The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

by Nina Riggs

“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.”

Well that just knocked me out.

Why is it so important, they whine, what’s the big deal? I make them a list one night. A list they won’t possibly understand for twenty to thirty years, but I am trying to write things down: Because you will find that the fruit will drop, but rarely into your mouth. Because the bathroom faucet sticks, and please makes the stronger hand less weary. Because on summer nights the expectant sky cloaks the trees like a bed sheet, and storm cells spit tornados toward us from deeper south, and the willow oak in the backyard is a monster, and every night we lie down at its feet. Because we never taught you to pray. Because at night you are thirsty. Because someday your children, on the other side of your wall, will cackle into the darkness long past their bedtime. Because right now through the open windows I can hear the newlyweds next door carving out a backyard patio by lamplight, deliberating as they kneel together in their yard, placing flagstones. The stones they hand each other are heavy and oddly shaped. And they must level each one in the dirt—tapping, cajoling, and swaddling the difficult rocks—and then make their way upstairs to bed. Because the s in please is the sweetest sound, like steam rising after a summer shower, like a baby whispering in his bed. Because you are human, and it is your nature to ask for more. Because want, need—those unlit cul-de-sacs—are too perilous unadorned.

We read Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal together. Its clarity on end-of-life care shakes through me like a summer storm. I give the book to everyone I know. Much of Gawande’s discussion revolves around the decision to stop treatment for cancers that seem to be relentlessly unbackdownable. Many of the stories he tells there—including his own father’s death from a spinal tumor—are hard to read. 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. Unlike the rest of the planet, my mom’s mind isn’t blown. “This is what I’ve been saying all along,” she says. “You just haven’t been ready to listen.”

I feel like that is what my mom would say.

So right now I train my eye on these dreamlike certainties: A cure of doctors will examine me in the morning. And in the meantime, a cauldron of thunderstorms simmers on the horizon and an anticipation of cocktails awaits some ice.

We have called in hospice for my mom. It’s strange, because hospice is one of those words that when you say it people’s faces fall. It is a word that evokes last breaths and hushed voices. But the more I think about it, the more I’m struck by what a beautiful word it is—hospice. It is hushed, especially at the end. But it’s comfortable and competent sounding, too. A French word with Latin roots—very close to hospital but with so much more serenity due to those S sounds. (You see, I am growing increasingly fond of the letter S.) It used to mean a rest house for travelers—for pilgrims. And is there anything more welcome to a weary pilgrim than rest?

As we walk away from the house into the August morning it feels like we are passengers straggling out of the wreckage of a plane crash. We are weirdly giddy, not good company for anyone but ourselves—delirious, shattered, and still under the spell of the gallows humor we’ve become as dependent on as oxygen in the final weeks to stay sane. “It’s okay to leave her, right?” my dad asks. “I think so,” says Amelia. “I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?”

This is how star and I are in moments where everyone else is normal.

I tell John about the dream when we wake up. “Oh my God,” he deadpans, pulling me close, hugging me. “Imagine if something like that were actually happening to you.” I punch his arm. All day I am haunted by what I am unable to

As a little girl—and even a teenager—I loved to come and find her here, to have her to myself, even though I knew it risked being told about all my latest shortcomings. Just to sit with her and enjoy the quietness around her—the way so many children seem to love to do with their mothers without understanding how we disturb that quietness with our very presence. Just now, I hear Benny galumphing down the hall toward me: “Mom! Where are you? I need to nuzzle you!”