The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

by Nina Riggs

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

Waldeinsamkeit is the untranslatable German word for the feeling of divine solitude and contemplation in the woods. Church in the woods.

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.