The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

by Nina Riggs

Researchers have discovered that in families where there is an identified breast-cancer-gene mutation such as BRCA1 or BRCA2, even family members without the mutation are at a greater risk for developing the disease.

“I want death to find me planting my cabbages, not concerned about it or—still less—my unfinished garden.”

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

the same wish I make every year: that everyone I love will find what makes them happy and that the universe will keep them safe.

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.”

Reveal the pain, but hide the wreckage. I can hear Montaigne hollering: break it open, look inside, feel it, write it down.

that living with a terminal disease is like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss. But that living without disease is also like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss, only with some fog or cloud cover obscuring the depths a bit more—sometimes the