The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

by Nina Riggs

Here is the small spot; here the densest nut. Here is the musket ball hole. Here is the shape in the world of your child, you wrapped around your child. Here is the dark pool in the thickest woods. Here is the sun that sets in your eyes.

She has found a hiding spot for us. We are behind a gravestone. “Everyone will find us here, and then we will all laugh so hard,” she says—the best idea I have ever heard.

We read Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal together. Its clarity on end-of-life care shakes through me like a summer storm.

But what he is working toward in his difficult exploration is unquestionably beautiful: how to distill what matters most to each of us in life in order to navigate our way toward the edge of it in a meaningful and satisfying way.

Sometimes the most important thing is knowing when to quit. Sometimes being heroic is knowing when to say enough is enough.

RWE’s “own attitude in the matter was, that it was only a question for each person where the best church was,—in the solitary wood, the chamber, the talk with the serious friend, or in hearing the preacher.”

She reminds us again and again to clear our vision of expectations, to try to see without understanding.

Thank you for the taco casserole. It worked even better than my stool softeners. Thoughts and prayers are great, but Ativan and pot are better. Thank you for the flowers. I hope they die before I do.

Of course they all remember; of course it is not only me, trying to both preserve and crack open the lie that time doesn’t pass, that loss isn’t a blade so sharp that it can make you bleed long before you ever feel the sting.

She embodies some of that stoicism that Montaigne admired so much—a kind of fearless acceptance. Well, not fearlessness exactly—but a fearlessness of being afraid.

When I’d picked up my dad for the funeral home appointment, he climbed into my car holding the orange Tupperware pitcher we’d been mixing powder lemonade in since the 1970s. “Will this work?” he’d asked. “I don’t think so, Dad,” I’d said. “Maybe something—not from the kitchen?” When he ran back inside to get a different vessel, I’d snapped a photo of the pitcher sitting in the passenger seat and texted it to my mom’s number. “Please come back,” I’d written. “Dad wants to put you in this.” The first of a million nonreplies.

the white sheets on the line that work the air of the cooler days like sails, like lost souls, like wings that need more imagining, filling the yard—huffing and brimming.

“Did you think you would never reach the point toward which you were constantly heading?” asks Montaigne.

Freddy and I take sticks and write in the wet sand thanks to things we admit have made us stronger, but are ready to say goodbye to: CANCER and DIABETES. Then we stand and watch it wash away on the rising tide. Benny chooses to write POOP. “What?” he says with one of his grins. “It’s good to say thanks and goodbye to poop, too.”

Emerson’s journal, 1838: “I am cheered with the moist, warm, glittering, budding and melodious hour that takes down the narrow walls of my soul and extends its pulsation 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.”

I’ve been here five days: the river of nurses and techs and transporters; merry-go-rounds of doctors; vitals and alarms. Someone urgently needs to weigh me at 3 a.m. Something is beeping. Sometimes it feels like the whole world is beeping.

There is life—this bright hour. Let us make good use of time, whispers Montaigne.