Brett Stanciu has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight‘s 2026 Essay/Memoir Contest
The spring after I finished chemo, insects wouldn’t bite me. My daughters escorted me on short walks in the town forest. Brown-spotted trout lily leaves nubbed up through last-year’s matted leaves. My daughters slapped their bare arms: vexsome black flies were prolific in the wet spring. On me, nothing. Not even mosquitoes deigned to sip my blood.
Rain had fallen steadily in the two weeks I’d been at Dartmouth-Hitchcock. Farmers delayed planting, fretting their corn seed would rot in the sodden soil. I’d envisioned a porch recovery of butterfly chair and library books and sunshine, but dreary weather marooned me on the couch again, my toes stretched out to the wood stove. The barn had been nearly emptied of firewood, its beaten board floor littered with bark scraps, splintered kindling. I was burning my stash of next winter’s wood.
Post-surgery, I returned home with my belly sutured and glued. The wound hurt.
My weight had slipped to seventy-eight pounds. I was translucent, ghostly. My brother boiled frozen ravioli, spooned small bowls of Greek yogurt, arranged shortbread cookies in the shape of seashells on a saucer. Eat, eat, he urged. My knees were tight flesh over bone, the muscles withered. My shoulders protruded sharply as bird wings, my ribs were bows of winter-bare branches. I could slide quarters in the holes around my knuckles. Mindful of the incision that would require months to heal, I moved tentatively, as if I held a tureen of boiling soup and feared to spill it on my belly. In my notebook, I wrote a calorie tally each day.
Hardboiled egg: 80.
Half a banana: 50.
Toast: 80. Butter: 100! = 180.
I wrote a to-do list on a yellow Post-it pad. I kept revising the list.
My driver’s license had expired. My photo was outdated, so I couldn’t renew by mail. Since I was still taking opioids, my daughter Gabriela drove me to the DMV. I hadn’t driven in six months, anyway. On my license, the black-and-white photo shows my eyes underlined by exhaustion swoops, scarf knotted over my head. The AT&T phone bill had crept up an additional monthly twenty dollars; a call was needed to straighten that out. The two mechanics in town refused to inspect the twelve-year-old Volvo my brother had ceded to Gabriela. The Volvo was too expensive for me to maintain, anyway. I listed it on Facebook Marketplace. On her twentieth birthday, I signed the title to a mechanic who lived in Maine. In the passenger seat while rain fell mightily, I counted his cash. “Good luck,” he said. Now I had another problem; I needed a car to return to work. I ordered next winter’s firewood, which required a $1,400 check. One phone call a day was all I could manage. Some days, I couldn’t summon the energy for any calls at all. I phoned the chimney sweep for the annual cleaning to avoid burning down the house. The lawn mower refused to start. A pail of empty cat food cans stank up the barn and needed to be taken to the transfer station. The garden fence had collapsed under a profusion of weedy bedstraw.
Woodchucks devoured the sunflower sprouts my daughter Molly had planted. Paint curled off the barn and the back side of the house I’d never managed to paint, and the clapboards were weathered gray, rot in the offing. On FaceTime calls with my dad, I stared at the peeling paint strips. The painter I’d phoned knocked on the kitchen door one afternoon. I stepped into my Danskos and followed him behind the barn. He said he couldn’t believe Trump had slashed cancer research. Exhausted, I leaned against the barn’s corner board. A sizable check from a friend carried me through the water-and-sewer quarterly bill, the mounting wave of electricity and oil notices, property taxes, the credit card tally of hotel rooms and gas and groceries.
By then, maybe I should have reconciled myself to uncertainty. Would my belly wound heal? Would the remission stick? Would my daughters need to race me back to the ED, puking and in pain? But how much uncertainty can a woman accept? I limped through these days, dressing carefully in loose dresses that kept away from the incision, dicing boiled eggs into pieces I ate slowly. In a drizzle, I wandered around my yard and couldn’t bend over to touch the emerging narcissi.
My colleague, the town clerk, had bought me a laptop for remote work and set the bag on my kitchen floor. For days, I walked around that bag before finally stowing it under my desk. I couldn’t manage my house bills. What could I do for the town? Would I ever be able to easily add two numbers? Forget subtraction, division, multiplication. I wondered if I’d ever create a spreadsheet again, stitch numbers meaningfully together.
My brother returned home to his dog and brewery. Gabriela set up housekeeping in her first apartment. Every morning, the girls each texted me: How are you feeling? Are you okay?
Every morning, I texted back, I’m fine, really. This was no lie.
Rain notwithstanding, spring lengthened the days. Alone, I walked to my neighbor’s house, then to the next house. I ventured down my steep road and stood where our short road joined Route 14. Early evening, on a weekday, the road was empty, pavement washed with rain. Strands of clouds glowed, resplendent with sunset’s rosy gold. Across Route 14 stood an abandoned house, wan with neglect, broken windows half-hidden behind dead mullein spears and an unpruned profusion of leafy lilacs. Hands in my sweatshirt pockets, wool hat on my
nearly-hairless head, I had nowhere else to go. Who had lived in this house and where had these people gone? The peaked-roof house was flanked by a matching mate on one side, painted an optimistic lemonade. Toy Easter eggs polka-dotted a front yard azalea bush. On the other side, a former small-town grocery had been converted to apartments, the windows masked with road dust. The apartments were busy with revolving tenants: couples with babies, a scowling man with a barking pitbull dog, a woman in a long blue coat hunched over a wire shopping cart. The uninhabited house was dwarfed by the dwellings around it, the changing sky. Would it collapse, or would someone revive its hollowed-out bones?
I began to cook again: rice and tofu and steamed carrots. My friend Meredith, who’d had her own cancer-related surgery, offered to walk me to the Galaxy Bookshop to pick up books I’d ordered with the last of my gift cards. I’d hadn’t yet managed that short stroll downtown, and I warned her she might need to rescue me with her Prius. Home again, we sat at my picnic table in the sunlight, robins caroling in the pines behind the cemetery. I wondered aloud if and when I would return to work. Meredith advised, “Don’t worry about figuring out the rest of your life right now. Go day by day.”
A few days later, my poet friend Mary walked with me to Front Seat Coffee. She bought cookies, and we sat in the nearby courtyard. I ate a few bites. Friends and acquaintances came up to me, their voices tinged with surprise or awe that I had lived through the winter. On the way home, Mary reiterated, “Slow is fine, take it easy.”
Math yet propelled my life. My short-term disability checks ended in May, that 60% of my weekly pay. I depleted my remaining vacation time, and then I had no more income and a body badly broken. I was not recovering from a cold or the flu. I needed weeks, I needed months, to begin to eat and drink again, to regain strength. How would I haul myself back to monthly solvency? Uncertain about my daughter’s college bill, uncertain about everything, I signed up for SNAP, the food stamp program. Even when I was most desperate during those single mother years, I’d never used food stamps. I’d always managed to feed my family. Disease submerged me below the managing threshold.
*
When I was a girl, my mother sometimes counted out a few dollars and coins for a Scholastic book order. When the cardboard box of books arrived in the classroom, what joy to have a novel about the miniature Littles family or a Helen Keller biography with the braille alphabet imprinted on the back cover. I read these books over and over. An early reader was titled Flat Stanley, about a boy whose bulletin board fell from the wall and flattened him in his sleep. At the end, Stanley’s brother plumped him up with a bicycle tire pump and returned the flattened boy to the land of ordinary living.
That spring and summer, I was Flat Stanley. I was bones and withered muscle, my balance shot. I imagined my body on the surgeon’s table beneath lights so brilliant shadows were chased away, my flesh sliced open. They had cut out those pieces of me, bowel and intestine, fallopian tube and appendix, the scarred ravages of lymphoma. I’d been cautioned not to lift more than fifteen pounds for three months; otherwise, I might return to the OR table for a hernia repair. My cats each weighed more than fifteen pounds.
Every day, I walked in my sandals with the moon-and-star-and-sun straps. I ventured downtown to the post office and bookstore. I ate kiwis, watermelon, brown rice, broccoli, cashews. My body gained flesh. My cheeks gradually drained of the chemo putty-hue. The bruises beneath my eyes dried up.
When I walked alone, which was often, my thinking bobbed over the past winter, those car drives with my head leaning against a window. One early morning, all the way down dark I-91 Gabriela and I admired Ursa Major, the beaming stars slowly erased by the dawn. So many nights I startled awake in freezing sweats, struggling to strip off my soaked shirt and underwear and roll on the dry side of the bed. A few hours later, I woke again, the bed as miserably drenched as if a pail of water had been dumped on me. We had so many speeding drives to the ED, me curled in agony. There had been the kind ED paramedic who held my hand, comforting me. The surgery team fretted about that obstruction and admitted me, over and over. And Dr. Varon with his bowtie and glasses, who never wavered that I could endure the six courses, who kept his eyes on my bloodwork, and insisted that I would persevere, even when I faltered, when any dribbles of my faith had funneled away.
*
In June, the ferocious pain ebbed to a steady nag.
Back in November, first diagnosed, I hadn’t cared that the blue pills I swallowed, clockwork every six hours, were opioids. Why care with stage 4 cancer and my death within reach? When I met Dr. Varon, started treatment, and began to believe I had a scrappy chance at survival, I feared the morphine. I worried opioid use would re-ignite my decades-long lust for alcohol. That I might save my body but destroy my savagely-earned sobriety, my sine qua non. Hence, every time that illimitable chemo winter-into-spring that the pain resurged and clabbered
my body, mind, and soul, I resisted returning to that EMERGENCY department. Yes, I didn’t want to be admitted and confined in a hospital room, but far beyond that reluctance, I feared my hunger for opioids. Sweet Jesus, how I loved that opioid balm. IV dilaudid carried me away from the anguish of those lymphoma scars that wrung my guts. Those miraculous milligrams lifted me from the dread of dying in my fifties that lay on my chest. The meds relieved my worries about my daughters who were now, months into this hellish cancer journey, limping with their own scabbing scars of unhappiness and what they had lost in this last year. With dilaudid running in my veins, I lingered on that light-suffused path I had experienced at Gabriela’s caesarian. At her birth, I’d ascended above a roomful of people bent over my bloodied body, intent on the earthly work of ushering a crying baby into the world and keeping the baby’s mother alive. What had snapped me back into my body was my baby’s cry. She needed me, her mother. I relinquished the allure of that otherworldly calm for the hard and joyous endeavor of parenting.
I loved and hated those drugs.
In the worst of my alcoholism, I dreamed only of bottles: the green glass I hid in laundry baskets and beneath beds. Years had passed since I’d had a drinking dream. Hence, the dream I’d envisioned that chemo winter of wandering drunk in a dark parking lot frightened me. Had the lymphoma quickened that sleeping beast of addiction? Would I survive chemotherapy only to drown again?
In June, I quit the lidocaine patch, screwed tight the cap of the dilaudid bottle, tapered off the Tylenol and Ibuprofen. I bought a Mazda and began driving again to the town office, to Molly’s apartment, and eventually to Burlington to visit Gabriela. We strolled down the sidewalk from her apartment and bought Nepali dumplings, perfectly spiced with something I could not name. Under a smoky haze from the Canadian wildfires, we swam in Lake Champlain.
I had not descended into addiction again. Morphine had buttressed me through the chemo that killed the lymphoma cells; dilaudid had sustained me through that obstruction, the nearly unbearably painful twisting of my innards. Rigorously, I’d adhered to Dr. Varon’s mandate: write down the time and dose of the opioid you’re taking. I’d stuck to the math, kept a close eye. But there was more. In those years when I was drinking miserably, I wanted to lie down and sleep, anesthetize myself, render myself powerless to the gods of addiction. Now, I craved life.
*
Midsummer, the rain quit. Farmers no longer fretted about seed rotting. Rumblings circulated about wells drying up, about the dozens of gallons of water needed daily for milking cows, about sparse hay yields.
Evenings sometimes, Molly and I parked behind the former hay barn painted yellow and converted to an all-things-Vermont-cheese tourist shop, behind it a spanking-new warehouse and distribution hub for local farms. In the long high summer days, we walked the trail along the river, Molly’s dogs sniffing white-and-pink soapwort and Joe Pye weed, hunting moles or squirrels, or seeking some dog-sweet something. Molly brushed away biting bugs that swooped through the amber light. Trefoil scattered like dropped yellow beans in the graveled mouths of
culverts.
Two and then three half-days I drove to work. And yet . . . even as I was healing, gaining strength through fresh tomatoes, wild rice, cashews, broccoli crowns, yoga, I held my mortality against my chest: a cupped wasp, a squirming snake, a tender-eared puppy. The prosaic world spun on. I was stuck, one foot hovering over my grave.
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