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Nurses.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 22 Comments

If you don’t know nurses, you will, or someone you love will. In my past year of cancer-and-chemo appointments, of those dozen hospital stays, in variations of days to weeks, the nurses were my very best friends. Nurses cajoled me to eat chicken soup and drink water (even a sip, just try); they were kind to me and looked out for my daughters. They taught us the ropes of the hospital ship: the habits of doctors and surgeons, how to adjust a bed and order food, find the light switches, turn up the room’s heat, find warm blankets. They offered orange juice and sandwiches to my daughters and hotel vouchers. The nurses told me I would live.

Nurses taught me about IVs, how not to bend my arm, what downstream occlusion meant, and when I must absolutely ring immediately for a nurse. They helped me to shower when I couldn’t stand, and never laughed when I said I forgot I had no hair. But they did tell funny stories and made me laugh. When I had a terrifying reaction to a chemo drug that was absolutely necessary for me to endure, a nurse sat with me for hours.

There was that terrible ED visit when I couldn’t stop throwing up from pain, and I was too weak to talk, and the nurse stayed long after his shift ended, holding my hand while I cried. There was yet another awful stay in the ED, those three nights in the room with the beige metal walls and the heat that wouldn’t turn off, and the nurse and the MD together figured out a pain med plan that brought me back to my body, that made the cancer bearable again.

Another nurse helped me get discharged on a spring day when I pleaded to go outside and see the apple blossoms, to have sunlight and wind on my face; she arranged for my daughter to sit with me on a bench and sip hibiscus tea, and she arranged for the hotel room where I slept all afternoon and then traveled in the morning across the road again, back to the cancer center for more chemo. She did this to help me heal. The chemo nurses tend the frail and the hopeful, the recovering and the dying. I had no port, so my arms were bruised and scabbed from months of sticking, and these fine nurses turned my forearms over and over and never failed me. Who in your life never fails you? They took such care.

I could write on and on. The nurse that first visit to the ED, who knew from a scan that I had metastatic cancer before I did. He walked in my room and looked at my daughters with such compassion. We did not know, but he did. He knew the hardship that lay ahead of my dear daughters.

The nurses, unfailingly, cared me as one of their own. I have notes in my journals, names and stories of strangers who cared so tenderly for me and my daughters, but really what I have is gratitude, admiration, and such sorrow for the unnecessary murder of one of our tribe.

The Goddamn Gray, the Brilliance of Language.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

A year ago, my daughter was driving me to the local ER, yet again, under the frigid winter sky. Wordless, I leaned my head against the side window of her Subaru, staring at the faraway pricks of stars vanishing and reappearing among the clouds. In the darkness, I fixated on one thought—the white hospital bed, the clear liquid drugs that would make the pain cease—and held to that, my lifeline. Cancer-and-chemo, in its infinite complexity, is a monotone landscape. In all those months, my existence was the blackness of pain, the temporary light of relief-from-pain, the crimson drug injected into my veins. Occasionally, a cardinal at a feeder, blood oranges, and then I couldn’t eat those, either, and I remained alive on Saltines and water.

I keep thinking of those below zero nights as I drive this night to the opposite end of town. There, with a friend in a place where I’ve never been, we eat drunken noodles and green curry, and then drive again through the darkness and the drifting snow that’s no threat, simply prettiness. At the Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, we settle into the dining hall with the residents. We’re greeted warmly, and the room is scented with the lingering remains of a savory dinner, of coffee and wine and the fragrance of flowers likely from the tables freshly scrubbed. This is a dear place, where I’ve been lucky to stay and work hard, meet friends and share stories about creativity, its hardness and joy.

Rigoberto González reads magnificently, his words, reminding me of when I was a teenager reading James Joyce for the first time, thinking yes, yes, this is what writing can do, push us into a place where we glimpse the world for a moment in all its shimmering and confounding complexity, its immense sorrow, utter fun, or the way a hand plucks a pebble from a river and holds it dripping and glistening to the sunlight.

At home, I stand in the darkness that is sodden with cold, a forerunner of the mighty freeze rushing this way. The crescent moon pushes against the clouds. In those underworld months, the goddamn gray occasionally scattershot with goldfinches exploding from bare branches, my fate might easily have veered another path. A storm and brutal cold loom over this nation submerged beneath political nefariousness.

This terrible disease, this exacting instructor, taught me brutal lessons. Among these, savor these draughts of warmth, recognize heart. Know this value. Do not disparage.

“Every person with a body should be given a guide to dying as soon as they are born.”
― Anne Boyer

Call It Madness

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 25 Comments

My newest novel’s advance copies arrived in a great big box at the post office that I hefted on my shoulder. The postmistress said, “You wrote another book? How cool is that.” Indeed. Then she wondered if I could carry out this box that she described as nearly large as myself. I laid the box on the passenger seat and then walked across the street to the co-op where I bought an orange and peeled it and ate the sweet sticky fruit in a drippy wet snow.

Call It Madness? A novel about a young woman who realizes her mother had spun lies all her life—a grandfather who hadn’t died, a beloved house that hadn’t sold, only tumbled apart with rot and rodents. How does she get out of the madness-making of family and salvage some shreds of happiness?

June 30 the book will be released from Regal House Publishing. You can find it at my beloved local bookstore, the Galaxy Bookshop, or from the big A here.

Here’s the opening page….

White Quartz

2016

I didn’t know what made my parents drive from Bellingham to faraway Vermont the summer I turned four. I had never met my great-grand-father Opa until that afternoon my mother rolled our station wagon down Breadseed Lane. Earlier that day, a stranger had helped my parents change a flat tire on the New York turnpike, but the spare was a misfit. For hours, our car had been thumping while I stared through the backseat windows at the trees and fields passing by, pondering the puzzle of that strange word breadseed. Could seeds blossom into loaves?

We hadn’t stopped for lunch, and I was hungry. Was this Opa character cooking us dinner? Turned out, he was not.

In a rain that was just beginning to let up, the old man stooped in his yard beneath an enormous pine tree, fists curled behind his suspender buckles. I was not quite yet four, remember, and I knew suspenders only from picture books. In a strange coincidence, I had asked my mother for a pair the last Christmas. She had laughed and said suspenders only existed in fairy tales about grandfathers who were woodcutters and chased away starving wolves.

I loved that trip so much that the next summer I begged to return to Opa and his house that smelled of sugary rotting apples. I whined, Please, Mama, please. Which apartment we lived in then I’ve long forgot-ten, but in my memory, I’m sitting on the floor. At the end of the galley kitchen, a glass door streams in cloudy light. I’m watching the hem of my mother’s skirt graze her bare knees. The polyester skirt is one she wore for years, zigzag black lines over white. The hem has opened and hangs down, its frayed edge unraveling into threads. She’s smoking, the cigarette held impatiently in her teeth, and ashes drift down in the murky light. That morning, my mother tells me that Opa died soon after we left. The house was sold.

Landscape, Here, There.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Late afternoon, the January darkness chasing away the chickadees at the window feeder, a friend phones about a film at a nearby arts center. Turns out, the film is about the broken-upness of relationships in America. Post-lymphoma, post-chemo, my energy by day’s end is something I can cup in one hand, a diminishment never illuminated by a nap. Grateful for the nudge and the company, I fill my woodbox, feed my cats.

It’s been a day of plenty here—of yoga and work, of slush on the roads and mush falling from the sky, a softness that threatens to harden overnight to ice. Midafternoon, I drop my car for an oil change and open my laptop in the waiting room. A stranger sits down in the otherwise empty room and drops his tablet on the table between us. I’ve kept much of this blog off the political realm, although surely any reader perceives my alignment is not with the aggressor in power. The stranger begins talking in a way that’s not angry but maybe more mystified about what’s happening in the country, the prohibitions about who can come in, with real consequences.

He’s newly retired. When I ask what he did for work, he says you don’t want to know, but oh I do, and so he begins unspooling his life. He worked for the fed’s immigration service. Military service, 19 nineteen moves, a residency in Germany during the Cold War, four grown children, one of whom is estranged. He says again, as if baffled, she kind of went nuts over this Trump thing.

The windows reveal spitting snow. He’s at a crossroads, that weighty retirement time. What will he do now? He says he’d like to put his hands to some good, maybe a Habitat for Humanity project. I close my laptop. He grew up in very rural Vermont, and he shares an accident that happened to him as a teenager, how it defined his life. Midafternoon, the light is as sooty as twilight. As a writer, I’m always looking for junctures: which way will a character act now? But I know, of course, that we meet crossroads every day. Crab at the post office woman? Curse the town snow plow driver? And I know well my own fallibility and hesitation. But I also understand how our lives and choices are enfolded into our culture and nation, that, as we live by the law of gravity, we live also by the constrictions of time and place. As for the country…. an immense crossroads. A collective atlas is under dispute.

Driving home in the snow that may or may not amount to much besides a dusting of ambiance, my friend’s son phones from a Texas freeway, lanes choked with rushing traffic. My headlights slice through the darkness. On either side lie hayfields, snowed in for the winter. The stars are swallowed in dense clouds. A year ago, another phase of terrible things that happen to cancer patients was barely beginning in my life. I didn’t yet know that there would be so many rushing drives down the icy interstate to the ER, all those grim hours when my daughters and I wondered which was this was going to shake out. Disease is a fierce and demanding instructor. The first lesson I learned, as I smartened up quickly, was to ask What’s real? What’s happening? even when I didn’t want to know the terrain of the landscape.

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is… no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship…

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. ~ David Foster Wallace

Making Effort

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

Under the waxing full moon, January’s hungry Wolf Moon, I hurry along in the few degrees above zero. I’ve forgotten my scarf, so when I turn and lean into the wind, I cover my cheeks and lips with my mittens and breathe in the scent of wool. It’s too cold for wetness, yet my mittens are redolent with sheep.

The wide sky and the fierce cold winnow me to shivering bones. Nonetheless, I walk further than I’d planned, thinking through a piece of writing, and then, so cold, words abandon me for images, then those, too, vanish, and it’s me in my boots and that good down jacket and the mittens just beneath my fluttering eyelashes, and intermittent pickups passing, their drivers lifting their hands silently.

My life flickers as a candle flame in my curved ribs. What great fortune to be walking along the earth’s curve as the planet bends into twilight, the ancient moon electrifying the new snow. By the time I return to the village, it’s not long after five and the darkness has settled in for the long go of the night. Nonetheless, it seems to me these wintry days are gradually lengthening. I mail a letter at the post office and then talk with an acquaintance for a few minutes in the co-op, a waxed bag of curry power in one mitten, an onion in the other. At the last moment, I remember to buy milk for the morning’s coffee.

Winter. This starkly elegant season, straight-forward, no fussing around. A librarian friend passed me Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, a novel I’d longed to hold and read. A book of my soul. My cat Acer, eight-years-old, has discovered the pleasure of purring. We lie stacked on the couch—me, this tabby, library book—content. Who knew this was possible, my slow learner cat, my slow learner self?

“And though he was not much given to thinking about love, did not much care for the word… it struck him that in the end it might just mean a willingness to imagine another’s life. To do that. To make the effort.”
― Andrew Miller

“beyond the face of fear”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 20 Comments

I’m at the dentist for an X-ray of a front tooth that’s gone sour three times before — two failed root canals and one beastly apico — which also equals pain, more pain, and so many dollars. We compare the X-ray to the one taken six years ago, just before the pandemic, around the time when my brother and I were marveling at drone footage of empty cities in China. The tooth looks pretty darn fine. I explain that I recently endured chemo, and I’m off every which way. I no longer seem to know this body. Plus, the added layer of paranoia.

He says simply, Chemo will do that. He offers me antibiotics. I’ve had enough antibiotics in the past year to reasonably heal a village, or at least a hamlet, and I pass.

The very last day of December, the day is cold and sparklingly sunny. I work at my kitchen table for a bit, and when the sun shifts around, I drive to a nearby town to return library books. It’s the holiday season yet, and the library is nearly empty and quiet. The librarian and I have known each other for years now. We were once farmers market colleagues. Eventually, I buckle down and work hard for a good long while. When I leave, twilight is just beginning to settle in. The library is warm, and the staff is setting up chairs and cushions. Parents and little kids troupe in, their cheeks glowing with the afternoon cold.

On my way home, I drive up to the ridgeline and take the walk I learned from my poet friend Mary. The cold sinks its teeth into me as I hurry along. The gibbous moon appears and vanishes in the scrim of clouds. All summer and far into the autumn I felt surrounded by a holy veil, a phosphorescence, trial by devastating disease and the violence of chemo and surgery, a trial I survived. I counted each moment as a lucky gem. Slowly, my pockets began to fill with the world’s detritus, with those nagging financial fears, the inevitable disappointment of relationships, the ever-present terror of relapse a knife against my gullet. In plain words, the stuff of living.

Walking, I studied the horizon as the blue deepened, pure ineffable winter, and the night cloaked me. I passed a few farmhouses with little twinkling lights. I was so cold and yet I did not turn back. Instead, the winter night flooded into my heart. My whole adult life I’ve been a crepuscular woman, seeking the radiant edge of sunrise and sunset, reveling in twilight, the majesty of the starry heavens. I’ve transformed grit and solitude into books. Enduring lymphoma made me wary of those recesses in my soul. I relied on others for sustenance and heat, for clean clothes, for glasses of water, in the way of very young children. Both my beloveds and strangers kept me alive. But slowly I’m beginning to admit that the coarser and rougher shades in my soul kept my body alive, too.

All of this is to say that a heartfelt seemingly casual chat and a walk into the cold night quelled my uncertainty, steadied me again. At home, I’d let my woodstove fire burn dead so I could unscrew the back plate and clean the ash-choked metal filters. My ruined hands could not hold the wrench. So I shoveled out the coals, set a match to birchbark, and lit a fire. Good enough for now. Soon, I’ll summon the energy to ask for stronger hands…..

Last and certainly not least, you readers have poured such love towards me this year. I’ve been sparse in writing here as I struggle to find footing in my changed world. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for reading. And may this new year shine joy for all of us, in the universe’s mighty and myriad ways.

A dear poem from Lucille Clifton:

blessing the boats

may the tide

that is entering even now

the lip of our understanding

carry you out

beyond the face of fear

may you kiss

the wind then turn from it

certain that it will

love your back     may you

open your eyes to water

water waving forever

and may you in your innocence

sail through this to that