The Bright Hour (Nina Riggs)
Nina Riggs was the great-great-great granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emmerson and an American writer and poet. After Riggs was diagnosed with breast cancer in early 2015 she started a blog called “suspicious country” where she and her husband shared their experiences navigating cancer. The posts from this blog eventually formed the foundation of her memoir, “The Bright Hour.” Riggs died two years after her diagnosis and her memoir was published posthumously.
As is true of memoirs, there’s no overview from me, just freeform thoughts. I’ll start by saying I resonated with how Riggs described the freedom that comes with having “the terrible thing” finally happen. I remember Frank Ostaseski mentioning something similar – that some hospice patients found it was only after their terminal diagnosis that they were finally able to breathe. Like having the end become evident gave them permission to live. On a much much smaller scale, I can relate. I was anxious in the days leading up to my wedding, worrying about all the things that could go wrong. At 5:30am the morning of my wedding, my hairstylist called to tell me she wasn’t going to make it. Rather than triggering stress, I felt tremendous relief. I didn’t have to spend the rest of the day worrying that something would go wrong, because it already had. I’m sure there’s a psychological term for this (if you find it, tell me!).
Riggs describes how eventually she stops pretending to be normal, to look normal. Her late mother describes it as a “mastectomy of bullshit.” She continues, “the oh-yes-everything-is-great stuff eventually gets carted off in a bag of medical waste.” The Bright Hour also underscores a number of affirmations that I recognize from other content on mortality and dying. First, that whatever you’re feeling is normal. Happy, depressed, numb, it’s all correct, nothing is unusual. Second, that we should expect and accept juxtaposition. How a moment can be perfect and at the same time awful. How things can be both familiar and completely foreign. How time can feel both fast and slow. And last, that death has a way of forcing you into the present – imploring you to show up for each moment and not take anything for granted.
One of the most poignant moments for me was contemplating the end of this book. As readers we know it’s the end – we can see the pages are running out, and we can tell from the title that it’s the last chapter. But the author doesn’t know it’s the last chapter, and maybe that’s why it seems so much like the others. Any chapter could have been the last. While life’s denouement may be marked by common themes, life still ends in the middle of everything.