The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying
Nina Riggs
for my boys: John, Freddy, and Benny and in memory of my mom, Janet Angela Riggs, 1947–2015
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 EMERSON, 1838
Prologue: The Bike Ride
“Dying isn’t the end of the world,” my mother liked to joke after she was diagnosed as terminal.
I never really understood what she meant, until the day I suddenly did—a few months after she died—when, at age thirty-eight, the breast cancer I’d been in treatment for became metastatic and incurable. There are so many things that are worse than death: old grudges, a lack of self-awareness, severe constipation, no sense of humor, the grimace on your husband’s face as he empties your surgical drain into the measuring cup.
My husband, John, and I were on the sidewalk in front of the house, our bodies moving together in the late morning sun, teaching our younger son to ride a bike.
“Don’t let me go yet!” Benny was hollering.
“But you’ve got it, you’ve got it,” I keep saying, running along beside him. I can feel a new steadiness in his momentum under my grip of the back of his seat. “You’re practically doing it all on your own.”
“But I’m not ready!” he yells.
We never taught our older son, Freddy, to ride. One day he begged to take the training wheels off, and minutes later was riding laps around the backyard. Not Benny. He is never ready for us to let go.
“Do you have me?” he keeps asking.
The weekend air is a medicine, and I’m starting to feel stronger and stronger: months of chemo behind me, close to finishing six weeks of radiation. We’re aiming for the stop sign at the corner—maybe fifty feet ahead—with the slightest incline.
“Strong legs,” John is saying. “Steady eyes, steady handlebar.”
A young couple with a dog crosses the street to get out of our way. They smile at Benny. I’m smiling at them and trying to catch John’s eye. He’s going to do it. I’m not looking down. I’m looking ahead.
Then: my toe catches, and I stumble on a lip in the cement.
In that moment, something snaps deep within. Benny hears me yelp, and John and I both let go of him. John is supporting my whole weight and I’m floating somewhere in the new universe called Pain. But I’m also watching Benny wobbling forward. He keeps going and going.
“I’m sorry, Mom! Are you okay?” he is yelling over his shoulder. “Look! I’m still riding!”
And there it is: The beautiful, vibrant, living world goes on.
*
The next day at the hospital, inside the MRI machine, where it sounded like hostile aliens had formed a punk band, I was reminded of a story I heard on NPR about a team-building exercise that an employer in South Korea was using to raise worker morale.
During the exercise, the employees dress in long robes and sit at desks. Each writes a letter to a loved one as if it were their last correspondence. Sniffling and even outright weeping are acceptable. Next to each desk is a big wooden box. But not an ordinary wooden box: a coffin.
When the workers are done with the letter, they lie down in the coffin and someone pretending to be the Angel of Death comes around and hammers the top shut. They lie in the dark inside the coffin as still as they can be for about ten minutes. The idea is that when they emerge from the pretend burial they will have a new perspective, one that will make them more passionate about their work and appreciative of their lives.
All around me: Rooms of gowned patients were lying flat on their backs inside tight loud tubes and silent patients were wheeled to and from these darkened basement rooms. We are practicing, I thought. As the machine clanked and buzzed for over an hour, I became the Angel of Stillness. I thought: Forget the Angel of Death. The contrast dye sizzled in my veins, and just as the tech warned me, the Angel of Medical Imaging came close but never touched me. When the noise finally stopped, I could hear the voice of a different machine in some nearby room instructing: BREATHE. STOP BREATHING. NOW BREATHE.
In the MRI control room, a picture was surfacing out of the dark of the screen: my spine being devoured by a tumor. They call the break pathologic—caused by underlying disease. This was the MRI where they found that the cancer had spread to my bones. This was the MRI that suggested I had eighteen to thirty-six months to live.
A half hour later I would be lying in the same position in a curtained emergency room bay being told by a teary radiation oncology resident—squeezing my hand, patting my bald head—that the pain I’d been having for two months, which I’d been assured was from having a weak core after months of chemo, was actually from the cancer that now would never go away.
STAGE ONE
1. One Small Spot
The call comes when John is away at a conference in New Orleans. Let’s not linger on the thin light sifting into our bedroom as I fold laundry, the last leaves shivering on the willow oak outside—preparing to let go but not yet letting go. The heat chattering in the vent. The dog working a spot on her leg. The new year hanging in the air like a question mark. The phone buzzing on the bed.
It’s almost noon. Out at the school, the kids must be lining up for recess, their fingers tunneling into their gloves like explorers.
Cancer in the breast, the doctor from the biopsy says. One small spot. One small spot. I repeat it to John, who steps out of a breakout session when he sees my text. I repeat it to my mom, who says, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Not you, already.”
I repeat it to my dad who shows up at my house with chicken soup. I repeat it to my best friend, Tita, and she repeats it to me as we sit on the couch obsessing over all twenty words of the phone conversation with the doctor. I repeat it brushing my teeth, in the carpool line, unclasping my bra, falling asleep, walking the aisles of the grocery store, walking on the greenway, lying in the cramped, clanky cave of the MRI machine while they take a closer look. One small spot.
It becomes a chant, a rallying cry. One small spot is fixable. One small spot is a year of your life. No one dies from one small spot.
“Oh, breast cancer,” I remember my great-aunt saying before she died at age ninety-three of heart failure. “That’s something I did in the 1970s.”
2. World of Trouble