The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

by Nina Riggs

There is a striking sketch from the late 1830s by transcendentalist artist and writer Christopher Pearse Cranch that was made to illustrate the concept of the “transparent eye-ball” in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Nature. 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 perceives: Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces,—all mean egotism vanishes. I 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. In the Cranch illustration, a giant eyeball on long, gangly legs and bare feet stands in an open meadow with hills on the horizon. The eyeball wears a top hat and an Emersonian waistcoat. It’s a funny and beautiful image, and it is exactly how the drugs make me feel: I am a ludicrous eyeball: I edit nothing out: All currents circulate through me and I take them all in.

Emerson rolling in his grave: Steroids and chemo are the closest I get to God.

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.” One of the things Dr. Gawande probes in his book is how to figure out what makes a person’s life worth living in order to make the most sensible choices as the end of life approaches. One man in the book says he is willing to stay alive if he can eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV. He will even endure high levels of pain if he can do these things. Others are happy to be alive as long as they don’t have to experience pain. Yet another just wants to do whatever possible to attend a family wedding. * * * My mom and I sit on her couch and talk it out. She says for her, it’s about lucidity: she wants to be able to have a conversation, feel a connection. That can help us determine how long we keep pushing blood transfusions and electrolyte replacement to keep her brain as clear-thinking as possible as the myeloma takes over.

I keep thinking about my painting teacher in Florence—a watercolor class in a timeless glass ceilinged studio on the Via dell’Alloro. “You must promise to only follow this advice in watercolor—not in anything else in your life—well, maybe cooking,” she told us. “Intensify slowly. Use lots of water, and lay down a wash of color. Walk away, let the pigment move and bleed and dry on the paper. Then return to it with a slightly deeper hue, again and again until you think you are satisfied. Whatever you do, don’t rush it. The best parts happen when you have stepped away.”

In his essay Nature, Emerson says, “Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things?” With solitude and a rainstorm: All is changed. My parents did not bring me up in a church-going tradition. But nature is church, my great-great-great grandfather believed—and I was raised to go into the woods. “[Nature] always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us. . . . The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.” He taught his children to go into the woods for communion—and they taught theirs to do the same, and so on. * * * “I actually hate nature,” I once confided to my mom when I was about nine after a buggy week at Audubon camp. I preferred to cozy up with a book or use my stuffed animals to act out scenes from Little Women. “Ha,” she laughed. “Just don’t ever let anyone from Dad’s side of the family hear you say that. You’ll probably be excommunicated.” The thing is, Emerson himself probably would have been fine with it. As his son wrote, RWE’s “own attitude in the matter was, that it was only a question for each person where the best church was,—in the solitary wood, the chamber, the talk with the serious friend, or in hearing the preacher.”

I am reminded of an image that one of my cousins—a woman who lost her husband to a swift and brutal cancer last year—suggested to me recently over email: 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 wind blowing it off a little, sometimes a nice dense cover.