“In fear of death we lose out in life.”

April 24, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Yesterday, an acquaintance I’ve known for years and who I like and admire, asked me how I am, and then remarked calmly, I don’t think you ever get out of stage 4 cancer. He’s a man of clear mind who’s now into his tenth decade in this life, and his words were not unkind and not unfeeling: the reverse, I reckon.

But there are things in our lives we never leave. My mother, at the end of her long life, returned to her childhood. My siblings and I knew little about her childhood. We never knew her father who died a few months after I was born. As she approached her death, she returned to his memory, trying to unknot whatever painfulness she had held her whole life.

How easy to slip down these holes of despair. But the rope of the past is multi-stranded. My mother both loved and hated my sauciness, which surely originated from her. In my garden, still frost-cloaked each April morning, I planted Russian sage last July when I was healing slowly, day by each day, from the brutality of surgery and cancer. Will these long-stemmed beauties return this year? Will the woodchucks devour the sunflowers? Will the roses bloom profusely and claw my fingertips with their thorns? My little satchel of possibilities.

In fear of death we lose out in life. We stuff an owl with arsenic and leave it totally
perfectly not alive in the study, like something coveted privately by Calypso, like the
greatest line ever written, embalmed with iron, staring down at us from the filing
cabinet, never read aloud. What makes us despair is the impermanence of beauty. — Bianca Stone

The die is cast?

April 12, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Writing notes for a reading for Call It Madness, I scrawl in my notebook that this novel is jammed with secrets. Avah Lavoie, protagonist, stashes secrets of theft of longing, and she’s surrounded by secret-keepers, too. Early in the novel, I offer readers two clues. These questions underpin my life, too. No surprise.

The first that’s slipped into the narrative is the story of beavers in New England, how these creatures and their laborious dams once flooded New England, rendering that birch bark canoe a viable form of transportation. When the craze for beaver hats set in, the beavers were trapped nearly to extinction, drying up the land. The story of the past shapes the terrain where we live and how we see the world.

The second is Caesar’s line Alea iacta est — the die is cast. The machination of fate. It’s a question that’s arced through my life since I was a teenager, immersed in Russian novels. Now, from my Vermont house, in the tender dawn, pearly crescent moon hanging low in the horizon, the stars snuffing out as light grows, the robins striking up their day’s singing, this line returns to me. Is fate sealed for this country where, by circumstance, I live, a madman as a leader, intent to wreck destruction and pain, war crimes? Around me, the questions reverberates through everyone: how to live?

Sunday morning, the earth after this fierce winter softening, the daffodils pushing up through black earth, the delicate snowdrops pearly, persistent, the strength of these slender stalks a strain of secret, too.

“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.” — Leo Tolstoy

Thawing earth, tempered heart.

April 1, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

My neighbor and I kvetch about what the spring thaw reveals: dogshit and stove ashes running into pools of black ink. The mud is a housekeeper’s bane and a gardener’s promise. In the rain, we swap stories of illness and books and parenting. These days, I keep T. S. Eliot’s words in my pocket.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Inexorably (and grateful, so grateful to be here, writing), my days unfold towards that first-year mark of emerging from chemo, from the brutality of drugs that both scorched and healed my body. In rickety last summer, I started yoga classes, at first hardly able to climb the stairs to the third floor with its windows that overlook Main Street and the Village Diner and the blinking yellow light intersection. In this mindful class, those ER visits appear again, drift through my thinking, vanish. In my fifties, now, like anyone, I’ve lived through the gamut. The most fearful times of my life, I was often quiet, utterly focused, like the terrifying afternoon when my youngest baby had an allergic reaction and a stranger rushed us to the ER.

Enduring the chemo was like that, too, so many months of cowering beneath a rushing train, nearly always on some variation of the pain scale, intent on the single goal of survival. I longed for the everyday world. In this were small bright gifts. My daughter’s friend would sometimes raid my post office box and bring me books and letters and medical bills, news of the outside world, literary fodder.

Disease is a strict teacher, with lessons of endurance and patience, of non-negotiable acceptance. My world constricted so often, breathing through pain to survive a little more, a little longer. One afternoon in April, my daughters walked me outside the hospital. We sat on a bench beneath a profusely blossoming apple tree. Through the white-petaled flowers with their ruby hearts, the blue sky. We sat and talked. For ten minutes? Half an hour? What does it matter? The limitless spring sky, the infinite mystery.

April this year, not otherwise
   Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
   Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
   Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Life can only be understood backwards…

March 27, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Kierkegaard wrote that famous line, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” This is the story of my life, and probably of yours, too. I’m a few weeks shy of a year away from the last chemo session. During those hours of infusion, I dozed, watching cardinals and house wrens through the cancer center window. That night, I slept profoundly, believing done, done, not yet realizing an excruciating surgery would lear up unavoidably a month later, that I would phone my siblings and beg for their arrival, that I needed fresh horses, the calvary’s arrival, that the end to these months of cancer treatment seemed impossible.

A year later, I’m still here, living forward, still waking before dawn to reckon what kind of light might kindle the day. A year ago, I could hardly lift my laptop. Now, I text a friend to borrow a belt sander. I am determined to lean my shoulders and back into revitalizing this old wooden floor that had been hidden for years beneath vinyl.

Cancer reshaped me in multiple ways, diluted my rage, cushioned my prickliness, whetted my fierceness to entertain no truck with catty foolishness. Disease fed my solitude and forced me to reach out and grasp hands. And now a sander.

A friend recorded Vermont’s poet laureate Bianca Stone speaking about Robert Frost. The recording is up for a few weeks on the local radio station, WGDR, on the March 22 Bon Mot show; it will feed your heart.

And one of my favorite Frost poems:

Into My Own

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true.

Strange gift.

February 25, 2026 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

A year ago, I couldn’t manage the three steps onto my back porch without holding a daughter’s hand. A reversal of those early parenting years when I held my toddlers’ teeny fingers as my children learned to walk and then, quickly, to run. A year later, my oldest and her partner load up our skis, and we head out for a seven-mile trek. I once thought idly of skiing, a mere pastime, nothing more. Now, it feels nothing less than miraculous.

A year ago, my daughters and the partner propped me together through the darkest months of my life. In those months while I endured chemo, little bits of lights and happiness trickled towards me, as if falling down an ancient stone-walled well. Sunlight in my living room, in the hospital halls, (never in the subterranean ER), flash of cardinals, the boxes of books and gifts of miso and cards and checks that kept me alive.

Post-ski, I feed my mewling cats and eat blood oranges, then lie on the couch and read Jonathan Buckley’s One Boat. I’m relaxed as if I’ve swum with a friend in a Vermont pond, and then we linger on the shore, talking about nothing and everything. But it’s February yet and snowfall is circling again. We’d skied from hayfields down into the forest and circled around and around. At one moment, I’d hit fatigue, where I wondered if I would emerge from these deeply snowy woods. It’s a place I’m now beginning to know intimately, where I know the life I clutch so fiercely can so easily slip away. I was reminded recently of Robert Frost’s lines that “the best way out is through,” a minute guide for human life. On this day, all the human things.

Small Celebrations.

December 13, 2025 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Each morning presents a new skein of yarn, knotted and jumbled as if carelessly carried in the bottom of my backpack, beneath leaking and softening apples, a sandwich wrapped in wax paper whose crumbs have escaped, the shuffling of notebooks, pricks of pens.

A friend asks me to xc ski this weekend. I pause and then warn her of possible abject failure. Can I balance? Can I even snap boots into bindings? Talking, I think of my ski boots in the upstairs closet. A year ago, a knitting companion asked to borrow needles: an inconceivability. A year ago, I couldn’t walk up my house’s wooden staircase, let alone swing open the closet door and shuffle through needles. I might as well have considered mining for gold with a plastic spoon. Pulling together boots, skis, poles: that alone would mark a kind of success. I am a lousy skier, but the glide of ski over fresh snow has given me so much pleasure. I imagine again stopping at the trails on my way home from work, how the cold winter twilight gleams on snow.

A theme that emerges in my writing over and over is order versus chaos. How laboriously I endeavor to keep the chaos from my life, from vacuuming the ashes and bark shreds around my woodstove to ordering my work life. Be productive. Get my work done…

When I first emerged from surgery and chemo this summer, I flung myself into living with buoyancy and joy. Now, I am in the longer stretch — grateful to be here, but mindful of sinkholes. A longstanding quarrel in town rises up again and grabs at me. I remind myself, this was not my doing and not my requirement to undo. What I do, instead: I force myself up from the couch, lace up my boots, and walk. In town, I fill my backpack with library books, zip my coat against my throat as the gloaming sprinkles down. I take the longer walk home through the neighborhood built near the coal-dark Buffalo Mountain, these houses built for Hardwick’s granite workers, a hundred years and more ago, once filled with hardscrabble people from other places, seeking not a fortune but a livelihood. The kind of work where a slip or accident had horrible consequences. I pass a house with a family of small children, strung with glowing lights, sleds jammed in snowbanks. The empty house where the old woman with the two barking dogs disappeared in my illness, and another empty, for sale. On my road, I’ve strung red globes in an apple tree, bits of brightness, small celebrations, better than order.