The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

by Nina Riggs

Emerson felt that nature was the closest we can get to experiencing God, and he believed that in order to truly appreciate nature, you must not only look at it and admire it, but also be able to feel it taking over the senses. The

transparent eyeball absorbs—

rather than reflects—what it...

become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

I get to hang out mostly in my own world—and that’s where I make the most sense.”

We rarely notice it because our other eye can often see what is happening, and if not—if the blind spots overlap—our brain does the work of filling

in the missing information.

“I wonder how big the blind spot could be, hypothetically, before your brain wouldn’t be able to compensate accurately,” I say.

The thing with blind spots: you never see them coming.

Like many members of my extended family, I am still searching for the edge of the shadow that Emerson casts: He draws me to him, he pushes me away.

“Permanence is but a word of degrees.”

One small spot and the universe is fluid and volatile.

“I haven’t

had a deep breath in years.”

At chemo, I can never find my center anymore. It’s like a big, empty ocean.

Waldeinsamkeit is the untranslatable German word for the feeling of divine

solitude and contemplation in the woods. Church in the woods.

“The illness pinches us on one side; the remedy on the other.”

how afraid we are as a culture of images of uncontained chaos. (One example: disembowelment. We really don’t like to see uncontained bowels.)

We contain things and give shape to things in order to be less afraid of them.

I think of this feeling sometimes—and I can imagine that sort of letting go: warm, dangerous, seductive. What if this is what death is: The engine beneath you steady; those that hold you strong; the sun warm?

I think maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to fall into that, to loosen the grip at the waist, let gravity and fate take over—like a thought so good you can’t stop having it.

‘We need to tell her she’s a ghost and she shouldn’t be here so much. Is this happening a lot?’ and you said, ‘Well, yeah—she’s here most weekends these days, and lots of afternoons when I get home from work.’ I was saying, ‘Dad, we need to tell her she’s dead. We have to let her know she can’t keep coming here and telling us what to do.’ ”

“For me—I can’t

find books dark enough right now.”