The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

by Nina Riggs

I’m also wondering about this unfamiliar calm that has settled over me in the last several days—ever since the doctor on the phone spoke the word cancer. At the same time as I have watched the terror build in John’s eyes, I have felt somehow relieved. It has happened, I keep thinking. The terrible thing. This is what the terrible thing feels like. Somehow, a lovely space has opened up inside my chest, a little, deep pool in the thickest woods.

“I really think you’re in some kind of whacked-out denial right now if you think these days are loveable.” “These days are days,” I say, calm and furious. “We choose how we hold them. Good night.” Around 4 a.m. I feel his hand on my back. “I’m so afraid I can’t breathe,” he whispers. “I know,” I say, scootching a little toward him but still facing away. “So am I.”

“You all be good,” she is saying, starting to doze. “I love you.” These are the things we all say at the end of book club now: I love you. Of course we do. Why haven’t we been saying that all along?

He saw the move to make a historic district as invasive of property owners’ rights and thought it smacked of underhanded segregationist techniques to keep the neighborhood white and upper-middle class.

I ask her if there is anything she still needs to tell me about things I could be doing better, any mothering she feels has been left undone. “You are a great person in many ways,” she says after a minute of thinking. “But sometimes you are too hard on people, which doesn’t become you, especially when it’s behind their back. And I really wish you were better about going to the dentist.”

The kids are deeply annoyed that I’m headed back into chemo. They hate it when I’m not there to pick them up from school, to schlep to piano lessons and swimming, to pack their snacks, help plan their class parties. And I appreciate that their enormous self-centeredness is still intact.

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.”

“Did you spend thousands of dollars on the Internet today?” he asks when he gets home from work and finds me with my pillows and hot-water bottles on the not-perfect couch where he left me in the morning, a low-slung rattan situation my parents bought as patio furniture in the early ’90s. “Not today,” I say. “Nice,” he says. “Do you want to go get in bed together and stare at the ceiling?” I do. We do.

For me, faith involves staring into the abyss, seeing that it is dark and full of the unknown—and being okay with that.