying in the sun, reading my way through the stack of books I’ve acquired on my bookstore tour. I’d imagined my fifties as a decade of some calm after kid-rearing, divorce and the scramble to set my girls and myself steadily in a beloved house, on a financial footing where I was not always chewing a thumbnail. Instead: a life like a bouquet of sunflowers, staggeringly beautiful, the leaves’ edges fading.

After reading, I stood in the parking lot with a friend, our conversation continuing in the way of friends who have known each other for years. For this moment, I relished how I felt held in this Vermont village, one blossom in a handful of so much.

“At these moments sufferers desperately want to escape from their holes, the silence and loneliness, and return to the world we share with others…” David Biro

The full extremes.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

The days are hurrying right up to that mark of a year of healing from chemo. After that final treatment, I lived into a little lull where I allowed myself to believe that all would be okay again, but the need for surgery roared up, too. Much as I fought against this — and, honestly, my fighting was from fear of a horrible outcome and, perhaps even more, if I’m dead honest, was my terror of YET MORE PAIN — but as I said, much as I fought against this, I eventually ended up back at Dartmouth in a hospital bed, my daughters beside me wondering when the heck this was going to end. That huddle of surgeons appeared. It was, after all, a teaching hospital.

I said no. The surgeon said, I put you on Tuesday’s schedule. Doubtlessly, he was satisfied to finally, after those months, to get to work repairing me. I stared out the window and knew there was no way I would ever make it home. So I said yes.

But a year… a year ago, I was somewhat seeing a man who was more interested in me than I was in him. I was interested in admiring the daffodils and learning to walk again. I was interested in never returning to the hospital again. I had other things on my mind, too. I was rewriting a book, and, since I had lived, I had to start earning a living again.

It’s been a remarkable year, suffused with radiant joy, with gratefulness to walk and eat and read and write and sleep—without pain. And a year filled, too, with the darkest thoughts I’ve ever experienced, as if the cancer had broken every inhibition, allowed me to feel and fear all the rottenness I’ve kept away for so long. This is not something I’ve written about here, but I keep bearing in mind my oncologist’s prescription: Go and live your life, Brett. A year later, the word that surfaces is fragility. I live in a world that bandies resilience—resilience of soul, resilience of Flood Ready Vermont!, resilience of community and systems. A year later, I know intimately the thinness of energy and health, the scantness of my days, your days, our days. All of it, I know; live all of it, such largess.

“The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion-not to look around and say, ‘Look at yourselves, you idiots!,’ but to say, ‘This is who we are.” — Anne Lamott

Making more tracks than necessary…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

I’m standing on a dirt road, looking up at the blue sky unblemished by any smear of cloud as my friend wraps a scarf around her face, when a Subaru speeds over the crest. Jolted, I lurch to the roadside.

$750k in cancer treatments and I’m felled by wrong-place, wrong-time on an otherwise untraveled back road? Not this afternoon.

Bitter cold warnings jam the local news. In snow-drenched Vermont, February marks winter’s swing, where the daylight begins to rush back, the light tinged with warmth, suffused with this second-half-of-winter’s promise that seeds will stir again. In the meantime, I take off my mittens as we walk and talk about writing and people and the value of a precise query letter.

We step aside for intermittent vehicles, a silver pickup, a friend’s Prius, a Corolla with split exhaust. A year ago, I’d been sprung from a stay at Dartmouth-Hitchcock and returned to my cancer-and-chemo habits that shifted from bed to couch to what felt like a Herculean effort to open my notebook at the kitchen table and scrawl a few lines, my shaky pencil a balloonist’s line that tethered me to the world. What I didn’t know then was that the hard things I’d endured in my life, some of my making, some not so (sobriety, a divorce, selling a house and lighting out for new territory with my daughters, writing and selling books, the pandemic, the constant wear of subpar home economics), was training for the next 10 weeks. In what is now a blur of that back-and-forth from home to Dartmouth, at one point my oncologist’s eyes widened just the slightest; I wondered if my life was tapering to its end. Was my body about to be driven under?

But not last winter. Not this sunny afternoon, either. What rich luck to walk on a Vermont ridgeline road, the snowy mountains in the distance, finches in a roadside maple. To work, to share a plate of roasted salty Brussels sprouts with a friend, bake a chocolate cake for my daughter’s birthday.

I will never escape this cancer, whether I live a year more or thirty. Its fearsome and awesome power churns through my heart. How it revealed unequivocally to me the brutality and dearness of this world.

Meanwhile, as I cherish these days, these hours and minutes, the country where I live hemorrhages, the last moment of a man’s life pounding through the chaos, his words to a stranger, “Are you okay?” illuminating suppurating wounds. All the things, sadness and delight and such sorrow, the radiant sunlight. Each of us, moving along our paths: separate, together.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
― Wendell Berry

The Survivable.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

It’s dark as the inside of my fist at five o’clock. I’m driving into spitting snow, my brand-new studded snow tires grinding. My companion and I are talking about all kinds of things — how language shapes our worldview and the personalities of tuxedo cats and dentists. I’m driving more by faith than anything else, not particularly fast, headlight beams filled with snow. As if cued, a deer waits in the forested roadside. I slow, then stop, people and deer staring at each other. Then the deer vanishes into the woods.

On this backroad, I’ve passed no other vehicle save a UPS truck, so I wait for a moment for the deer to return, for a companion to leap across the road.

My passenger says, apropros of some conversational thread, that I’ve shed bad karma in my months of cancer treatment, of struggling to survive. My devotion has always been my pencil or keyboard, not the meditation cushion. And yet…

I roll my car forward through the swirling snow. I’ve long adhered to that ancient Aristotelian notion that action defines character. When I realized I had cancer, a year ago, I was rapidly veering towards sepsis. I could not indulge any opinion. To survive, I had to strip away illusion. What were the facts? What was the wisest way forward? None of this was simple.

Cancer narrowed my world. Through weakness and the possibility of a fatal infection, I was confined to my few downstairs rooms, to Emergency Rooms, and hospital rooms. But unexpectedly, cancer widened my life, too, gave me the gift of friendships forged in rough experiences, reinforced for me that this world is propelled by cause-and-effect, that actions have consequences, and that I often grasp only the slenderest knowledge.

New England November drives us into the season of early darkness, blackness so profound our eyes struggle to navigate. When I left Dartmouth-Hitchcock after that last long stay, I felt old, aged in bone and flesh, and concurrently, miraculously restored to my twenties, those years when my lust for living and creating was ravenous and I did not yet comprehend the immutability of time. At the end of this evening drive, I stand for a few moments in this velvety and freezing darkness, snow hissing on the hot car hood, a slender strand of white lights twinkling in my kitchen window. I clench my mittens in my cold hands. Around me, beguiling night.

“When you survive something that was thought to be unsurvivable, the obvious is gained. You have your life—you have time. But it’s only when you get there that you realize your survival has come at a cost.”
― Suleika Jaouad

And last… my story “Tiny Towns” appears in the new collection: 2050: Vermonters Take a Swipe at the Future. Reading tonight in St. Johnsbury….

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

Start again…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Twenty years ago, I wandered on an early morning walk. Mightily pregnant, I didn’t go far, merely down to our sugarhouse and through the white pines. I looped back through the garden. I was about to have a second baby — that very day — and, second time around, I knew those solitary walks would — for an undetermined time — be a distant memory.

In a break in the rainy weather, a friend walks me through the cemetery, past the little league field, and down the hill into town. At Front Seat Coffee, she buys cookies, and we sit in the courtyard, eating and talking, the courtyard where I’ve passed so many hours with my laptop. Slowly, we walk back up the hill. Three robins perch on the elementary school’s fence.

Six weeks ago, another friend walked me to the Galaxy Bookshop, the first walk I’d taken to town since last November. I picked up a copy of Dostoyevsky at the Galaxy, and finished the novel in Dartmouth, waiting for surgery. The surgeons teased me, Why such light reading?

One more lesson from cancer: how intensified the world becomes. Slip back, start again. Repeat, repeat. But isn’t that one way of the world? There’s plenty more ways — a crash, a sudden halt, a perilous nonstop descent — but often our lives are fits and starts.

I remind myself, Try to learn something.

This day dawns overcast, broody with the promise of rain, the world lush with spring green and birdsong. To keep myself and my cats happy, I light a fire in my stove, brew coffee, consider the day. As I recover, my old demons of uncertainty have woken, too. My walking companion counseled me to narrow my energy to the actual day. Help was recently sent fortuitously to me; this morning, as I mixed powdered sugar and butter for cake frosting, I reminded myself, Be grateful; use your luck wisely. Savor this day.

At Twenty-Eight

By Amy Fleury

It seems I get by on more luck than sense,

not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood,

breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud.

I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance.

At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance

as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude

she counts as daylight virtue and muted

evenings, the inventory of absence.

But this is no sorry spinster story,

just the way days string together a life.

Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan.

Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry.

I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights,

singing like only a lucky girl can.