In my winter of chemotherapy, I woke at night, quivering. Where was I? What was happening? Gasping, I reminded myself that I was in bed, I was okay, that whatever demons had sought me in sleep had been banished by my waking. I didn’t blink my eyes open into peace. My breathing never eased into contentment.
Cancer-and-chemotherapy is a path of suffering, an involuntary hairshirt. The first morning I met my oncologist Dr. Valera in that Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital room, I was surfacing, bleary and exhausted after an emergency admission and an exploratory surgery that verged on plunging me into a sedated coma. My daughters had been summoned through a snowstorm. What remained of my vitality was vanishing. Me or the lymphoma would triumph. There was no middle ground. Yet, that first morning, Valera assured me, “I can cure you.” Not cocky, not boastful, merely stripped down to facts: the lay of my body and disease, his skill and treatment course.
I clutched his words desperately, but I never repeated aloud, “This physician makes a claim that I will live.”
What was the levy I would pay for remission? And would that remission stick?
Through the months-long ordeal of chemo, I leaned on Valera’s four words: “I can cure you.” The reputation of chemo is that it’s awful; the reality is beyond worse. He said, “I’m going to knock you down, take you to the edge. Then you’ll feel much better than you have in a very long time.” I stretched out my arm and willingly agreed to what I judged was my surest chance of survival.
He hadn’t lied. Chemo has a reputation for vomiting and nausea, as though the experience is a bad bout of flu. Not fucking so. Chemotherapy shoved me underground into a dank coffin where I breathed not my garden soil that nurtured primrose and forget-me-nots but clay. For months, mallets cudgeled my bones’ hearts. My back and belly were a blacksmith’s anvil, as the cancer and chemo used my body as a forge, each force shaping their own creation. From the get-go, I had never considered disease a war or myself a soldier, but my life nonetheless transformed to a battleground. The daily world of paychecks and lunch plans had withered. I trembled on a bridge spanning a bottomless void, howling and wailing, mired in the ineffably in-between realm of half-alive, half-dying. Pain and disease had banished me from the secular world. Was it any surprise it was easier to sail by my house to breakfast-at-the-diner dates and staff meetings, skirting my wan face, my tomb-quiet rooms?
In those shivering nights and the hours in the cancer center infusion room among my ailing tribe, I cupped my fragile mortality before my sternum: a drooping calla lily, a sparrow with a snapped wing, a tire-crushed hare thrashing to live. All of this journey—the whole damn thing—anguish and vomiting and the dreamless nights I lay eyes round-open in the darkness, my heart shredding with my daughters’ misery and fear—was imbued with a sacred radiance. A strangely blessed journey.
I’d begun this sickness haul edgy and bitter. Divorce had schooled me to eye the people around me with wariness. While my friends had kept on with coffee and hiking clubs and attended poetry-and-pie readings, as a single mother I cobbled together three jobs, jerked awake at 4 a.m. to brew coffee and write. Now, knocked nearly dead with metastatic cancer, I leaned on this man I hardly knew. Sure, I banked on science, research, medicine, stark facts, but the bare-bones reason I trusted Dr. Valera was the way he scrutinized me and my clustered daughters with that keen look. He would salvage me because this life I lived was worth saving. Reciprocity was not required.
Now, in survivorship, I edged back to the world of yipping dogs and car insurance premiums and spreadsheets and how would I earn a living. The chaos of daily life clanged on the other side of a glass wall. How would I crash through? Would I ever descend a flight of stairs without trepidation?
*
That spring of 2025, a month into shaky recovery, two barking dogs ran at me one afternoon on the forest path, a German shepherd leaping at my shoulders, the smaller mutt knocking against the backs of my knees. Rickety, I feared I would fall and the dogs would trample my aching body, break me further. Six rounds of chemo, two surgeries, twelve hospital admissions, five more ER visits—all that care of my daughters, hematologists, surgeons, nurses, bills soaring towards the three-quarters-of-a-million-dollar mark, my rough feistiness—and I would collapse in the mud and be torn apart by dog bites.
Their owners were acquaintances I knew, meandering, talking. I shouted, “Get your dogs off me!” and then I ran away.
Dismissively, the woman called after me, “Don’t be so sensitive…”
Shaken, I leaned against a white pine, weeping. Their voices dwindled away. I pressed my hands over my eyes, crying so hard I trembled. I had not cried that November evening when the ED physician told me my belly was crammed with cancer, that time was of the essence, that my life dangled in the Reaper’s fingers. Crying would achieve no goddamn good. I wrangled the nearest biopsy date, wrote my will, pondered the Main Street cemetery through my dining room window. I conjured every remnant of strength. I had believed I could muscle up, endure. Years ago, I’d read about the Chilean men’s soccer team that crashed in the Andes. Eventually, two young men walked over the snow-forbidding mountains. One counseled himself, I will suffer just a little longer so I can return to my family and home. Now, profuse crying after curious dogs. What was wrong with me?
The June PET scan had revealed unequivocally that I was (for at least this moment, this day) scoured clean of cancer. Dr. Valera had counseled that me that I would need a year to recover from chemo. “Where you are in a year,” he said, “that’s as far back as you’ll come.”
I thought, That’s a tradeoff I can live with.
I asked, “What am I supposed to do now?” All winter, I’d adhered to the Rules: wear a mask, be vigilant against infection, drink water, know my meds. Where on the map was I headed next?
He answered, “Go and live your life.”
What the hell did that mean?
*
Every morning, I wrote. Tenaciously, I immersed myself in revising my novel, A World Without Maps. I tallied the words I’d cut, a thousand, fifteen hundred. Sometimes the day’s score ended up two or three hundred less. For the town, I worked five hours a week, then ten, then twenty hours. But I wrote in the mornings and again in the afternoons. End of July, I submitted the revised novel to Dede Cummings at Green Writers Press. Breathlessly quick, she offered to buy the book. The Vermont Arts Council awarded me a coveted Creation Grant: paid time to write. I wasn’t getting rich, but writing paths were opening in my life’s shrubbery.
*
I signed up for a weekend at Karmê Chöling, a nearby Buddhist center whose interstate exit my daughters and I had passed all winter. I’d been curious about this place for years. I’d heard about the center’s prolific garden and expect the food to be wholesome and delicious. I also simply wanted to eat with other people.
Labor Day weekend, I borrowed a tent and drove up through Walden Heights where the fields were emerald with hay, not bleak with snow, and followed the interstate artery south. Soon after, I turned off on the Barnet exit, then rattled down a dirt road and up a hill. The former farmhouse was at the end, surrounded by woods behind it. The place reminded me of Marlboro College, of being eighteen and away from home for the first time. The porch view of the lilypad-studded pond and mountains promised this was a good place to be. I set up the tent under a massive-trunked white pine and lay down, the door unzipped. Dragonflies darted. Exhaustion, my new familiar, sank in me, and an exhilaration, too, the old familiar from my young woman days, of what new experiences might greet me.
I dozed, then woke in the sunlight. We were drought-stricken yet, and there was no prediction of rain. Nonetheless, these warm and dry days were sweet, redolent with the mixture of sun on fallen pine needles that reminded me of New Mexico where I had lived in my earliest childhood. In my memory, my father fries bacon and eggs for our breakfast, sings with the Candyman song on the radio. My mother wears lipstick and a black cashmere cardigan and shares cigarettes with her friends around the coffee table my father had made from scrap wood, curls of smoke rising like escaped genies from magical lamps. My brother rides his plastic horse on its squeaking metal springs, felted cowboy hat on his head, bucking on his imaginary journey. The unhappy things that happened in our family life had not unfolded.
I pulled on a sweatshirt and walked down to the farmhouse. Dinner was laid out in metal pans: steamed ears of corn and garlicky tofu and a salad heaped of many colors. I sat with strangers who kindly moved their chairs aside and made space for me. Almost immediately, I wanted to leave. They asked where I was in my practice and swapped stories with words that were (again) unknown to me. Dukkha and vipassana and anatta. Some were years-long students of the Rinpoche who was leading the weekend and had followed him from Canada to Denver to Mexico City to Japan. I had been teaching my daughters to drive and grifting for money, baking blackberry cobblers, and writing a book about addiction and scoring free kittens. My practice had not been on a meditation cushion. My work had been in the grocery store check-out line.
End of August, the day descended early into darkness. I lay in my borrowed tent and my daughter’s summer camp sleeping bag, wool hat on my head, bundled in sweatpants and a bulky sweater. The cold scoured over my face. I shivered, slept, woke miserably chilled, and dragged down to the farmhouse in the parting dawn. Rural Vermont, the farmhouse door was unlocked. In the warren of hallways, I found the women’s room, showered in tepid water, then huddled in a rocking chair on the front porch, waiting for the sun to rise and warm me. Others appeared in sweatshirts.
A man named Amando handed me a mug of burdock tea. “Looks like you could use this.” I sipped its rooty strength. He owned a property management company and had left his employees to run the business. This Center was the first stop on his motorcycle journey West.
At the Center, there were rules and traditions I didn’t understand. Who could walk through what door at what time, how to prostrate before the Rinpoche, and the mandate to respect those in silent retreat. As if in a foreign country, the rules were unwritten. Every day, I kept thinking I would leave, that this rarefied realm was too strange and I couldn’t understand it; I had no place here. Then someone would offer me a pear.
That last afternoon, the leaves on the mountains across the valley were transforming to a glimmer of autumn gold, spotted with ruby and orange. After lunch, I wandered down the dirt road with new friends, a yoga teacher who was also a single mother and her lover with brilliant blue eyes who was from Hungary. She and I stood on a metal bridge. From my work for the town, I knew this was a replacement bridge, wedged into place, that the river which seemed so puny beneath us had surely frothed up ferociously last summer or the summer before and destroyed the bridge that been here before, smashing wood and metal and cement with boulders and fallen trees and the power of water. Below us, the boyfriend skinny-dipped, tossing cupped handfuls of water into the sunlight.
A ringing bell drew us back to the shrine room. Under the high peaked ceiling, the space was alive with Tibetan chanting and smoky incense and the monks’ humming. Behind the Rinpoche, a wall of windows framed the August beauty of green and gold leaves, the cobalt sky. Coneflowers pressed against the screens.
The Rinpoche said, “Questions? What questions do you have?”
The man on the motorcycle journey who had brewed the burdock tea raised his hand. “This place is so wonderful, so inspiring, but also so precious. The world is falling down. We’re destroying the planet. The political regime is veering into fascism. How do we keep faith? How do we know what we’re doing makes sense?”
The Rinpoche chuckled.
What? I thought. Where’s the humor?
“I’m laughing, I know, and that’s not very nice, because it’s a good question, a serious question. Think of what’s happened in Tibet, the profound suffering that transpired under Chinese rule. How do we keep devotion? Keep practicing? How have the Masters done this for centuries? Because all we have is this moment, exactly and precisely where we are. That doesn’t mean politics isn’t real, that terrible things don’t happen, that when and where we live in history doesn’t matter. It does. But all we have is this moment, exactly and precisely where we are.”
I sunk into the Rinpoche’s words.
“That word devotion… It’s an important word. Devotion is how we live our life. And human life is very precious. All human life has the Buddha nature. Remember this, how precious our life is.” The Rinpoche hummed and then chanted in Tibetan, rolling syllables of words I did not understand but whose rhythm I followed, like moonlight flowing into the recesses beneath a barn’s overhang or into a child’s playhouse.
I stared through the windows at the coneflowers on their slender stalks swaying in the late summer breeze. As I listened, I saw my life as a riffling flipbook: me as a small girl with my straight bangs, my crooked-teeth girlhood, those teen years of blackheads and lip-gnawing, my young womanhood when I fell in love with the man I married. I had loved him dearly, my husband, this father of my daughters. The love I nourished for him had waned bloodless and blown away in the wind. I had harmed him, and he had harmed me. His abandonment of me and our girls—how ferociously I had raged against this betrayal!—would hound him. The laws of this universe pinioned on equal and opposite actions and reactions. Karma would capsize him, too. His salvation was his to work out.
As for my salvation and devotion, my centered place was not in this shrine on a meditation cushion but in the unwalled shrine of the world. The practice that had kept me alive that winter, that had strung those months and weeks and days, the hours and minutes and seconds, was writing, my practice of arranging order from chaos, of fashioning beauty from the inevitable destruction of my mortal life. For years, I had chafed against what Heidegger named being-in-the-world. I am a writer, not a physician, not a nurse. Resisting, I had tried to drown my soul’s thirst in wine, a fool’s errand. In all those parenting years of reading Maurice Sendak’s teeny-tiny Nutshell Library books, I’d failed to comprehend that the lion swallowed Pierre because Pierre had treated this magnificent creature carelessly. I had been so afraid of failure, of poverty and mockery, of perusing my own mad creative dreams, that I slammed the door against the fearsome beast of my talent. Which circles, again, back to that koan of the privileges and afflictions you’re bequeathed, and what the fuck you chose to do with the multifarious hand you’re dealt. In the aftermath of disease, I didn’t make fast friends with my lion. But that tawny beast had settled into a chair at my kitchen table where we dined on a chopped-up salad of passion and angst, dismay and glee.
This sacred journey over the footbridge that spanned the abyss had returned me to this patch of sandy soil and my square house and yellow compass flowers, to the people who had both betrayed and prayed for me, and same-old, same-old challenges of my existence: the hard work of mothering and writing, of living in this world of satiation and vomiting, of split hearts and busted cars, of unpaid insurance bills and litter boxes in need of cleaning, of hayfields rich with dandelions, rugged weeds transformed into sunshiny gold.
I adored that lavish summer light, hazy with pollen and road dust, the hovering honeybees. I would maybe live a year or two, maybe five, maybe I would die thirty years from now, a bent-over ancient woman with missing teeth, my eyes yet smoldering with mischief. Or perhaps I would leave this farm-now-Buddhist-Center in that Mazda I was now driving and misjudge a turn, crash into a log truck and perish. Like anyone, my mortal life will be snuffed out. My daughters would row their own courses, too, stuff their pockets with corn kernels and white quartz pebbles, shiny trinkets of glass pumpkins and bluebirds. Wounded creatures, they’d lick and nurse the gashes from my disease, the festering slashes. I wanted to live to see how this healing would fare for these young women. What a delight this would be, pushback against the universe’s ruthlessness.
The chanting ceased. The roomful of us sat silently, the winged insects darting among the sunshot dust motes. Time stretched. I longed to return home, to my cats squalling in hunger, to my manuscript on the kitchen table. Alone save for the cats, I would feast on Brandywine tomatoes and the last of this year’s garden basil. I thought of that nearly antiquated word, contentment, that simple koan I had scoffed at, in my younger, more headstrong days. I laid my hands over my chest, my ribs visible now, my heart more easily found.
In my clasped hands wasn’t a field mouse or a damp toad but an orange day lily, black-stamened, tongue-like petals looped around my knuckles, a coarse and ordinary flower that graced perennial beds or roamed wildly along roadsides or hayfields gone rampart with burdock, the soil’s fertility diminished by flood waters stained with sewage. My lily hadn’t been cut with shears but ripped from the earth herself, amber tuber roots clotted with mud. Poet David Budbill, who had endured his own measure of hardship, named this ubiquitous flower beautiful, “tough, resilient,/like anyone or thing has to be in order to survive,” for whatever fleetingness we are each offered.
Somewhere in that hourless afternoon, the Rinpoche commenced singing again, the voices around me joining in one-by-one in this language I could not speak or write but whose meaning gushed through me, real and vital as my blood that had survived this go-around with cancer.
A pause, then a shuffling as we gathered our heart gifts. Mine was a letter penned from my ravaged year. I did not know that heart offerings were passed to the Rinpoche in silk scarves. My new friend, Armando, stranger from mythical Rome and plebeian Chicago, pressed a scarf into my hand. The Rinpoche slipped out my envelope. I folded the scarf, the silk slippery and unblemished as starlight, and thanked Armando.
“Keep it. Surely, you’ve earned this.”
People swirled around us. We shared our travel plans, he in a plane, me in a car headed north again on I-91. Then we parted ways.
I left the crowd and headed out alone. Close eye, I paused abruptly. Three plump mosquito bites blossomed on my bony wrist. I wrapped the scarf around these irritations. A blood drop stained the silk. Mystery upon mystery coursed in my life’s fluid, glossy crimson that quickly withered black.
Dr. Valera had told me, “Go and live your life.” From my first ED visit, the devouring lymphoma bending me in agony, through the blurred nightmare of the concoctions and scalpel that kept me alive, to that June appointment when I fretted about my next instructions—all of this arced to Valera’s five words: “Go and live your life.” Physician, oncologist, healer of my ailing flesh. Midwife of my soul.
I was dying. I’d been passing from this earthly realm since that spring-sweet morning in New Mexico when I tore from my mother’s flesh in a balmy gush of her blood. Like a fist clutching a bouquet, the cancer had gathered together all the selves of my life: my girlhood, when I carried a Sweet April doll everywhere; my aggrieved adolescent self; those young woman years when I was falling in lusty love and learning to write and we crisscrossed the country in that black Volkswagen. Years of mothering and boiling maple sap and mixing current muffins and how I shook snow from the kale in my garden. When I was abandoned to single motherhood, I feared poverty and my daughters’ unhappiness and wasting my precious life. I was afraid of him.
Nonetheless, I kept my household and my girls together. I moved us out of the wilderness and into a village. I was the mossy-floored forest and the belching bullfrogs, the keen-eyed falcons that drifted over my youngest daughter as she kicked her soccer ball. I taught myself the treasurer job to garner steady work, wrote a book about drinking and restraint, then a novel and another. I embodied the wolf moon and the strawberry moon, the purple pickerel weed in the muddy shores of Number 10 Pond. One sugaring season when my children played house beneath the spruce tree, two molting snowshoe hares hopped out of forest and amused the girls all morning. Silently, the pair appeared the next morning, the girls’ mouths round Os of awe. We never saw hares again. We’d pulled up stakes and moved.
At this moment, what lustrous luck, to be in glorious Vermont, mosquitos feasting on my flesh, crickets singing in the ripe corn and among the tree roots that rutted in lumpy ropes and tendrilled into the earth. Sun and dry road dust settled on my cheeks. On the mountains across the valley, crimson threaded through the green-drenched forest, winter arriving, that steady constant. I had things to do: check in with my daughters, sow autumn radishes. On the pebbled road, as I trekked homeward, my boot heels struck a coarse melody.
About the Author:
Brett Ann Stanciu is the author of Call It Madness (Regal House Publishing, 2026), Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction (Steerforth Press, 2021), and Hidden View (Green Writers Press, 2016). She is a contributing writer and editor for the Vermont Almanac and received a 2024 Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center for the Arts. Recipient of two Vermont Arts Council Creation Grants and a 2025 Pushcart Prize nomination, her writing appeared recently in Utopia. Mother of two grown daughters and a stage 4 lymphoma survivor, Stanciu lives in Hardwick, Vermont, in a 100-year-old house built for granite workers and surrounded by lilacs.
Feature image by Mary Skrynnikova 💛💙 on Unsplash