some thoughts on the bright hour by nina riggs

memoir

“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.” Ralph Waldo Emmerson, 1838

oh nina. i had wanted to read this book after i read when breath becomes air. one day when we were out walking the dogs, one of the little libraries on our walk had it tucked within. what are the odds?

nina riggs was diagnosed with cancer at 37. she documents her life before and the two years after her diagnosis. she’s so lovely. her writing is so wonderful. i love the short chapters. i love how each one has a title of its own. hers was the first book i read that had this type of format and i really prefer it to long, lingering chapters.

I know I can’t sit inside for one more minute, so I head for the woods, where today it is so brutally green and alive it almost hurts, and I feel I am being drugged with the scent of wisteria. At first I am nearly running - I cannot slow my body - and I can feel in my chest and my fingertips the thrum of some electric-like current and my heartbeat in my ears. p.39

oh nina.

her goal was to describe how life and death can exist together. and she does this so well. she lives, even in the shadow of her ongoing, stubborn cancer.

i absolutely knew how this book was going to end and yet. still. i hoped. there is so much regular life in this book, sometimes you forget how it’s all going to end. this book just makes me so, so sad. what a loss for her family and friends. what a loss for the literary world, too.

I understand what it is to dawdle in the sun on a perfect day and feel winter and grief in the warm breeze and in the dry rustle of the grasses and in the waves in the bay newly tipped with white p.153

in an interview with the Washington Post two days before she died, she says,

I hope people will relate to it, and see themselves and their families in it. I hope they’ll feel comforted by it, too, maybe feel a closeness to the experiences described in the book, a familiarity even. Sort of the opposite of fear, really. I so admire what writers like Atul Gawande and Paul Kalanithi have done to uncloak aspects of our mortality and make the experience of living with death in the room every day one that everyone can relate to. That’s a real point I hope I make in the book: it doesn’t have to be scary, at least not for the most part.

before i go, paul kalanithi is the author of when breath becomes air, another beautiful memoir of dying. and some time, after nina dies, paul’s wife and daughter and nina’s husband and sons become a blended family of their own. sometimes the fates weave our futures in mysterious and magical ways.

i hope there is some magic in your day.

n xx