The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

I am cheered with the moist, warm, glittering, budding and melodious hour that takes down the narrow walls of my soul and extends its pulsations and life to the very horizon. That is morning; to cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body and to become as large as the World. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838

Author Nina Riggs doesn't quote Ralph Waldo Emerson arbitrarily: she is the poet's great-great-great-granddaughter, and his legacy hovered over her life. And although Riggs had previously published a volume of her own poetry, it is here in her memoir, The Bright Hour, that Riggs exhibits her inheritance of that literary legacy: because, boy, can she write. Begun upon receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, The Bright Hour is not so much a narrative of a death, but of a life: this book crackles with life and living, and it made me laugh out loud, and it made me cry, and it made me grateful that someone with such a gift for writing took the time to record her final months.

“Dying isn't the end of the world,” my mother used to joke after she was diagnosed as terminal. I never really understood what she meant, until the day I suddenly did – a few months after she died – when, at age thirty-eight, the breast cancer I'd been in treatment for became metastatic and incurable. There are so many things that are worse than death: old grudges, a lack of self-awareness, severe constipation, no sense of humor, the grimace on your husband's face as he empties your surgical drain into the measuring cup.

So, just as Riggs was informed that she had one small spot of cancer on her breast, her mother's long fight against multiple myeloma was entering its final stages. And this dichotomy of experience made for poignant storytelling: Riggs, weakened from chemo but trying to help the mother who desperately wanted to be helping her; Riggs experiencing the loss of her mother and knowing that this kind of loss will be even harder for her own two young sons to understand; to bear. In writing about her mother's death, Riggs captured her life as well: we learn of her parents' early lives and courtship; learn of their quirks and strengths. And ultimately, Riggs captures her mother's end:

Something I didn't expect: She didn't leave all at once. And I don't really mean that in an esoteric way at all. At first she was present, even though she was lifeless. But every time I would go into or out of her room, I would come back to something newly less “there”. The way her fingers were curled on her chest (those softest, most delicate hands – my earliest memory), her lips, the color of her skin. By Sunday morning it was her eyes – they'd changed to a vinyl-looking film; they were not hers at all.

And in writing about her own impending death, Riggs captures her own life: In what seems so few scenes, the reader gets a rich picture of Riggs' childhood and relationships with her family; her marriage and children; her large network of friends (one of whom is fighting a cancer battle of her own and shares snarky texts with Riggs about the “casserole bitches” and their failed good intentions). The Bright Hour is suffused with so much life and laughter, and optimistic treatment plans, that even knowing where the book is going, the suddenly terminal diagnosis is devastating to read:

A stream of doctors after that – one, a radiation resident I have come to know, crouching down at eye level with me, gripping my hand and not pushing away her tears. Then a surgeon. Then a neurologist. Then Dr. Rosenblum standing over me with the face of a mother whose daughter is very late for curfew. She keeps patting my hair: “How could this have happened? I am so, so sorry.” John's eyes from the visitor chair reflect my own face back to me again and again: Wait, what? We keep asking each other, What?

Told as a series of short essays – from a few paragraphs to a few pages – Riggs quotes often from both Emerson and Michel de Montaigne (the man certainly had a lot to say about death), and she also makes mention of quite a few other books that I have enjoyed: When Breath Becomes Air, Being Mortal, H is for Hawk, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The stories did both make me cry (Riggs' husband putting his hand on her back at four in the morning and whispering, “I'm so afraid I can't breathe”) and made me laugh (Riggs' husband insisting they can't call their new puppy “Montaigne” because, “We're not assholes”), and throughout, I simply loved Riggs' voice and craft.

At one point Riggs remembers someone telling her that living with a terminal diagnosis is like walking a tightrope over a crevice filled with craggy, pointed rocks. Not living under a terminal diagnosis is like walking that same tightrope, over the same dangers, but they're obscured by fog. The Bright Hour is a gift from a writer who saw the crevice, the craggy rocks, and had the skill to capture the experience.