The Bright Hour Quotes

“I am reminded of an image...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.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“Sometimes the most important thing is knowing when to quit. Sometimes being heroic is knowing when to say enough is enough.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“For me, faith involves staring into the abyss, seeing that it is dark and full of the unknown—and being okay with that.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“Sometimes I'm sad about everything; the way my grilled cheese sandwich tastes, how nice my socks feel, a song John is playing in the kitchen. One time he puts on this goofy Loudon Wainwright song that was on a mix tape I used to listen to during my commute from the boys' school in Bethesda back into the District when we were newly married and everything was about to begin and it makes me burst into tears about the shortness of everything.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“A retired rabbi—the friend of a friend—writes me an email out of the blue about how he lost his mother when he was nine years old. In the message, he lists all the things he remembers about his mom and all the ways she remains in his life: her favorite flower, the books she read him, her sense of humor. “She is far from a hole in my life. She is an enormous presence that can never be replaced.” His words are a gift that I pull out some nights and let swirl through the room, brush over my skin like a tincture.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“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. Here”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“I am trying to know myself. I want a better sense of what kind of mother the kids will remember me to be. It’s hard: I am not done becoming me. I am still in the works. I still aim to be softer in some places, firmer in others.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“I want death to find me planting my cabbages, not concerned about it or—still less—my unfinished garden.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“Here we are closer to something I am trying to understand: that openness to fear. We are hearts and stingers. We ride the tide. We believe in resistance; we are made both of fight and float.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“That was grief, I say to myself. It makes us dark and a little crazy.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“When you fall in love with your kids, you fall in love forever.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“She is far from a hole in my life. She is an enormous presence”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“It’s weird,” I say. “For me—I can’t find books dark enough right now.” The things I’m loving these days: things where everything is not okay, and that’s okay—or not. Montaigne incredulous: “Did you think you would never reach the point toward which you were constantly heading?”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“I am still trying to know myself. I want a better sense of what kind of mother the kids will remember me to be. It's hard: I am not done becoming me. I am still in the works. I still aim to be softer in some places, firmer in others.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“It’s a beautiful, human kind of coping. Clean laundry, wine.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“A bus. A cough. A rusty nail: Death sits near each one of us at every turn. Sometimes we are too aware, but mostly we push it away. Sometimes it looks exactly like life. Orange: The colors of the sky are the same when the sun rises as when it disappears.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“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.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“I love that she could go her whole life ardently loving purple, and then shift to an equally passionate affinity for orange less than a week before she died. It’s exactly like her: She had strong opinions but was never afraid to change them—to evolve or retract or alter. Her favorite way to start a sentence—“You know what your problem is?”—was closely rivaled by “You know what I was wrong about?”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“Of course they all remember; of course it is not only me, trying to both preserve and crack open the lie that time doesn’t pass, that loss isn’t a blade so sharp that it can make you bleed long before you ever feel the sting.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“Thank you for the taco casserole. It worked even better than my stool softeners. Thoughts and prayers are great, but Ativan and pot are better. Thank you for the flowers. I hope they die before I do. All your phone messages about how not knowing exactly what’s going on with me has stressed you out really helped me put things in perspective. Xanax is white, Zofran is blue, steroids make me feel like throttling you.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“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.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“We have to learn that what cannot be cured must be endured,” Montaigne also says.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“You are fully entitled to slap the next person who tells you that God only gives us what we can handle.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“My friends ask a new kind of question: How is today? I hope the pain is manageable today.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“Downstairs, the boys gaze at a screen on the old futon in the playroom. We will figure out what to do about them soon enough. They probably already know what’s up and are waiting for us to figure out how to say it. Their very existence is the one dark piece I cannot get right within all this. I can let go of a lot of things: plans, friends, career goals, places in the world I want to see, maybe even the love of my life. But I cannot figure out how to let go of mothering them.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“We contain things and give shape to things in order to be less afraid of them. Yes. The crafted idea does this. It's why I write. The metaphor does this. The intact body does it, too. Sometimes I worry I do this instead of allowing myself to feel things. . . . Reveal the pain, but hide the wreckage. I can hear Montaigne hollering: break it open, look inside, feel it, write it down.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“I'm terrified. I'm fine. The world is changed and exactly as before. There are crows in my hair. I have no hair. Bring me a jug of wine. Bring me a kerchief to scrub spotlessly clean.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“There: I discover a packet of unopened grief. My mother. I try to soft-belly breathe.

It is unexpected for her to find me here in Paris, but there is is. Somehow, an ocean away from my dad and the kids and almost everyone we know makes the distance away that she is feel even more boundless and profound.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“Morning was always Nina’s favorite time of day. Before she got sick, she used to bounce out of bed at first light, and she insisted on open blinds when we went to bed, even if we were in a hotel with an eastern exposure in the desert. So it seemed fitting that she died at 6 a.m. on February 26, just before the sun came up.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

“It’s hard to say exactly how the pain shapes my days; it is as variable as the weather, as tomatoes, as a child. Sometimes it finds me with the first turn in bed; sometimes only after too long at a party; sometimes it is all that I am—my truest self—and other times I only recognize it on the faces and stoops of others enough to say its name. Pain—you are a cipher as well.”
― Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying