Contemporary Authors

• The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2017

1. The bright hour : a memoir of living and dying https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007161 Riggs, Nina, author. The bright hour : a memoir of living and dying / Nina Riggs. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2017. 310 pages ; 22 cm RC280.B8 R5355 2017 ISBN: 9781501169359 (hardback)9781501169373 (trade paper)

• Nina Rigg - https://ninariggs.com/bio/

  Nina Riggs lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, with her husband and kids and dogs. She taught poetry in the creative writing program at UNC Chapel Hill for almost ten years, and completed her memoir–The Bright Hour–about her experiences living with metastatic breast cancer, in January 2017. She died on February 26, 2017.

• UNCG - https://newsandfeatures.uncg.edu/late-alumna-nina-riggs-bright-hour/

  Late alumna Nina Riggs’ ‘The Bright Hour’ on NYT bestseller list
  June 29, 2017
  Late alumna Nina Riggs’ ‘The Bright Hour’ on NYT bestseller list
  image description Nina Riggs (Photo by Toni Tronu)
  Print Mail

  This past month, a UNCG alumna’s words reached thousands across the globe. In her work, she conveyed the profound joys of life, in the midst of impending death.

  Many Spartans knew and admired Nina Riggs, who attended the MFA in Creative Writing Program from 2002 to 2004. She died in February at age 39, only weeks after finishing her book, “The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying,” published by Simon and Schuster on June 6.

  "The Bright Hour" book cover

  The book took shape from Riggs’ essay that appeared in the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column in September of 2016, “When a Couch is More Than a Couch.” Prior to that she had written about her life with breast cancer in an article that appeared in the Washington Post, and on her blog, Suspicious Country. Within 10 days of its publication, “The Bright Hour” held spot 14 on the New York Times’ best seller list for nonfiction, and was then named an editors’ choice. Riggs’ wise, realistic and uplifting perspective on life – and death – is far reaching. Katie Couric, who made a video segment on “The Bright Hour,” called it “an amazing book,” and it has already been translated into seven languages.

  In “The Bright Hour,” Riggs frequently alludes to the 16th-century French philosopher and essayist Montaigne, and to her great-great-great grandfather, American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. The book’s epitaph is a fitting quotation from Emerson: “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.”

  Because of her awareness of her time limitations, Riggs wrote about her life as it was happening, submitting pages as she completed them, with the knowledge she would not see her young children grown up, or her book in published form. Many scenes take place within a few short blocks of the UNCG campus, and readers can find Greensboro landmarks, such as St. Mary’s House, in the pages.

  At UNCG, Riggs worked with Fred Chappell and Stuart Dischell in poetry workshops and was poetry editor for the Greensboro Review from 2003 to 2004.

  Dischell said of her, “Nina was one of our most worldly and elegant poets when she came to us in the MFA Program in 2002, after a year in Paris with her husband, John. She was a brilliant student whose poems had passion, gravity and historical perspective. The prose of her memoir is as beautiful as it gets.”

  Her husband John Duberstein observed that at UNCG she not only studied the craft of writing poetry and nonfiction, but created a lasting community among her classmates and professors.

  “The program doesn’t just build writing skills – it was very much about relationships,” he said.

  Even after Riggs graduated, the UNCG writing community remained a big part of her life; she was a part of small writing groups, finding writing exchange opportunities and close friendships with the people she had gotten to know through the MFA program. She also found a writing position with the Center for Reproductive Rights through a UNCG classmate.

  “The Bright Hour” has been reviewed and profiled in The Washington Post, People Magazine, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, O Magazine, The Boston Globe and Publishers Weekly, among others. Author Kelly Corrigan wrote, “How a woman can have this much emotional clarity and narrative power while fighting for her life should astonish every last one of us. Magical. Unforgettable.”

  Last Tuesday at Scuppernong Books in downtown Greensboro, UNCG faculty member Holly Goddard-Jones interviewed Duberstein, and two UNCG MFA alumni, Drew Perry and Tita Ramirez, read excerpts from “The Bright Hour.” The crowd packed the back half of the bookstore, a clear testament to Riggs’ connection to the literary community in and around UNCG.

QUOTED: "a luminous, heartbreaking symphony of wit, wisdom, pain, parenting, and perseverance against insurmountable odds."

Riggs, Nina: THE BRIGHT HOUR
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Riggs, Nina THE BRIGHT HOUR Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 6, 6 ISBN: 978-1-5011-6935-9
A loving mother of two meditates on the nature of life and death.When poet Riggs' (Lucky, Lucky, 2009) diagnosis of breast cancer suddenly became terminal at age 38, her view of all living things narrowed to her two sons, her strong yet fearful husband, John, and the memory of her mother, who died just months before. The author entered the fray with her doctor's grim announcement of "one small spot" on her breast and began years of treatment for a cancerous lesion that seemed initially manageable, spread, and eventually claimed her life just this year. As breast cancer permeates her family history--even her paternal grandfather underwent a radical mastectomy in the 1970s--Riggs wasn't completely shocked by her diagnosis, but it took time for the reality of illness to sink in, as well as the development that one of her young sons was diabetic. The author generously shares memories of her romance with John, their life together in Paris, and familial anecdotes that oscillate between tender and bittersweet. The author writes with a seamless flow and an honest, heartfelt tone; the narrative often glides into passages of gorgeous, rhythmic prose leaving no doubt about Riggs' immense talent for poetic language. She also retains a dry, witty sense of humor throughout despite the sadness of enduring chemotherapy and its side effects, navigating advanced medical and legal directives, a mastectomy, and an incremental decline in her health. She was buoyed, however, by starting a personal cancer chronicle blog called Suspicious Country and by the words of Michel de Montaigne and Annie Dillard. Though the aggressive cancer hijacked her physically and psychologically, Riggs' indefatigable spirit is the true heroine in this story of life and loss; even in her darkest moments, she writes, "the beautiful, vibrant, living world goes on." A luminous, heartbreaking symphony of wit, wisdom, pain, parenting, and perseverance against insurmountable odds.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Riggs, Nina: THE BRIGHT HOUR." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002767/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=6c1146ce. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
1 of 11 12/24/17, 2:00 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491002767

QUOTED: "Through this warmhearted memoir, Riggs writes her way to accepting her own death and the uncertainty that follows it. The Bright Hour is an introspective, well-considered tribute to life."

2 of 11 12/24/17, 2:00 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The bright hour
Carla Jean Whitley
BookPage.
(June 2017): p27. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
"The beautiful, vibrant, living world goes on." Nina Riggs, who died in February, realized this truth during a mundane moment: While teaching her son to ride his bike, she stumbles and releases him. As Benny rides forward, he shouts behind him, checking on his mother.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
It's a simple moment, but to Riggs, whose triple negative breast cancer had been deemed terminal, it encapsulated so much more. When she was diagnosed at age 37, doctors expected her disease to be curable. It was one small spot of cancer, that was all. But it metastasized and, by age 38, Riggs knew the disease would kill her.
Riggs' husband, John, longs for a return to normalcy. "I have to love these days in the same way I love any other. There might not be a 'normal' from here on out," she responds. "These days are days. We choose how we hold them."
As she endures chemotherapy and radiation, Riggs faces those days with a clear-eyed determination to fully live. Riggs, herself a poet, examines her impending death through her own lyrical perspective, informed by the writings of her great-great-great-grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and French philosopher Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.
Part of living, though, is death. Riggs must face it even before her own cancer is deemed terminal: Her mother's multiple myeloma is fatal. The family concludes her mother's funeral with an open-ended moment of silence, which Riggs struggles with. Shouldn't they sound a gong or otherwise give those gathered permission to leave?
No, her brother says. "It's about honoring the unknowing and the awkwardness and the mystery
3 of 11 12/24/17, 2:00 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
of dying. It's unsettling--and that's okay."
Through this warmhearted memoir, Riggs writes her way to accepting her own death and the uncertainty that follows it. The Bright Hour is an introspective, well-considered tribute to life. As Riggs' famed ancestor Emerson writes, "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."
--CARLA JEAN WHITLEY
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Whitley, Carla Jean. "The bright hour." BookPage, June 2017, p. 27. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492899151/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=3a4240cb. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492899151

QUOTED: "Despite the profound sadness of her situation, Riggs writes with humor."

4 of 11 12/24/17, 2:00 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying
Publishers Weekly.
264.17 (Apr. 24, 2017): p85. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying Nina Riggs. Simon & Schuster, $25 (288p)
ISBN 978-1-5011-6935-9
Riggs, who lives in Greensboro, N.C., was 38 when she was diagnosed with incurable metastatic breast cancer. The diagnosis comes at the onset of this moving and insightful memoir. Married to a lawyer, and the mother of two young sons, Riggs was initially told that the cancer was "one small spot," but as the memoir progresses (the sections are ominously yet cleverly named after the four "stages" of cancer), the small spot grows and spreads to her spine. She undergoes a mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, spinal surgery, and joins a clinical trial. During the same period, Riggs's wisecracking and beloved mother, who had been fighting multiple myeloma for eight years, dies. Despite the profound sadness of her situation, Riggs writes with humor; the memoir is rife with witty one-liners and musings on the joys and challenges of mothering and observations on the importance of loving relationships. The great-great-great-granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Riggs frequently quotes her legendary relative and uses his writings as a guide, as well as the writings of the philosopher Montaigne, whose advice to "live with an awareness of death in the room" she takes seriously. In this tender memoir Riggs displays a keen awareness of and reverence for all the moments of life--both the light, and the dark, "the cruel, and the beautiful." (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 85.
PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250878/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=289de8f7. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491250878
5 of 11 12/24/17, 2:00 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living
and Dying
Stacy Shaw
Booklist.
113.16 (Apr. 15, 2017): p9. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying. By Nina Riggs. June 2017. 288p. Simon & Schuster, $25 (97815011693591.818.
In this memoir, poet Riggs struggles through a breast-cancer diagnosis that, despite treatment and a mastectomy, stubbornly persists until it spreads and becomes terminal. During this battle, Riggs' mother has cancer that becomes terminal, Riggs' friend is diagnosed with cancer that becomes terminal, her son is diagnosed with diabetes, and her parents' dog dies. Throughout, Riggs, who sadly passed earlier this year, presses on, stoic and searching for a philosophy to describe this crazy situation, and for a treatment that will allow her more time with her husband and two young sons. Riggs is to be admired for candidly sharing the battle she fought, and for her no-holds-barred documentation of all the depleting minutiae of such a fight. Throughout, she sprinkles in the philosophies of life she ponders and the gallows humor that helps her cope, which readers may find off-putting in its depth of darkness. Overall, this brutally honest depiction of terminal illness is not for the faint of heart, but will be appreciated for its raw honesty.--Stacy Shaw
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Shaw, Stacy. "The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2017, p. 9.
PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492536071/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=8555f42e. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492536071
6 of 11 12/24/17, 2:00 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The biography shelf
California Bookwatch.
(July 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
The Bright Hour
Nina Riggs
Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas, 14th fl., New York, NY 10020 9781501169359 $25.00 www.simonandschuster.com
The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying comes from a contemporary poet descended from Ralph Waldo Emerson who was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was thirty-seven. This was not surprising, since cancer ran on both sides of her family, but as she watched her mother pass away and her own cancer spread, Nina had to decide how to live her remaining time with her two young sons and the best friend she'd married. As she grapples with the basics of how to lead a well-lived life, readers join her on a journey through health and wellness, illness, and the basics of getting the most from each day. The author lost her battle but her book lives on as a testimony to the process of gaining the most from life.
The Long Haul
Finn Murphy
W. W. Norton & Company
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 9780393608717 $26.95 www.wwnorton.com
The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road comes from an author who was himself a semi-trucker, dropping out of college to drive a truck. His life on the road, the mechanics and demands of long-haul moving, and the life and challenges of being a professional trucker lend to a series of lively stories about the trucking industry and the characters and adventures it often involves. Readers needn't know anything about trucking, nor have a prior affection for it. Finn Murphy takes care of all explanations and details, bringing readers along for a rollicking ride through a trucker's world and providing an insider's eye, pairing it with an involving series of encounters.
7 of 11 12/24/17, 2:00 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Orb Stones & Geoglyphs: A Writer's Journey Daniel A. Smith
Amazon Digital Services
ASIN: B06XP2N459 $1.99 http://a.co/6RE3E3j
One doesn't expect geology or a search for lost cultures to appear in the context of a writer's search for self; but one of the pleasures of Orb Stones & Geoglyphs lies in Daniel A. Smith's evolutionary process both as a writer and as an investigator, and so his story traverses a range of revelations that move from personal to social issues as he considers early influences and perceptions and how these changed. From developing a story and fostering an early attention to editing to charting the winding process of an idea that moves from kernel to fruition, chapters provide powerful insights fellow writers will want to learn from. It's highly recommended for a wide audience, from writers to fans of autobiography, science, and the process of finding geoglyphs and unlocking their deeper mysteries.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The biography shelf." California Bookwatch, July 2017. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A506674817/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=c8bf627e. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A506674817
8 of 11 12/24/17, 2:00 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living
and Dying
LaVonne Neff
The Christian Century.
134.21 (Oct. 11, 2017): p48+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Century Foundation http://www.christiancentury.org
Full Text:
The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying By Nina Riggs
Simon &. Schuster, 320 pp., $25.00
Ancient Egyptians brought skeletons to their feasts, exhorting guests to drink and make merry while they still could. American Puritans in the 17th century kept skulls as warnings to sober up and focus on the afterlife. Memento mori, the gruesome reminders were called: remember that you must die. People died suddenly, and young. They wanted to be prepared.
Nina Riggs did not feel prepared when she learned that a small spot in her breast was malignant. Cancer ran in her family: it had taken three grandparents and several aunts, and her mother was in treatment for multiple myeloma. But Riggs was only 37. Her sons, Freddy and Benny, were eight and five; she was not ready to leave them. Merrymaking had its place, but it didn't address her concerns. And the afterlife, if it existed, was unknowable.
So Riggs, a published poet, turned to writing as a way to shape and contain her experience: first an online journal, Suspicious Country, initially to keep friends and family informed; then an essay in the "Modern Love" section of the New York Times', and finally, during the last six months of her heartbreakingly short life, this memoir, her memento mori for 21st-century readers. "I see the young mother's double take, the kids who stare, the waiter's nervous glance, my friends who jump to adjust my chair," she wrote late in her illness, after a lunch out. "Maybe the skeleton at the feast is me."
9 of 11 12/24/17, 2:00 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Unlike skulls and skeletons, however, Riggs is neither spooky nor gloomy. Her book's title comes from a journal entry by Ralph Waldo Emerson--her great-great-great grandfather--in which he praises morning, a "moist, warm, glittering, budding and melodious" time when one can "cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body" and "become as large as the World." Riggs's love of the world shines through every chapter, even as the ground shifts beneath her. A second tumor is discovered; a mastectomy is advised. Her husband, John, says he can't wait for things to get back to normal. She cuts him short. "I have to love these days in the same way I love any other," she protests. "There might not be a 'normal' from here on out."
So she wallpapers the mudroom, installs a fire pit in the backyard, assembles a rocking chair, and plants a garden. "Please stop," John pleads. So she stays up late reading, parties with friends, surprises John with a trip to Paris, and takes the boys to Orlando. Just days before what will be her final trip to the hospital, she is sitting on her deck watching her sons at play. She feels the light on her skin. "We love the days," she writes. "They are promises. They are the only way to walk from one night to the other."
Make no mistake: this is no feel-good book, no chirpy assurance that we can magically rise above the infirmities of the flesh until we shuffle off this mortal coil. Riggs must deal with her young son's diabetes and her mother's final illness as well as her own grief, terror, and pain. Some days her back, riddled with tumors, hurts so badly that she can't get out of bed. But Riggs, a master of metaphor, usually describes her struggles indirectly. Instead of detailing her symptoms and treatments, she lists her mother's. Instead of discussing her anxiety, she describes "the packed room of anxious women ranging from twenty to ninety all in our identical gray dressing gowns." In a bleakly gorgeous account of scattering her mother's ashes, she lets a bereaved guinea hen--"the last living member of [her] species at the end of summer on an island in the chilly Atlantic"--convey her own intense grief: "There is no fear as great as her fear. From time to time she lets loose a great squawk, ... a desperate hollow call out into a world where the wind blows and the sun shines and children and dogs run in the lawn but where there is no one that matters to answer."
Riggs often lightens painful scenes with wryly humorous observations--the MRI machine that sounds like a punk band of hostile aliens, the chemo-destroyed pubic hair that looks like "a drowned baby muskrat in the drain," the breast surgeon's office "tucked back among perfectly perky B-cup-size rolling hills." Especially delightful are the cautionary emails her friend Ginny, also living with stage four cancer, imagines sending her future teenaged children from the grave.
Still, I probably wouldn't give The Bright Hour to a person living with cancer. Riggs is writing for the rest of us: those who rarely think about death because, at the moment, we feel fine. "A bus. A cough. A rusty nail," she intones. "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." One sunny morning Riggs and her husband are running alongside their six-year-old son, teaching him to ride his bike. She trips and falls. Her spine snaps. Two days later the ER doctor tells her that the cancer has metastasized. In 14 months, she will be dead.
"Living with a terminal disease is like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss," she writes. But "living without disease is also like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary
10 of 11 12/24/17, 2:00 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
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." Remember that you will die.
Riggs was not conventionally religious. "Faith is a word I have struggled with," she admits. "For me, faith involves staring into the abyss, seeing that it is dark and full of the unknown--and being okay with that." Meanwhile, "there is life--this bright hour."
Reviewed by LaVonne Neff, who blogs and reviews books at her blog, Lively Dust.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Neff, LaVonne. "The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying." The Christian Century, vol.
134, no. 21, 2017, p. 48+. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A511454702 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ca4453cd. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A511454702
11 of 11 12/24/17, 2:00 PM

"Riggs, Nina: THE BRIGHT HOUR." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002767/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6c1146ce. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017. Whitley, Carla Jean. "The bright hour." BookPage, June 2017, p. 27. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492899151/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=3a4240cb. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017. "The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 85. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250878/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=289de8f7. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017. Shaw, Stacy. "The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2017, p. 9. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492536071/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=8555f42e. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017. "The biography shelf." California Bookwatch, July 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A506674817/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c8bf627e. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017. Neff, LaVonne. "The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying." The Christian Century, vol. 134, no. 21, 2017, p. 48+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A511454702/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ca4453cd. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/a-mothers-memoir-is-this-years-when-breath-becomes-air/2017/05/31/265e5b34-13cc-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html?utm_term=.8032245f2332
  Word count: 1225

  QUOTED: "The book will make you feel joy. Riggs writes beautifully about her family, her love of literature and nature, of beach vacations and watching her son learn to ride a bike."
  "The Bright Hour is a stunning work, a heart-rending meditation on life — not just how to appreciate it while you’re living it, but how to embrace its end, too."

  A dying mother’s memoir is this year’s ‘When Breath Becomes Air’
  By Nora Krug June 1

  Two days before she died, Nina Riggs made a request: Don’t be afraid to read my book.

  There’s good reason for such a plea. Her book, “The Bright Hour,” is a memoir about the last two years of her life. She completed it in January; she died the next month, at age 39, of metastatic breast cancer. Her book comes out Tuesday.
  Author Nina Riggs, who died of cancer in February. (John Duberstein)

  In an email interview from a hospice in Greensboro, N.C., Riggs, who had two young sons, remained remarkably upbeat: “I think a real gift that this experience gave me was forcing me to appreciate my life/death, not just my life. I had to embrace the experience of having cancer, because that experience was part and parcel to my experience of my husband, my kids, my dearest friends. So I would say I really hope the book I wrote will make you feel much more joy than anything else.”

  The book will make you feel joy. Riggs writes beautifully about her family, her love of literature and nature, of beach vacations and watching her son learn to ride a bike: “Don’t let me go yet!” he screams, as she does. The book will also make you feel sad.

  But heed the author’s request. “The Bright Hour” is a stunning work, a heart-rending meditation on life — not just how to appreciate it while you’re living it, but how to embrace its end, too. It is this year’s “When Breath Becomes Air.”

  Riggs, a former teacher and a poet, raised her family in Greensboro. Before becoming ill, she was, by her own account, a fairly typical young mother. Amid the play dates and trips to Target is an amusingly irrational sense of doom that will feel familiar to many readers — Web searches about what fate might befall her boys if, for example, they ate too much playground mulch or had “an unnatural passion for ceiling fans and kitty cats.” In 2015, during a mammogram, doctors found “one small spot,” and her perspective quickly shifted: “It has happened, I keep thinking. The terrible thing. This is what the terrible thing feels like.”

  Riggs had a family history of breast cancer; her paternal grandfather died of the disease, along with several other members of her extended family. But knowing this ominous genetic makeup offers little assurance or comfort when the diagnosis is made. “We are certain only that there is so much of what we are uncertain,” Riggs writes.

  [Nina Riggs: ‘A family tree entwined by cancer’]

  And yet Riggs barely pauses to pity herself or her family. She trudges forward with the kind of strength and humor that make reading her account a bittersweet pleasure. Her wit is sharp and her observations lyrical: “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,” she writes.

  Riggs was surprised by the speed at which her disease progressed. And though readers know the end that this narrative is hurtling toward, still we feel the suspense, the hopes and the disappointments along the way. In the midst of it all, Riggs is also coping with the slow death of her mother, a woman whose lines zing even in her final moments, when she tells her daughter, “You are a great person in many ways, [but] I wish you were better about going to the dentist.”

  Off the Shelf/Simon & Schuster

  A descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Riggs sought solace in his work and that of the philosopher Michel de Montaigne. Like Emerson, Riggs was drawn to “finding beauty and magic . . . in the natural world, and in our smaller, everyday worlds,” she said. “When I found the Great Seer of my family had already dealt, beautifully, almost ecstatically, with these issues, it was a real source of inspiration.”
  (Simon & Schuster)

  The book’s title comes from Emerson’s journal, where he writes about being “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.”

  Riggs died in the morning, her favorite time of day, as her husband notes in a poignant afterword. Before her illness, “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 eastern exposure in the desert,” he writes.

  Riggs said she hoped her book would help readers better understand how death and life are entwined. Montaigne appreciated this, she explains. “He left all his doors unlocked. He acknowledged the terror that could come. But by considering it and allowing it in, he resolved to live with its presence: ‘I want death to find me planting my cabbages, not concerned about it or — still less — my unfinished garden.’ ”

  [Before I go: A mother’s hopeful words about life in its waning moments]

  Book Club newsletter

  Monthly book reviews and recommendations.
  The author Nina Riggs (Nina Riggs )

  Death found Riggs in an unfinished garden. Her children are 7 and 10. But her life flourishes in the pages of this book. Written in the present tense, it feels present, as if Riggs is in the room talking to you — that witty friend who makes you laugh and ponder big thoughts even as she quietly suffers. It makes the last pages especially moving.

  Still, in her final interview, conducted with the help of her husband, Riggs expressed hope that readers would not greet her book’s dark subject with fear: “Even the scary parts are deeply intertwined with all the bits of life we cherish most,” she said, “our partners, children, passions, work, friends, music. So many wonderful, beautiful, amazing things that are going on right there under death’s nose all the time.”

  Nora Krug is an editor and writer for Book World.

  The Bright Hour
  A Memoir of Living and Dying

  By Nina Riggs

  Simon & Schuster. 310 pp. $25

  We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

• Sydney Morning Herald
  http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/nina-riggs-how-i-let-go-after-my-incurable-breast-cancer-diagnosis-20170614-gwqtvv.html
  Word count: 4100

  Nina Riggs: how I let go after my incurable breast cancer diagnosis

  Nina Riggs was just 38 when she learnt that her breast cancer was incurable. In her moving and funny memoir, the devoted mother of two chronicles the daily business of learning to let go.

  Nina Riggs

  "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 38, 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 humour, 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.
  Nina Riggs, photographed at home shortly before her death in February 2017: “There are so many things that are worse ...
  Nina Riggs, photographed at home shortly before her death in February 2017: “There are so many things that are worse than death,” she wrote. “Old grudges, a lack of self-awareness, severe constipation, no sense of humour …” Photo: Supplied/ Toni Tronu

  "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 15 metres ahead – with the slightest incline.
  Nina with husband John and sons Freddy and Benny, 2010.
  Nina with husband John and sons Freddy and Benny, 2010. Photo: Supplied

  "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.

  "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.
  Breaking News Alert

  Get the latest news and updates emailed straight to your inbox.

  By submitting your email you are agreeing to Fairfax Media's terms and conditions and privacy policy.

  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 the radio 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 10 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 practising, 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 tumour. 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 18 to 36 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

  'Oh, breast cancer,' I remember my great-aunt saying before she died at age 93 of heart failure. 'That’s something I did in the 1970s.'

  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 tunnelling 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 20 words of the phone conversation with the doctor. I repeat it brushing my teeth, in the car-pool 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 93 of heart failure. "That's something I did in the 1970s."

  "MY PATERNAL grandfather had breast cancer." That tends to make whoever is charting my medical history look up. "He had a radical mastectomy in the 1970s. And his sister had it, too – she died in her 50s. And one of his nieces. And his daughter – my aunt." I'm sitting in the genetic counsellor's office as she madly sketches out my family tree on a sheet of paper. There are squares and circles, the cancer victims marked with X's. Lots of X's. On my mom's side: cancer in both her parents, although not breast. An early melanoma in her sister. And less than six months after this conversation, my mom herself will be dead from a blood cancer called multiple myeloma.

  As the genetic counsellor is drawing the diagrams, I am remembering a similar one from seventh-grade science class, the Punnett square: almost fortuneteller-like, better than Ouija boards and those folded-up cootie-catchers – when the grown-up self is almost equally conceivable and impossible. Pick any boy in the class, and you could predict the likelihood that you and he would have kids with brown eyes, or hair on their toes and fingers. Or – as the genetic counsellor's diagram seems to suggest – cancer.

  According to the Punnett square, two kids at my table, Mike Henninger and Christina Stapleton, had a 100 per cent chance of having a blue-eyed baby. This thrilled seventh-grade me: something about the future was settled, then. A certainty – if Christina and Mike fall in love. And want a child. And Christina is able to get pregnant. And the baby arrives safely into the world.

  On my dad's side: his older sister has the breast cancer mutation BRCA2. She was the first of us to be tested, after her diagnosis in the 1990s. Her daughter, who has not had cancer, also has the mutation. And so does at least one of my dad's three living brothers. But it turns out I do not have it. I have just been diagnosed with breast cancer at age 37, but I do not have the breast cancer mutation. "I'm going to send you a study I found," the genetic counsellor tells me. "You might be interested in the findings, given your situation."

  Researchers have discovered that in families where there is an identified breast-cancer-gene mutation such as BRCA1 or BRCA2, even family members without the mutation are at a greater risk for developing the disease. "All this likely means is that there are some genes we have not successfully mapped yet," the counsellor says. "We are seeing part of the picture, but not all of it."

  We are certain only that there is so much of which we are not certain. As far as we know, genetics accounts for only about 11 per cent of breast cancers. Which leaves 89 per cent hurtling randomly toward us through space.

  My grandfather, the one with breast cancer, died when I was seven, two years after my grandmother. Cancer, both of them – his maybe metastasised from the breast, maybe something else. We can't be sure – it was the early 1980s. "Did you ever see his scars," asks one of my uncles after my diagnosis, "from the mastectomy?"

  Once I did, although at the time I thought they were from a war. It was summer. I was five or six years old and we were down on the rocky beach below our family summer house on Cape Cod, where my grandmother's horse, Sachem, had caught a leg between two large rocks, snapped it with the force of his own heaving and had to be shot. The horse's body was too immense to move, and everyone was sweating from the work of covering him with a mound of rocks piled taller than me.

  My grandfather's body was lean and muscled and rigid – the familiar family physique – but his bare chest was another planet: distorted, twisted with scar tissue, hollowed out to the rib cage like a wooden-hulled skiff. Grown-ups are full of surprises, I remember thinking. Who could ever possibly imagine what it is to be one?

  Years later, farther down the beach where the bluff curls to a weedy cove, some of Sachem's bones eventually returned to us – bleached, worn and so massive at first I imagined they belonged to a prehistoric beast. Now one is kept on the table near the mantel, next to the angry jaw of a bluefish, the slough of a king snake, a brittle helix of thousands of conch eggs and two wooden plaques carved with my grandparents' dates. Some things are meant to return to us again and again.

  THE KIDS are out of school the Monday after my diagnosis, so John takes the day off to try to keep them out of the house. I lie on my back in bed, imagining being a sick person. What do sick people think about? How do you know when you start to be a sick person?

  I'm also wondering about this unfamiliar calm that has settled over me in the last several days – ever since the doctor on the phone spoke the word cancer. At the same time as I have watched the terror build in John's eyes, I have felt somehow relieved. It has happened, I keep thinking. The terrible thing. This is what the terrible thing feels like. Somehow, a lovely space has opened up inside my chest, a little, deep pool in the thickest woods.

  An earlier version of me – even me from a week ago – is already googling my way to a PhD on breast cancer death rates. Over the past decade I have earned my Google PhD in at least a hundred catastrophic topics – usually fates that could befall my poor children: chance of death by undetected rabies bite, chance of death by green-tinged diarrhoea, chance of death by large ear lobes, chance of death due to eating playground mulch, chance of death due to an unnatural passion for ceiling fans and kitty cats.

  I remember once reading that ovarian cancer very often went undetected because patients did not have any obvious symptoms early on. I also have no obvious symptoms, I was able to deduce, so clearly I have ovarian cancer. John shakes his head: "You're amazingly crazy," he says. "You know – for not being crazy." Since I was a little girl, I have planned an escape route whenever I sleep in a bed that isn't my own. John doesn't worry about anything until the rooms are full of smoke and someone is shaking him and flames are licking under the door.

  Darkest confession: one time, alone with the baby for too many hours – the day already dark, John still at the office – I knowingly let nine-month-old Freddy repeatedly suck on the power cord to my laptop – he giggled and whined simultaneously each time it zapped his tongue – so that I could have a spare second to scour the internet for something that would tell me the likelihood of a healthy, verbally precocious nine-month-old developing autism.

  A couple of years ago, when a therapist helped me realise through a series of exercises that the only thing that would satisfy me on the internet was a website that explicitly said: "Freddy and Benny are going to be just fine. So are you and John," I laughed out loud at myself. But it didn't really stop me from seeing disaster at every corner, or checking from time to time to make sure the magical website did not in fact exist. "You're holding on so tight," that therapist told me. "You think you will be obliterated if anything bad ever happens."

  Now, lying in my bed, obliteration feels like peace, like drifting toward sleep. This is the terrible thing. Meanwhile, John and the kids go to the park, to Target, to the library. When they get home, John comes upstairs quietly and sits down on the end of the bed.

  "I need to talk to you," he says.

  "Okay," I say.

  "I really wish I didn't have to say this, so try not to freak out."

  "Okay," I say again.

  "I think Freddy has developed diabetes." John has been a type-one diabetic for nearly 20 years.

  They said it's not genetic … "Okay."

  I cannot think of one other thing to say. "

  I noticed he was drinking a lot from the water fountain at the library, and it reminded me of when I was diagnosed. So I tested his blood sugar on my meter. It's off the charts."

  "Okay."

  "There's really nothing else it could be," he says.

  With hardly any more words, I put my clothes on, and we pack up the car and call the pediatrician and head to the hospital. Freddy's eyes are scared and exhausted. "It completely sucks," I say, pulling him against me as we walk out to the car. "But trust me: you're going to survive."

  On the way, I get a call that my MRI results have come in. We stop by the Breast Centre, part of the same complex. The woman at reception hands me the test results and a large pink tote bag. "Complimentary!" she says. One small spot, the printout confirms. I can breathe again and then I can't as we walk onto the children's ward, the pink tote over my shoulder.

  Freddy is a great sport at the hospital, but he hates it when they put in the IV, which takes a number of sticks in his tiny hand, and he's not shy about letting the nurses know. "I'm surprised you're okay with doing something so painful to a kid," he tries, incensed by the multiple attempts. And: "Are you sure you have actually put in an IV before?"

  The saintly nurse rolls her eyes, and John heads out to get Freddy some chicken wings and broth from his favourite Chinese restaurant – something with low carbohydrates that won't further elevate his blood sugar. While he's gone I call my mom. "I know it's going to sound like I'm making this up," I say.

  First I tell her the news from my MRI, then Freddy's diagnosis. They want to keep us here for three to four days – to get his blood sugar under control, stabilise his kidneys, teach us how to give him shots – even though John is already a pro.

  Benny isn't allowed to stay on the ward because it's flu season, so John takes him home after dinner. We talk on the phone later that night. "I really didn't want to tell you," John says. "In fact, I considered taking him straight to the hospital and telling you.

  I'd decided to take the kids on an impromptu trip. It just seemed really important not to let you find out." Freddy's asleep at last. I'm lying nearby on the fold-out chair, lights off in the hospital room – just the flash of the heart monitor, sending out a steady code into the night like a lighthouse: okay for now, okay for now, okay for now. "I'm so glad it was you who was on parent patrol," I say. "I think it would have sailed past me. I kind of feel like I've had a lobotomy." "Oh yeah, I wasn't going to tell you that part either, but I had them take care of that as well," he says. "It seemed for the best."

  THE QUEEN of Triple Negative Breast Cancer: that's the doctor I have the great fortune of being squeezed in to see so she can determine how to treat this aggressive-seeming, hormone-negative tumour, the clinic coordinator at Duke Cancer Centre tells me.

  John and I take a selfie in the exam room while we wait. "This is what two completely terrified people who are trying to act like they've got it all under control look like," I say, showing it to him.

  "How many people do you think are going to feel you up today?" he says.

  The first appointment is at 9.20am., and we don't leave the clinic until 6pm. Dr Blackwell is smart like a switchblade and wears knee-high black boots with her white coat. She looks completely together. She might be my polar opposite.

  She seems to terrify everyone around her, and John and I both love her right away. She knows the details of my case off the top of her head. She refers to my cancer as being "highly curable". She prefers to call chemo combinations "recipes" because "cocktail" makes her think about having a drink too early in the day and that's disappointing. So maybe we are not polar opposites.

  "I like how nonplussed she seems by the whole thing," I say to John after she leaves the room and I'm wiggling back into my sports bra. There is still a huge bruise on my breast from the biopsy, and I have to keep reminding myself that it is not the tumour – just a side effect. "She's totally unimpressed by my cancer. Maybe even a little bored by it. I think that's good."

  "I don't think nonplussed means what you think it means," says John, half listening to a work voicemail. "Really?" I say. My shirt is inside out. He helps me pull it back over my head. "Doesn't it mean blasé – like not worked up about something?"

  "It's the opposite." Now he's groping around under my shirt with one hand as he googles the word on his phone with the other.

  "I don't believe you," I say. He shows me the definition.

  "Oh," I say, pushing his hand away. "Then I like how non-nonplussed she is. And I am frankly nonplussed by your behaviour in this exam room."

  The rest of the day: scans, waiting, talking to pharmacists, more waiting, and meeting the rest of the team – the radiation oncologist, the surgeon. The surgeon makes me smile when he makes a Freudian slip while referring to the choice between lumpectomy and mastectomy as being "my incision" instead of "my decision".

  AT CHEMO school, everyone is fiercely upbeat as we learn not to eat rare tuna and how to tie a square scarf and what kind of mouthwash is good for mouth ulcers.

  I sit with a friendly-faced nurse and a number of other newly diagnosed folks in their 70s and 80s, crowded around a table in the bowels of the cancer centre. There are so very many of us, actually, I might be suffocating. "Are we having fun yet?" asks an abundantly lipsticked lady as she fiddles with her cane.

  "I know I am!" pipes up her husband, grinning at the nurse, then me.

  I text Tita, who had offered to come with me. "Now I really wish you had come. You would adore this scene." She is a fiction writer, and she loves the inner workings of things: bodies, minds, relationships, support-group meetings. We can spend hours dissecting a strange interaction at the grocery store or a waiter's mannerisms or the emotional challenges her sister's ex-boyfriend's mother might be facing. "I feel like I've been granted access to the mecca of unexpected intimacy," I say.

  "PLEASE. WRITE. EVERY. SINGLE. THING. DOWN," she texts back.

  The nurse emphasises the importance of condom use during mid-chemo sexual intercourse and everyone stares in my direction. I take furious notes in my binder. I underline condom twice, maybe three times. "I have the c-word but the c-word doesn't have me," someone says and we all nod.

  Discussing the prohibition on shellfish during chemo, a gray-faced man in a golf jacket announces that he has a "sexual attraction to pulling the shell off shrimp by the tail".

  "Oh for God's sake – this again," moans his wife. After a big pause, everyone laughs for real. We recite the cancer centre phone number aloud in unison, with gusto. We wish each other well. We graduate. We're ready for the big leagues.

  This is an edited extract from The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, by Nina Riggs (Text Publishing, $30), which is published on Monday.

• A Cup of Jo
  https://cupofjo.com/2017/06/nina-riggs-husband-john-duberstein-on-grief/
  Word count: 1363

  Motherhood
  The First Thing I Did After My Wife’s Death
  By John Duberstein

  The First Thing I Did After My Wife's Death by John Duberstein

  This past spring, Nina Riggs died from complications of breast cancer at age 39. While she was sick, she wrote The Bright Hour, a beautiful (and even joyful) memoir on living and dying. Here, her husband John Duberstein describes the unexpected way he found comfort right after her death…

  The title “father-in-law” can evoke Ben Stiller-style awkwardness. But these days I can’t imagine life without my father-in-law, Peter. I’d even pick Pete if family were a choice.

  If you’re going to bond, two deaths in two years is a powerful adhesive.

  First, my mother-in-law Jan died from multiple myeloma. Then, just 18 months later, my wife Nina died from complications of metastatic breast cancer at age 39. Nina’s cancer left me a widower and single parent to our boys, Freddy, 10 and Benny, 7.

  What it did to my father-in-law Pete seemed almost unfathomably cruel. With the loss of his life partner still fresh, he had to face the loss of his first-born child — raised safe, sound, and successful to adulthood, the way every parent hopes; then suddenly gone.

  Leaning on each other during grief is not the ideal way to get close to someone, but boy howdy, it works.

  We’re not the odd couple, exactly, but definitely odd as a couple. Pete, nearly 70, looks young for his age. He’s fit, rides a motorcycle and can fix or build anything. He also plays golf, guitar and soccer. He’s almost pathologically laid back. I’m younger, but less kinetic. I read difficult books about difficult people. Social gatherings make me uncomfortable.

  Nina first introduced me to Pete in 1998, when we were in the throes of a summer romance. We then surprised our families and friends by marrying just a year after that first meeting with her parents. Nina and I negotiated all the twists and turns of our twenties and thirties together: grad school (her), law school (me), moving from Paris to Greensboro, North Carolina, where we traded strolls along the Seine for Nina’s dream of drinking bourbon on a wraparound front porch with our best friends — who all lived down the street.

  Pete and Jan followed us to Greensboro — and found a house less than a mile from ours. I worried it would make for a tricky in-law situation, but it turned out having them close by was as much of a boon for me as it was for Nina. Pete and Jan were there for all of it — from the birth of our oldest son, Freddy, which was attended with the normal mix of joy and neurosis, then Benny, who was born so quickly I almost didn’t have time to eat the sandwich I bought en route to the hospital (and Nina’s fruit salad was still cold when she ate it postpartum); for the minivan identity crisis; for the purchase of our rambling old bungalow.

  Pete had always connected with others by fixing or building things with his hands. But after Jan died, his tool kit expanded: He kept tabs on Nina’s oncology appointments and chemo treatments, took care of the boys whenever we had to be at the cancer center, learned to manage Freddy’s blood sugar and insulin dosing for dinners (and overnights when we were late) and remembered important details about Nina’s articles and, later on, the memoir she wrote.

  When Nina died, Pete wrote a beautiful passage but couldn’t bring himself to read it aloud. I, on the other hand, prepared lengthy, detailed remarks and wound up speaking extemporaneously for more than an hour.

  Still, Pete and I share the obvious: almost two decades spent negotiating life with two fiercely loving women, the two of them so close they spoke daily on the phone even on days when they knew they’d see one another; and of course our common shipwreck of loss.

  Two days after Nina’s memorial, I decided to take my sons away to the coast. I called it our “griefcation.” The only part of the whole thing that was clear to me was I wanted Pete with us.

  I make a list. I shop. I even buy a new Nerf football. But I also forget milk, butter, lunches, books, board games, cards, markers and paper. We arrive with several loaves of bread but nothing to put on them, and enough mixed nuts, guacamole and corn chips to throw a Super Bowl party, but nothing for dinners.

  Nina and Jan would have been apoplectic. Nina used to make lists of what we would need, down to the last detail. Lists of groceries, lists of beach supplies, toys and medications, and a master list of all the lists to make sure each one has been accounted properly — one list to rule them all! And Jan was her mentor. She wasn’t a dictator, but she did make the damn trains run on time. Adieu, military precision and discipline. There are many things missing from the list on this trip. Including toothpaste. And toothbrushes.

  The beach is gorgeous. And my crowning achievement pays dividends: a game of Nerf catch! Peter throws to Freddy, who drops a bunch, but sells out on every one, diving in the sand. Pete encourages him without criticizing, the way Nina did, but in a fatherly way, giving it a whole new feel. As I watch the tosses back and forth, something hits me: Pete’s mortality. Like with all the dying — both our wives in such a short span — I’d forgotten that one day that’s the path he’ll take, too. And I suddenly feel a visceral sense I will not be able to bear losing him. I see the odd geometric pattern we’ve started to form laid out for me: Grandfather, son-in-law, grandson; father in law, father, son; grieving father, grieving husband, motherless child. Repeat.

  I want to try, the way Nina did, to embrace life with death as an integral part of it. To love all the days, no matter how fraught, or how few. But there’s no field guide. I doubt there’s a support group for men who have lost their father-in-law. You don’t even hear much about widowers, come to think of it. When Nina died, I joined a terrific online support group, but it’s for young widows — my peers are 90% female. Widows, but not widowers. So what do you do when your whole family dynamic is built around widowers? We still feel just like a family, but one whose contours I am only just learning to articulate.

  Later, when I shoo the boys toward bed at the beach house, Pete is already starting to clean up after dinner. This routine was always quintessentially marital for me. Picking up wine bottles, scraping plates, wiping countertops. I would wash the dishes; Nina would clear, organize and put things away. Hand in glove. It had a real rhythm to it, a domestic, if not balletic, grace. Pete and I fumble through it, not fully synchronous, but still enough in rhythm. He clears, I clean. I wash, he dries. We have washed some dishes twice, others not at all. But we figure it out.

  The First Thing I Did After My Wife's Death by John Duberstein

  “On Father’s Day 2014, we’re wearing paper hats that my boys made for us, one for the Pirates (my team) and one for the Red Sox (Pete’s).”

  Thank you so much, John. We can’t wait to read Nina’s book, The Bright Hour.

  P.S. How to write a condolence note, and my sister’s apartment makeover.

  (Top photo by Rennie Solis, via Amber Interiors Shoppe.)
  Tags: grief

• USA Today
  https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2017/06/05/the-bright-hour-a-memoir-of-living-and-dying-nina-riggs-book-review/102326974/
  Word count: 754

  QUOTED: "a thoughtful and heartbreaking exploration of what makes life meaningful in a person's remaining days."

  Nina Riggs' moving cancer memoir shines 'Bright'
  Matt McCarthy , Special for USA TODAY 11:36 a.m. EDT June 5, 2017
  Read an excerptpowered by Zola
  The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying
  by Nina Riggs
  (Simon & Schuster)
  in Memoir

  USA TODAY Rating

  How do you know when you start to become a sick person?

  That question and the difficult quest for an answer hang over Nina Riggs’ beautiful and haunting new book, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying (Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., **** out of four stars).

  At age 38, Riggs, a poet and direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, discovers that treatments for her breast cancer are no longer working and that the disease has become metastatic and incurable.

  The devoted wife and mother of two young boys begins her story by attempting to put her new reality in perspective. “There are so many things worse than death,” she tells us on page one, “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.”

  What follows is a thoughtful and heartbreaking exploration of what makes life meaningful in a person's remaining days. We’re with the author as she relives the mastectomy and chemotherapy, which result in an “obliterated sense of femininity,” as well as her attempts to explain what is happening to her sons.

  Buried within this agonizing tale are moments of levity — I laughed out loud many, many times — and flashes of poetry: “The 's' in please is the sweetest sound,” she writes, “like steam rising after a summer shower, like a baby whispering in his bed.” I imagined Riggs holding her children as this thought came to her.

  As the disease progresses, we learn more about the people closest to her, including her mother, Janet, who is dying of multiple myeloma, and her husband, John, who emerges a loving and steadying presence. While other couples are dreaming of growing old together, she and John must tend to funeral arrangements and estate planning.

  To cope, Riggs invokes an Emersonian aphorism, “always do what you're afraid to do” (which, she tells us, was actually said by Emerson’s aunt), while being unflinchingly honest about her experiences.

  Looking back at her abbreviated life, our narrator confesses that she once let her 9-month-old suck on the power cord to her laptop — “he giggled and whined simultaneously each time it zapped his tongue” — so she could search the Internet to determine if her otherwise healthy child might be developing autism.
  Author Nina Riggs.

  Author Nina Riggs. (Photo: Toni Truno)

  We also learn that during her first pregnancy, doctors told Nina that her unborn son had a clubfoot. “Not the world ending,” she writes, “but the ground shifting. Everything stranger than before.” It's the same perspective she takes with her own cancer diagnosis. The author is not looking for our sympathy; rather, she’s offering a window into her fragile, ever-changing world.

  Riggs references Plato’s belief that doctors should ideally experience all of the illnesses they seek to cure. I have often struggled to understand what my patients are going through as they fail one round of chemotherapy after another and try desperately to qualify for a clinical trial involving an experimental new drug. This book provides a stunning look at that experience and has forever changed my understanding of the illness narrative. It’s a book every doctor and patient should read.

  It's hard not to compare The Bright Hour to When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi's best-selling memoir about his battle with lung cancer. Both were in their late 30s when they discovered they were dying, and both write spare prose with a poignancy that is uncommon. However, Riggs' book is markedly different in tone and content. It's more humorous and less philosophical — but equally moving.

  Nina Riggs passed away in February, leaving behind a young family and a final, harrowing thought. “I am not done becoming me,” she wrote as death approached. “I am still in the works.”

  —————

  Matt McCarthy is an internist and the author of The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly.

• Slate
  http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2017/07/nina_riggs_the_bright_hour_and_other_memoirs_by_dying_authors_reviewed.html
  Word count: 2448

  Famous Last Words
  Three memoirs of mortality suggest that even for the terminally ill, universal truths are elusive.
  By Laura Miller
  Natalie Matthews-Ramo

  Natalie Matthews-Ramo

  “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight,” Samuel Johnson remarked, “it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” The same can be said of the terminally ill. Johnson’s word, concentrate, suggests why the rest of us often seek wisdom from people facing this terrible sentence. Nothing feels more fleeting than concentration in this buzzing, scattered information age, when you can conclude a day of nonstop media consumption still worried that you haven’t thought or done anything that really matters. And while no one envies late-stage cancer patients their fate, surely they, among all of us, must be experts at winnowing the essential from the ephemeral?
  Laura Miller Laura Miller

  Laura Miller is a books and culture columnist for Slate and the author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia. Follow her on Twitter.

  Books like Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture and Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air spend weeks on the New York Times best-seller list (115 for the former, and for the later, 60 and counting), in part for their promise to share some of the clarity their authors earned in the hardest possible way. Writers have always contemplated their own deaths, of course, most famously Michel de Montaigne, the first modern essayist, whom Kalanithi quotes: “To study philosophy is to learn to die.” But most authors, like the rest of us, don’t get around to thinking about it until late in their lives. Neither Pausch nor Kalanithi were known as writers before they set out to chronicle the approach of their own deaths (from pancreatic and lung cancer, respectively), although Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon, had literary aspirations. Both men were young (46 and 36) when they received their terminal prognoses, as was the late Nina Riggs, author of the lovely new memoir The Bright Hour. Riggs, a poet, wrote a blog about living with stage 4 breast cancer, as well as personal essays on the subject, before her death just as The Bright Hour was going to press earlier this year. Taken together, these three books suggest that universal truths, even in extremis, are elusive. Perhaps they don't exist at all. We die the way we live, idiosyncratically.

  The Last Lecture is organized around a speech Pausch, a computer science professor, delivered as part of an ongoing series at Carnegie Mellon University in which noted scholars are asked to offer a talk presenting the pith of everything they have learned. Pausch called his lecture “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” and it is as much pep talk as pedagogy. (He also explains at the end that he intended the speech as much for his own children as its original audience.) Pausch describes growing up loving Captain Kirk, Disneyland, and winning stuffed animals in amusement parks, passions seamlessly transmitted to his adult life. To call Pausch a big kid would be no exaggeration, and in his eyes, no insult. He longed to experience zero gravity and become an Imagineer. (Few have ever adored the Disney-industrial complex more wholeheartedly.) He got both. The book’s insistent “follow your dream” refrain is in perfect concert with the upbeat self-actualization mantras of American popular culture, as is the promise that not only do you never have to grow up—that is, gracefully accept your own limitations—but you shouldn’t even want to.

  At times, Pausch comes across as an optimism machine. “I don’t know how not to have fun,” he writes. “I’m dying and I’m having fun.” The Last Lecture is a scrubbed-up, apple-pie version of the showdown with mortality, a promise that it can be done without fear or despair, with a song in your heart even—probably “When You Wish Upon a Star.” Without a doubt, Pausch’s native buoyancy and determination carried him far in life, but they are also a pair of blinkers, a willful refusal to acknowledge some of the world’s less chipper realities. Pausch was disappointed that more of his students didn’t recognized the photo of Jackie Robinson he hung in his office. One of the things he admires most about the first black player in Major League Baseball, he writes, is the athlete’s motto: “Don’t complain, just work harder.” In fact, Robinson’s contract prohibited him from complaining, even if teammates or fans spit in his face, but the possibility that this was a strategic decision in response to virulent racism rather than a rule to live by doesn’t seem to occur to Pausch.

  Inspirational writing is, even at its best, like Robinson’s silence: a tactical lie. It’s made of the stuff we tell ourselves to help us keep going; whether it represents the whole truth matters less than how useful we find it. The Last Lecture, for all its likability, for all the comfort it has brought to many people, falls within this category. When Breath Becomes Air, on the other hand, is a testimonial. Like all real literature, it aims above all to tell a truth, however roughly it goes down. Kalanithi often struggles with this task, particularly when it comes to writing about his most intimate relationships, or what he calls “human relationality.” Those parts of his memoir can feel remote and stilted. He has a tendency, when faced with some imponderable question, to light out for his bookshelf and come back with a quotation from Beckett or T.S. Eliot. What makes this moving is less the content of those passages than the force of the longing behind them. A great reader from childhood, Kalanithi had mapped out a life for himself that would begin with a brilliant surgical and academic career, then finish with a second, equally impressive literary act. In When Breath Becomes Air, he is trying as hard as he can, using the tools he has cherished for decades, to tell us what it is like to have your life knocked savagely off course.

  Part of the allure of When Breath Becomes Air is that it is written by a doctor, and not only a doctor, but a surgeon, a godlike (or at least magelike) figure in the eyes of many—including surgeons themselves. The best writing in the book is Kalanithi’s account of his work, his meticulous descriptions of the tissues where selfhood in all its mysteries resides and what it feels like to manipulate them, to be millimeters away from obliterating a patient’s identity in the act of saving his life. Kalanithi makes no effort to hide the formidable self-confidence required to do such a thing. Anyone who has ever huddled in a waiting area, waiting for a verdict from someone like him, can’t help but be fascinated by how such a powerful figure copes with the same vulnerability and confusion that ordinary mortals bring to his doorstep.

  For a while after his diagnosis, Kalanithi went back to work, but eventually his strength failed him, and at some delicate intersection, never quite pinpointed in When Breath Becomes Air, his need to prove that he was still a brain surgeon came into conflict with his patients’ well-being. Like Pausch, he held a sense of himself defined by his ability to do almost anything he set his mind to. He was, however, far more willing to look the destruction of that self in the eyes. Kalanithi never completed When Breath Becomes Air, but the book we have still ends authentically, with the once-driven doctor, now almost stilled, holding his infant daughter in his arms. He is resigned to the fact that they will never really know each other, hoping only that some day she’ll understand that she was the greatest joy of his last hours, “a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied.”

  When Breath Becomes Air and The Last Lecture assure their readers that remarkable men have the same hopes and troubles as the rest of us, that death is both a great leveler and chance for them to prove their mettle. Nina Riggs, who died at age 39, was a published poet, but not especially celebrated or influential in the world beyond her family and friends before she got sick. She was already much like the rest of us, with the exception of being Ralph Waldo Emerson’s great-great-great-granddaughter. Hers is one of those haute-WASP families whose fortunes have petered out over the generations, the grandparents’ estate sold piecemeal and the grandchildren applying for disability. One thing she does appear to have inherited is cancer, which has ridden roughshod over both branches of her ancestry; even her paternal grandfather had breast cancer. Riggs’ distress over her own illness was cruelly compounded by the fact that her mother died of the disease during Riggs’ treatment.

  Yet The Bright Hour is not a gloomy or brooding book. Perhaps Riggs’ life as a poet taught her to reconcile herself to transience, frustration, and the unlikelihood of achieving renown. She quotes Montaigne even more than Kalanithi does, but to her, he is not a marmoreal Great Writer, but a companion, the chatty, brilliant, worldly friend at her elbow. The havoc chemo wreaks on her appetite makes her sympathize with his kidney stones and his doctor’s prohibition on eating oysters, a treatment Montaigne considered almost as bad as the illness. Pausch and Kalanithi inform us that impending death whets their appreciation of everyday life, but Riggs shows us what that life is, bathed in the incandescence of anticipated loss. Her husband, John, and her sons, Freddy (10) and Benny (7), emerge as distinct, eccentric individuals in The Bright Hour. Early on, Riggs has a fight with John when he tells her, “I just can’t wait for things to get back to normal.” This, to Riggs, is a betrayal of the biggest challenge she has ever faced. “I have to love these days the same way I love any other,” she tells him. “There might not be a ‘normal’ from here on out.”
  170630_BOOK_hour

  The Bright Hour hits many of the established beats of the cancer memoir: mourning for lost hair and eventually a lost breast. What it’s like “when your new hair emerges sleek and orderly from a shoebox.” The ink-black humor Riggs shares with the friends she makes in waiting rooms and support groups. Complaints about the military language often used to describe cancer treatment and how exhausting this language can be to a person whose energies are wholly consumed in making it through the day. Riggs is funny and frank, confessing that she only pretended to admire her transcendentalist ancestor’s work as a teenager, secretly caring “way more about what was happening in the Baby-Sitters Club series and what I could do to my bangs with a curling iron.” She describes the paradoxically disorienting experience of a respite in her treatment. “I make sense there somehow,” she writes of the cancer center. “A lot more sense than I make at the gym or the elementary school or the grocery story or work meetings— or all the other places I’ve sat outside of for too long in my car taking deep breaths as I attempt to return to civilian life.”

  “Dammit,” Riggs’ mother jokes. “I can’t believe I’m going to die right when you’re in the middle of all this. It’s killing me.” But her family also gets a new dog, sends her sons off to summer camp, goes to Harry Potter World, shops for a new couch on the internet. She shrugs off the notion of a bucket list. “I want all of it,” she writes, “all the things to do with living—and I want them to keep feeling messy and confusing and even sometimes boring. The carpool line and the backpacks and light that fills the room in the building where I wait while the kids take piano lessons.” She is also lucky to be married to the kind of man who comes home from work and says, “Do you want to go get in bed together and stare at the ceiling?” They seem a near perfect match.

  Riggs takes Montaigne as her melancholy example on how to approach the end of life: “I am making myself ready to lose it, without regret, but as a thing that is lost by its very nature.” She remembers without bitterness the days of her young motherhood, days that seemed to go on forever, as she and her friend pushed strollers to the park and fumed over “our lives—so small and long.” She and another dying woman plot to give their relatives the passwords to their email accounts so that they can use them to send “a direct ‘mother is watching’ email” to misbehaving children. She wonders what it would be like to fall asleep while riding on the back of her father’s motorcycle and thinks “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.”

  But The Bright Hour is not without its terrors. In the memoir’s most extraordinary chapter, Riggs describes heading off to a retreat center run by Catholic nuns, to take a few days alone to write. After the kids head off to school, she packs, thinking that she is “readying myself to leave them. I am practicing. ... This is just practice.” The moment she sets foot in the retreat, despite the peaceful surroundings, she has a panic attack: “I can feel that John and the kids are out there—their world spinning along. And I am here—separate, cut off, alone.” This moment, this sudden encounter with nothingness, is as close as a dying memoirist can come to fingering the edge of the knife about to cut her throat. Fear is strangely absent from the most popular books of this kind, and perhaps The Bright Hour is too raw to join their numbers. But Riggs’ willingness to include that darkness is what gives her last work its surpassing radiance.

  ---

  The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. Hachette.

  When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Vintage.

  The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs. Simon and Schuster.

• The Underbelly
  https://theunderbelly.org/2017/06/book-review-bright-hour-nina-riggs/
  Word count: 1710

  QUOTED: "Nina observes everything, and that is the grace of this crafted memoir, and yes, her admittedly-biased dear husband was right – it is a beautiful book. Its unselfconscious prose dances from short chapter to chapter."

  Book Review: The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs

  by Sue Robins June 19, 2017
  1

  A Search for Understanding…

  I have been compulsively ordering books from the Internet since my breast cancer diagnosis in February. Every few days a new one arrives in my mailbox. I have The Emperor of all Maladies, Option B, Pink Ribbon Blues and Hallelujah Anyway stacked, partially read, beside my bed.

  The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs is the only book I’ve finished to the end, consumed in three short days. Last January, when my diagnosis was looming, I stumbled upon Nina’s New York Times Modern Love essay. It was about the seemingly simple task of buying a couch, made complicated by the fact that Nina had metastatic breast cancer.

  I started following Nina on Twitter. I pre-ordered her book, due to be sent to me in June. Sometime after my own surgery, in late February, a post popped up on her Twitter timeline. It said: Dispatch from Hospice: they have morphine, open doors, a Cook Out down the road, allow dogs. John’s playing Springsteen. It’s gonna be ok.

  I felt a great sadness wash over me. Nina Riggs died a few days later.

  Nina joins so many talented women who we have lost to metastatic breast cancer, like Lisa Bonchek Adams, a heroine on Twitter whose quote is taped to my bathroom mirror: Make the most of this day. Whatever that means to you, whatever you can do, no matter how small it seems. Another Modern Love essayist, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who had ovarian cancer, wrote You May Want to Marry My Husband, which was published a few days before her death too.
  The Bright Hour author, Nina Riggs
  A Book of Life

  Nina’s book The Bright Hour is not a cancer memoir; it is a book of life. Nina had a graduate degree in poetry, and it shows. Her words are meant to be savored; her writing is both accessible and complex. The layered meanings become clear when you take the time to go back to re-read a passage (and you should).

  I want all of it – all the things to do with living – and I want them to keep feeling messy and confusing and even sometimes boring. The carpool line and the backpacks and the light that fills the room in the building where I wait while the kids take piano lessons.

  As the cancer slowed her down, Nina became more and more reflective and eloquent. She spots a scooter parked outside a motel on her way to the hospital, imagines the life of the owner – and crafts her own fictional version of ‘The Girl on the Train.’ In response to her good friend Ginny’s cancer metastasizing too, she says, I never stop being amazed by how cruel and beautiful this world can be.

  Nina didn’t forget the humour, the ridiculousness that is cancer treatment. She calls the Radiation unit ‘the nukes,’ and names her cane ‘Faith.’ But then there’s this: all day I am haunted by what I am unable to feel. Her own humanity is sprinkled liberally throughout the book.
  Unapologetic Bravado

  I googled Nina Riggs and her Good Reads page comes up, with five star reviews. The very first review is by her husband, John Duberstein, which I think is the sweetest thing in the world. He comes clean that’s who he is and says, I’d be giving her five stars regardless, because I loved her more than anything…the book is filled with beauty, lyric and profane. John has taken on the important role of shepherding The Bright Hour into the world.

  He’s right about the book. It is lyrical, and clearly written by someone who has an impressive literary pedigree as the great-great-great granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. She seems to adopt Emerson’s ‘always do what you are afraid to do’ as her mantra – taking a trip to Paris with her husband, trying out a writing retreat and I spotted a smiling picture of her on a scooter on the Internet deep into her treatment. I admire her unapologetic bravado.
  Can’t Find Center

  I’d imagine The Bright Hour will be read in narrative medicine classes, a combination of a ‘patient’ memoir and prose that could be carefully examined page by page by medical students for its beauty. Nina can help future doctors to crack open the right side of their own brains, to recognize that cancer patients are first people, not cancer.

  Nina’s feelings are hidden in her words, at chemo, I can never find my centre anymore. It is like a big, empty ocean. I wish I had a friend like her to text things only she would understand: They injected blue dye in my nipple! My scar is so itchy! This oncology resident needs a prescription for a personality! I know she would laugh and text me something back clever, and we’d bask in the common and absurdity that is breast cancer. Her son has diabetes and mine has Down syndrome – another small commonality. Our boys also show us that nobody is guaranteed a pain-free life. It is in the shades of grey that you find the beauty, after you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and make the most of every day.
  Ordinary, but Extraordinary

  Many are comparing The Bright Hour to Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air. I love both books but for different reasons. Paul’s book is definitely written by a man whose identity is strongly associated with being a physician. The strength of his book is the 2-way intersection between literature and his profession.

  Nina’s gift is her descriptions of motherhood and of an ordinary, but extraordinary life: picking out a rescue dog (and a couch), her beloved mother’s last days, her memories of her budding romance with her husband John. She is a keen observer of life and of death too. She reminds me want to pay more attention, to look up from my phone, to quiet my monkey brain, to just be in the here and the now. The Bright Hour is a soft reminder that this moment is all that we’ve really got, cancer or no cancer.
  Sorcerer of Remembering

  I am done with treatment, but have not yet been given the holy ‘NED’ (No Evidence of Disease) all-clear. I said good-bye – for now – to the radiation machine at the cancer agency last week, not wanting to jinx myself. Like Nina, I could be back. Or I could not. Nobody knows anything for sure. As one physician once told me: there are no ‘nevers’ or ‘always’ in medicine. This is especially true in the cancer world. Nina’s cancer went from one small spot to breaking her back in a matter of months. The power and cruelty of cancer is clear here, but Nina is not just her disease. She’s a mother, a friend, a daughter, a wife and a poet.

  I’ve dog-eared The Bright Hour, folding over many bits containing words I want to remember: All the oh-everything-is-great stuff eventually gets carted off in a bag of medical waste, and I am teaching myself to say the scary things, and, drawing upon the philosopher Michel de Montaigne, did you think you would never reach the point toward which you were constantly heading?

  Nina Riggs is a sorcerer of remembering. In one chapter, called The Machine, she vividly describes bringing her two young sons to see the radiation machine. I brought my own son to see the radiation machine a few weeks ago too, but I don’t remember much, except my husband tried to flee the room. Afterwards, my son concluded, ‘that was like a hospital horror movie.’ I fretted that I had damaged him even more than having a mother with cancer has.

  Nina remembers every detail about her boys’ visit: I notice Benny won’t stand all the way inside the room and that he keeps glancing at the oversize radiation symbol on the 12 inch thick door, and the awareness that her boys are suddenly seeing her as on of the ‘Feeling Pretty Poorlies’ who crowd the Radiation waiting room.
  All Of Our Days Are Numbered

  Nina observes everything, and that is the grace of this crafted memoir, and yes, her admittedly-biased dear husband was right – it is a beautiful book. Its unselfconscious prose dances from short chapter to chapter. What do we do with our remaining days? Riggs gently reminds us that everyone’s days are numbered – some of us are more acutely aware of that solemn fact than others.

  I’d humbly suggest spending a few hours savoring The Bright Hour and dipping into Nina Rigg’s life. This would be an excellent use of your precious time. While Nina wrote her book as her legacy for her sons to remember her by, it is a gift that we get to read it, too.

  Towards the end, when there are just a few pages left, you will reach a chapter called Afterword. Then, it is okay to go ahead and cry.

  Sue Robins

  Sue Robins is a writer, speaker and mom from Vancouver Canada. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in February 2016. Sue has been published in the New York Times, Huffington Post, the Canadian Medical Association Journal and Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper. She’s also the mom to three kids, and her youngest son happens to have Down syndrome. In her pre-diagnosis life, Sue was an inspirational speaker at health conferences and preached about kindness and compassion in health care settings.

• The News & Observer
  http://www.newsobserver.com/entertainment/books/article154592469.html
  Word count: 1398

  QUOTED: "With “The Bright Hour,” Riggs leaves behind a literary legacy that captures both her incredible talent and her unwavering love for her family, particularly her husband, John Duberstein, and two sons, Freddy and Benny. Her lyrical, honest prose immerses the reader in her world; you feel the fear, the despair, the joy."

  Her ‘vivid, messy, beautiful life’ – with cancer. Don’t be afraid to read this book.

  By Jennifer Bringle

  Correspondent

  June 06, 2017 12:20 PM

  One small spot.

  Faced with the terror of a breast cancer diagnosis at 37, Greensboro poet Nina Riggs clung to those three words. They became a mantra. A balm. One small spot couldn’t be that bad. One small spot could easily be treated.

  The truth is, with cancer – particularly Riggs’ triple-negative breast cancer, which is often more aggressive and harder to treat – it is rarely that simple. And deep down, Riggs suspected that. Cancer cast a long shadow over her family, claiming grandparents, aunts and even her mother, who succumbed after a years long battle with multiple myeloma in 2015.

  “One Small Spot” is the title of the essay that opens Riggs’ new book, “The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying.” The memoir is a collection of essays, broken into four sections representing the four stages of cancer diagnosis.

  In the ensuing months after that initial diagnosis, Riggs traversed the craggy path of treatment: hair loss, the oily taste of chemo coating her mouth, the feeling of almost being outside one’s own body while hopped up on steroids that help stave off the chemo nausea.

  And then, the setbacks. The discovery that one small spot was much larger and connected to a second tumor, neither of which seemed responsive to the chemotherapy. A mastectomy, followed by more chemo and radiation. A mysterious backache that only seemed to get worse, no matter what medications, exercises or treatments Riggs tried.

  Just before Christmas in 2015, no longer able to endure the pain, Riggs complained to her radiation oncologist about her discomfort. An MRI revealed the truth – Riggs’ cancer had metastasized to her spine, actually breaking one of her vertebrae. The cancer would continue to spread – to her hips, other vertebrae and finally, her lungs.

  Last fall, The New York Times published Riggs’ essay “When a Couch is More Than a Couch” in its “Modern Love” column. Witty and poignant, the piece chronicles Riggs’ search for the perfect couch, knowing it will be “something that will hold us through everything that lies ahead – the loving, collapsing and nuzzling. The dying, the grieving.”

  Like so many others, including the publisher that signed Riggs to a book deal, I discovered her writing through that essay. At the time in the throes of my own battle with breast cancer, Riggs’ words shot right through me, and I couldn’t help feeling a strong connection to her. We were both the same age, both mothers of young boys, both writers, both living in Greensboro. Like Riggs, my family history was pockmarked with cancer deaths, and I had recently received the news that I carry the BRCA2 gene mutation, which explained a lot since it puts carriers at higher risk of developing breast, ovarian, pancreatic and prostate cancers.

  As I read Riggs’ words, I shook my own chemo-bald head in tearful recognition at her description of the gut-wrenching realization that she would soon no longer be around for her sons.

  “Their very existence is the one dark piece I cannot get right with in all this,” she says in the essay, which is included in her memoir. “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.”

  Though my prognosis is, so far, better than Riggs’– I’m currently considered cancer-free after multiple rounds of chemotherapy and several surgeries — I understood implicitly the feelings a mother has when facing her own mortality while her children are still young. The agony of even thinking about being forced to leave them is almost indescribable.

  But Riggs manages to do just that – and so much more – in “The Bright Hour.”

  As the great-great-great-granddaughter of legendary poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, Riggs’ writing talent seems almost a birthright. She honed her skills in UNC-Greensboro’s Master of Fine Arts program and published a book of poetry, “Lucky, Lucky,” in 2009.

  For a chance to win a copy of this book, add a comment below. We’ll pick a winner at random.

  With “The Bright Hour,” Riggs leaves behind a literary legacy that captures both her incredible talent and her unwavering love for her family, particularly her husband, John Duberstein, and two sons, Freddy and Benny. Her lyrical, honest prose immerses the reader in her world; you feel the fear, the despair, the joy.

  The book also tells a story we rarely hear – that of a person living with stage 4 cancer. With breast cancer, in particular, the metastatic and stage 4 community stays largely ignored as their stories don’t quite fit the perky pink paradigm of the breast cancer awareness movement. People want to hear the positive stories of survivors, not the scary, sad but ultimately real stories of those who lose their lives.

  Riggs perfectly captures the strange, sometimes otherworldly feeling experience of cancer treatment. The unexpected sense of camaraderie and belonging a patient feels with her brethren at the cancer center, and the bizarre post-treatment world of growing hair and no longer bearing the obvious characteristics of a sick person: “In treatment, the wrongness I feel in my life is a wrongness reflected in my body – my steroid puffy face, my bald head, my lopsided chest. And spending my days at the cancer center: It’s something I’m part of. I make sense there somehow. A lot more sense than I make at the gym or the elementary school or the grocery store or work meetings – or all the other places I’ve sat outside of for too long in my car taking deep breaths as I attempt to return to civilian life.”

  But though one might expect a tome of sadness and despair from a writer with only months left to live, Riggs fills her memoir with vivid, messy, beautiful life. The book illustrates how Riggs’ sense of humor never falters, with amusing anecdotes about her children – such as a birthday trip to a local parking attendant’s booth for her tollbooth-obsessed youngest son – to the hilarious exchanges between Riggs and her friend Ginny, also fighting breast cancer, that include a plan to arrange to send their children parental dispatches from the beyond via email.

  Throughout the book, Riggs turns to two literary muses – Emerson and the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne – to offer insight. This could be distracting from a lesser writer, but Riggs seamlessly integrates both Emerson’s and Montaigne’s thoughts on life, death and health, adding a richness to her own experience.

  Riggs didn’t live to see her book published. After a short stint in hospice care, she died early in the morning of Feb. 26. Early in the book, Riggs relays a spat with her husband after he declares that he hates these days of treatment. But Riggs disagrees; though terrifying and difficult, these are her days, and they matter.

  In the last essay of her book, also titled “The Bright Hour,” Riggs explains: “We are breathless, but we love the days. They are promises. They are the only way to walk from one night to the other.”

  Jennifer Bringle writes The News & Observer’s StyleWatch column. This review originally appeared in the News & Record of Greensboro.

  “The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying”

  By Nina Riggs

  Simon & Schuster, 288 pages

  To learn more about Nina Riggs

  Vsit ninariggs.com or her blog, suspiciouscountry.wordpress.com.

  To support A Fund for Nina’s Boys, visit youcaring.com/nina-riggs-500580.

• Omnivoracious
  http://www.omnivoracious.com/2017/06/marysue-rucci-of-simon-schuster-on-editing-nina-riggs-posthumous-memoir-the-bright-hour.html
  Word count: 937

  Marysue Rucci on Editing Nina Riggs’s Posthumous Memoir, "The Bright Hour"
  Sarah Harrison Smith on June 06, 2017
  Share

  Bright-Hour225
  Nina Riggs’s The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, which is published today, is one of the Amazon Book Review editors’ favorite books this month. Nina was 38 years old and living with her husband and their two little boys in Greensboro, North Carolina when doctors discovered a small spot of cancer in her breast. What at first seemed easily treatable turned out not to be, and she found herself in what Montaigne – the writer she turns to for wisdom - called “suspicious country”: a place where death might be just around the corner.

  Nina’s cancer proved terminal, but she lived to complete her poignant, life-loving, and often funny memoir with the help of her editor, Marysue Rucci, vice president and editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster. John Duberstein, Nina’s husband, says of Marysue that she “not only took on the project of a dying woman, with all its inherent risks (noncompletion, for one), but made Nina feel as vital as any author – sick or well – could in the writing of a manuscript. She too forged a relationship with Nina that transcended their professional roles.” We asked Marysue to tell us more about working with Nina on this remarkable book.

  Amazon Book Review: Marysue, how did you come to publish The Bright Hour?

  On September 23rd, 2016, Nina published an essay in the New York Times’s Modern Love column, titled “When a Couch is More than a Couch.” Less than two weeks later, Nina’s agent Brettne Bloom sent me a proposal called “15 Signs Death is Near,” which was an expansion of the Modern Love piece. I read the proposal at my desk and wrote an email to Brettne: “Please let me publish this book.” The pages were brilliant – laugh-out-loud funny, intelligent, and deeply moving. Nina’s experience as a mother and wife, grappling with a terminal diagnosis while living (and loving) every day, felt incredibly noble, but she also made it incredibly identifiable. And she wasn’t at all maudlin. That afternoon I spoke with Nina by phone - about what the book would look like, about her poetry, about her family and her dreams for the publication. It was an instant connection. I made an offer that afternoon, and the next morning Brettne called to tell me Nina accepted.

  Bright-Hour-author-600

  Nina Riggs and John Duberstein

  What attracted you to the Nina’s writing?

  Nina was a published poet, and I was immediately struck by the precision and elegance of her language. She was also unafraid to reveal the messy beauty of living – to be raw and vulnerable and human on the page. So at once there was this elevated prose with echoing metaphors and intellectualism – Montaigne is a special muse in this book – and simultaneously a deep relatability and immediacy. It’s a gorgeous combination.

  What was the process of editing The Bright Hour like?

  Nina wrote the book between late September 2016 and January 2017. What she produced in that time is truly astonishing. After all, she was terminally ill and still mothering two young sons and holding together a life she loved in Greensboro. She sent the book in to me and her agent in pieces - it’s broken into four parts. With each submission of material, the structure and language were just there. The book flowed out of her, like she was in a fever dream. She would email us sections, and I would edit on the page and scan and return the pages to her. There were small notes - mainly I filled the margins with stars of approval. The only section that took real editorial back-and-forth was the final section, and we all understood why that was the case.
  Read a Free Preview
  The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

  Preview

  Preview opens in a new browser window.

  Did Nina have a chance to complete work on the manuscript before she died?

  Yes, she did. She turned the final manuscript in on January 31, 2017. She got to hold the book galleys and even made some final notes while in hospice. She passed away on February 26, 2017.

  What is the lasting impression you have of Nina as a writer and a person?

  Nina was magic. I have this photo of her and her husband on the couch they finally purchased after the Modern Love piece, and she is aglow. That’s how I think of her: ablaze with talent and joy and grace and humor.

  How is Nina’s family doing now?

  Nina chose an amazing life partner in John Duberstein. John is exactly as Nina depicts him on the page – incredibly smart and warm and hilarious. When I met him and their sons, I marveled that Nina had absolutely nailed them. They’re great kids, and John says they’re doing well. They have a terrific support network, including Nina’s father Pete (also in the book). It makes me think of what Nina wrote in her prologue to the book, “And there it is: The beautiful, vibrant, living world goes on.”

  Thank you so much, Marysue.

  You might also like:

  Katherine Heiny's First Novel, Standard Deviation, Is Way Above Average
  "A Delightful, Warm, and Totally Unpretentious Book About Books"

• WUNC North Carolina Public Radio
  http://wunc.org/post/mother-poet-reflects-her-last-days-bright-hour#stream/0
  Word count: 256

  Mother, Poet Reflects On Her Last Days in 'The Bright Hour'
  By Charlie Shelton & Anita Rao • Jun 9, 2017
  The State of Things

  Picture of Nina Riggs
  Toni Tronu

  Nina Riggs was not surprised when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015. She knew the disease ran in her family, and she’d spent years watching her mother battle cancer. Once Riggs’ cancer turned metastatic and incurable, she decided to reflect through writing.
  Credit Simon & Schuster -2017

  Riggs was a poet, but decided to shift to narrative writing as she chronicled her experience with cancer as a mother, wife and daughter. Her writings gained in popularity and in September 2016 she had a piece published in The New York Times “Modern Love” column. That column sparked a full-length memoir.

  Riggs was able to finish her book before she died earlier this year. The book is called “The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying” (Simon & Schuster/2017). Guest host Anita Rao talks with John Duberstein, Riggs’ husband, about the memoir and Riggs’ battle with cancer.
  Listen
  Listening...
  19:58
  Guest host Anita Rao talks with John Duberstein, husband of the late poet and writter Nina Riggs, about her memoir, 'A Memoir of Living and Dying'.

  Duberstein speaks at Tuesday, June 20 at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro at 7 p.m.
  Tags:
  Nina Riggs
  Modern Love
  "The Bright Hour" A Memoir of Living and Dying"
  The State of Things

• Zero Breast Cancer
  http://www.zerobreastcancer.org/blog/297-book-review-the-bright-hour-by-nina-riggs
  Word count: 1966

  QUOTED: "Even though the book is a memoir and a work of non-fiction, the experience of reading it is akin to reading fine prose in parts. The writing is all at once lyrical, precise, clear and pithy. A self-confessed ‘google addict’ the author has not written a book about, or synthesis of, everything one might want to know about her disease or those of her mother or son. Reading this book feels more like reading a personal journal and being inside both the head and the heart of the author experiencing her ‘normal life’ as a mother, daughter, wife, friend and [woman]."

  Book Review: The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs

  Published: Wednesday, 30 August 2017 11:15

  bright hour cover

  bright hour chart

  Overview:
  In her book, published posthumously, the great-great-great granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson deals with not one, not two, but three serious health issues simultaneously impacting her life; her own aggressive metastatic breast cancer at 38 years of age, her mother’s final stages of, and death from multiple myeloma (cancer) and her nearly 8 year old son’s diagnosis of (likely familial) type 1 diabetes.

  Each one of these alone would have been enough to be disruptive. The author challenges herself to name the unnamable and face reality unflinchingly. Allowing herself some degree of sentimentality and sadness in expressing her emotional and psychological terrors she never becomes remotely close to self-pity or whining.

  Oh - and simultaneously one of her closest friends (similar age) is diagnosed with the same form of aggressive hard to treat breast cancer and who predeceases the author by several months.

  Even though the book is a memoir and a work of non-fiction, the experience of reading it is akin to reading fine prose in parts. The writing is all at once lyrical, precise, clear and pithy. A self-confessed ‘google addict’ the author has not written a book about, or synthesis of, everything one might want to know about her disease or those of her mother or son. Reading this book feels more like reading a personal journal and being inside both the head and the heart of the author experiencing her ‘normal life’ as a mother, daughter, wife, friend and women as it intersects with, and is increasingly dominated by, her metastatic cancer and the treatments she must undergo. Through a series of ‘flashbacks’ we learn much about her personal - and some family – history, her inner life, her relationships and the great the loves of her life – husband John and young sons Freddy and Benny.

  We get to know Nina Briggs the whole person, as she integrates all her fears and pain into her experience and processed them in her own unique way. Despite a disease that ultimately proves overwhelming and terminal for her mother and then for her, a robust spirit of humanity, resilience and humility shines through. This is a book that should be so incredibly hard to read and yet is not. Strange to say but it is even beautiful to read – empathizing with the author is both a moving and a very intimate experience.

  How the book is organized:
  The book begins with a short Prologue and is then organized into four sections that the author calls Stages. Although not explicitly stated, it is likely no coincidence that the approach echoes the medical language used to describe how her cancer becomes more entrenched and spreads throughout her body. Each Stage in the book contains a varying number of chapters. These chapters are more akin to daily musings or journal entries so we will break with our usual approach to these reviews and provide a brief cliff note to each Stage rather than to each and every chapter as there are close to 100 of them! The book concludes with an Afterword and Acknowledgments. There is no chapter listing, no index and no references. This is a very personal autobiography.

  Prologue:
  We meet the author and her nuclear family and get a glimpse of how serious her triple negative breast cancer is.

  Stage One:
  This first part of the book consists of 22 chapters, many of them quite short. Each chapter is either a) a vignette that draws the reader into the author’s family and her day-to-day life or a b) a meditation on the various experiences of her breast cancer from diagnosis through initial chemo treatment. The tone of this section is mostly dispassionate – out of body observations of reactions and interactions to the process of diagnosis, initial chemotherapy and consideration of surgery options.

  All the while life continues around her in all its ups, downs and overall messiness as her husband John holds the center together calmly and stoically. He has no real inkling that this is not just some short lived blip that will pass relatively quickly. At this point in time the author’s concerns for the health of her mother and her son loom larger than her own illness. The author’s doctors are very upbeat about her prognosis and she trusts them wholeheartedly.

  Stage Two:
  These 23 chapters cover the period of surgery (a single mastectomy of the diseased breast) and the aftermath of comprehending the implications for body image and sense of femininity. The author and her husband must factor in this new reality into their relationship and sex life. It seems that the tumors are not responsive to standard chemotherapy and the seriousness of the situation starts to become apparent as more aggressive chemo and radiation is prescribed.

  The author starts to contemplate the challenge of helping two young boys understand that their Mom has a serious disease in age appropriate ways. It is notable that although the author and her husband seek expert advice and support they bring their own authentic honesty to the conversations with their children. They don’t sugar coat any of it nor leave the children with any kind of false hopes but shower them with love and keep life as normal as possible for them while imparting information in a matter of fact way.

  During this stage the author’s mother’s impending death looms and the way this unfolds creates a powerful example of how to face death in an orderly, pragmatic and fearless way. Or as Nina Riggs puts it – her mother was “fearless of being afraid”.

  Stage Three:
  The briefest of the four stages time wise -and the shortest at just 20 chapters – begins with the author’s mother being cared for at home by hospice services and her death shortly thereafter.

  The twist so to speak is that the author is vastly more aware of her own mortality than most people are when they lose a parent in the ‘natural order of things’. She leans into death and dying as she starts to explore her own mortality in ways not normative for someone of her age and stage in contemporary America.

  For much of this Stage we follow the author through a predictable arc of comprehending and processing the practical aspects of the funeral arrangements – in this case cremations - and two services – while the finality and permanence of her loss starts to sink in. The author’s gift as a writer is to bring the reader into the process of bereavement, of mourning and of memories in a way that doesn’t feel like an invasion of privacy.

  Simultaneously the author is also back in chemotherapy and the drugs being used are the big guns – the ones that are very toxic and do a lot of collateral damage to healthy cells in the process of containing the cancer. Radiation is also prescribed and her oncologist steers her away from moving forward with breast reconstruction to avoid complications from infections while she is still in active treatment. While less certain about a good outcome than before the oncologist maintains an optimistic approach.

  All this without her beloved mother’s support and companionship anymore.

  Stage Four:
  This Stage begins with a return to the aftermath of an incident first recounted in the Prologue: The Bike Ride when the author trips and falls while teaching her younger son to ride a bike. Tests expose the fact that her back has broken as a result of the cancer metastasizing into her bones even as she is still being actively treated for what her doctors considered localized, containable breast cancer.

  It’s the longest section of the book at 32 chapters and explores all the interactions, emotions and thoughts that come up for the author as she starts to comprehend that she now has stage four terminal breast cancer and her mortality is something that cannot be escaped from nor denied. She explores both the most mundane and most profound implications as this realization deepens; she confronts the implications for her as a mother (the hardest of all), a wife and a member of an extended family, friend group and community. She is too young to die at barely 40. Her boys will not even be teens when she does.

  The medical ‘stuff’ is ever present and the author’s physical suffering real but it's somehow just there, in the background. Everyone is doing their best and many aspects suck but there is not one shred of animosity by the author towards the limitations and lack of (current) medical answers or solutions for her.

  Afterword:
  This is written by Nina Riggs’s husband John Duberstein and describes the last day, and hours, before she dies in a hospice facility close to their home at 6 a.m. on February 26th, 2017.

  Conclusion and Recommendations:
  Near the end of the book the author quotes a cousin who lost a spouse to cancer; “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 obscuring the depths a bit more – sometimes the wind blowing it off a little, sometimes a nice dense cover” (page 243). This resonated strongly for Nina Riggs and this insight and perspective goes a long way to explain why her aggressive metastasize breast cancer never paralyses her, never robs her of her essential life essence or humanity.

  Oftentimes the reviews on dust covers of books are generically effusive and somewhat predictable. In this case the reviews are genuinely heartfelt, specific and right on point. “Gorgeous and brave….” Dr. Lucy Kalanithi. “Magical. Unforgettable.” Kelly Corrigan, New York Times bestselling author of The Middle Place and Glitter and Glue. “Profound, absorbing and often even funny…” Gretchen Rubin, New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Project and Better than Before.

  “Nina Riggs writes gorgeously and with astonishing clarity. She never shies away from describing the terrible sadness and messiness of her own dying, but also manages to suffuse this book with a miraculous blend of light and joy. This is an emotional journey told with raw honesty and also a sly sense of humor. The Bright Hour is an instant classic…. A book about dying that has powerful lessons for everyone about how to life.” Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club and Books for Living.

  We could not say it better ourselves and highly recommend this book.

  Hard cover and Kindle editions available on Amazon

  Book Reviewed by Rose Barlow, ED Zero Breast Cancer.

• My AJC
  http://www.myajc.com/entertainment/books--literature/poet-ponders-life-the-brink-death/OJ0sXOahStr0GpY9SeX3IK/
  Word count: 1015

  QUOTED: "Ultimately, this is Riggs’ magic. She has produced a work about dying that evokes whimsy and joy, one that sublimely affirms that the inevitability of death carries with it its own kind of light and grace."

  Poet ponders life on the brink of death
  Nina Riggs pens rhapsodic memoir about living with terminal cancer
  living

  By Anjali Enjeti - For Cox Newspapers
  0

  Posted: 3:26 p.m. Thursday, June 22, 2017

  That a writer with only months to live could carve out the time and energy to chronicle her experience of terminal cancer is an impressive feat. That a writer could accomplish this with such exuberant prose as Nina Riggs does in her debut memoir, “The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying,” is revelatory. The book, birthed after Riggs’ 2016 essay, “A Couch is More Than a Couch,” which appeared in the New York Times column, Modern Love, captures vivid, dynamic moments, searing truths, bitter ironies and every delicate emotion in between.

  Riggs’ great-great-great grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, inspired the book’s title. “That is morning; to crease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this, sickly body and to become as large as the World.” Riggs, who published a book of poetry in 2009 entitled “Lucky, Lucky,” was a great admirer of her literary ancestor. One particular phrase, “the universe is fluid and volatile,” in her favorite essay of his, “Circles,” helps her to wrap her mind around the parameters of her own mortality. “It allows for the idea that there are things that cannot be contained,” she writes.

  Among her most referenced authors in “The Bright Hour,” though, is the 16th century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, whose five out of six daughters, brother and best friend died prematurely. Montaigne ponders the weight of this kind of grief, and in him, Riggs finds a kind of kinship.

  “I love about Montaigne that, despite roving bands of thieves and constant political upheaval, he reportedly never kept his castle guarded. He left all his doors unlocked. He acknowledged the terror that could come. But by considering it and allowing it in, he resolved to live with its presence.”

  Riggs’ love of words was fervent, unbridled. She was a scrupulous linguist. The tones and the distinct sounds of syllables aroused in her a deep reflection.

  “But the more I think about it, the more I’m struck by what a beautiful word it is – hospice,” she writes. “It is hushed, especially at the end. But it’s comfortable and competent sounding, too. A French word with Latin roots – very close to hospital but with so much more serenity due to those S sounds. (You see, I am growing increasingly fond of the letter S.)”

  Her brief, melodic chapters, many only a page long, straddle the genres of prose and poetry, much like Emerson’s do.

  Last year, Paul Kalanithi published “When Breath Becomes Air,” a memoir about living with terminal lung cancer. Kalanithi died at age 37, and like Riggs, lived for only approximately two years after his terminal diagnosis. Kalanithi’s book has been widely praised; Riggs herself deemed it “gorgeous.” “The Bright Hour” equals “Breath” in clarity, nuance and artistry. Like Kalanithi, Riggs makes acute examinations of the gradations of autonomy and agency while in treatment, and the ways in which relationships grow and reshape themselves in the face of a finite timeline.

  “The Bright Hour” is also a precise study of how chronic and terminal illness affects members of the family. Early in the book, at a time when Riggs’ own cancer appears to be a relatively self-contained disease and her prognosis is good (“one small spot,” Riggs repeats like a comforting mantra), Riggs’ mother Jan is in treatment for terminal multiple myeloma. Riggs spends her time in between chemo infusions taking care of Jan. When Jan refuses further treatment, sorrow washes over Riggs. “See: She is dying,” she writes. “It is weird to write that – like I’m saying something bad about her behind her back. But it’s true. And no one knows it better than her. Eight years of cancer… My mom: my map, my Sistine Chapel, my ‘Lonely Planet,’ my beautiful ruin, my volcano.”

  And it’s Riggs’ mother who, in many respects, models for her daughter the kind of perspective that Riggs later adapts when she learns that her own cancer is metastatic and incurable. “‘Dying isn’t the end of the world,’ my mother liked to joke after she was diagnosed as terminal…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.”

  Riggs was a wife and mother of two young sons, and as her illness progresses, she contemplates, keenly, the beauty and ferocity of the love she has for them. “When you fall in love with your kids, you fall in love forever. And that love forms the exact shape in the world of the cab of a beat-up pickup on the side of the dark highway – filled with safety and Stevie Wonder and okay-ness.” With her dear friend who is also parenting young children while living with terminal cancer, she exchanges hilarious texts about how they might monitor their children from the grave, as if “dying makes us more powerful parents than the living version of ourselves.”

  Ultimately, this is Riggs’ magic. She has produced a work about dying that evokes whimsy and joy, one that sublimely affirms that the inevitability of death carries with it its own kind of light and grace. “We are breathless but we love the days,” she writes. “They are promises.”

  NONFICTION

  ‘The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying’

  By Nina Riggs

  Simon & Schuster

  320 pages, $25

• Sojourners
  https://sojo.net/articles/what-bright-hour-can-teach-us-about-living-and-dying
  Word count: 1411

  What ‘The Bright Hour’ Can Teach Us About Living and Dying
  By Mallory McDuff 6-23-2017
  Print

  This summer, I opened the pages of Nina Riggs’ memoir on living and dying, The Bright Hour, the same day that I walked into a cancer treatment center for the first time in my life. I’d waited for the publication of this book after reading about her embrace of daily life in Greensboro, N.C., as she faced a terminal diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer. During the short period chronicled in the book, the author watches her mother and her best friend Ginny die of cancer: To say that Riggs — and here I just have to call her Nina — has a familiarity with grief is a bit of an understatement.

  After the first few pages, I want to be Nina’s friend, sharing a drink on the porch as her kids run around the backyard, or even taking selfies before heading into a chemo treatment. Her story reflects a love affair with the mixed bag of mortality, teaching a son to ride a bike, even as she trips and breaks one of her vertebrae, laughing at book club with her mother and friends, even as her mom is dying.
  READ: How Do We Tell Time in Hard Times

  After reading her poignant descriptions of the chemo treatment room, I arm myself to pick up a close friend who has gone through radiation, immunotherapy, and now low-dose chemotherapy (and why, I wonder, do they call it therapy?). My primary role for the past few months has been dropping off quarts of “sopa de pollo,” soup from the local Mexican restaurant, with its steamy pieces of chicken, thick chunks of avocado, and warm corn tortillas on the side. In Nina’s book, her husband has a name for women like me: “casserole bitches!” But I’m a casserole bitch who shares a history with my friend, as we offer congratulations or condolences on the everyday lives of our teens.

  “I think they are doing pretty well, don’t you?” I’ll ask on the phone, my voice rising an octave, as I assess our daughters’ well-being in a relative vacuum of concrete information.

  “Definitely,” she says. “They both have good heads on their shoulders. Now they don’t want to talk to us at all, but it could be a lot worse.”

  Indeed, she would know, as she faces cancer as a single mother with two teenagers. But before this day, I had never accompanied my friend to chemo, an almost intimate encounter that exposes my total lack of experience with what writer Nora Gallagher calls “Oz,” the land of the sick and ailing, another universe understood only by those with critical illness.

  “Pick me up on the third floor of the Cancer Center, and I’ll be in chair 33,” my friend e-mails me, as if giving directions to CVS or Trader Joe’s. I imagine 33 cancer patients sitting in a row with signs indicating their number in the chemo queue. Strangely enough, she looks healthy for someone who is undergoing chemotherapy. While her grey hair is sparse, her skin is radiant, almost glowing. Everyone says that the short pixie cut looks hip on her, and the lack of wrinkles on her face makes her actually look young.
  51uasc7jggl._sx331_bo1204203200_.jpg

  It’s like I can see the fullness of her face now. She says her face is rounder because of the steroids, which have their own negative side effects. I marvel that she manages to meditate for two hours a day and exude some sense of calm, striking to me as the taxol drips into the port in her chest. I’m scared to need this sense of calm, I admit to myself, even though I know that no one is immune. My friend closes her eyes and pulls the blanket to her chin, while I pick up the adult coloring book on the table, filling in an image of a mandala with the stroke of a violet colored pencil on the page.

  * * * *

  While I don’t have a lot of experience with cancer and mortality, I do have experience with accidents and death, which is different from the slow drip of chemo in a hospital room with an exquisite view of the mountains. As I race through the pages of The Bright Hour, I’m trying to understand my compulsion to write and talk about my own parents, who died in mirror-image cycling accidents, two years apart, both hit by teenage male drivers. The irony is that they simplified their lives as they aged, biking to most destinations rather than driving, cooking with local produce they harvested, hiking long-distance trails like the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail. When we were growing up, they integrated their Christian faith with stewardship of the earth by giving up trash and even driving for the 40 days of Lent, a true novelty in our small Southern town before the advent of recycling. As I read memoir after memoir about grief, I am meditating, sometimes obsessing, on my parents’ story as the primary gift that I can give my two daughters, in a world where change seems so disruptive, especially now.

  * * * *

  In that spirit, I reach out to another friend named Sophie sitting in Charleston, S.C., by the bedside of her elderly mother. Her death seems imminent, the hospice workers say. In a message on Facebook, I tell her that she is a loving daughter and mother to her two grown daughters, whom I’ve known since they were little. As an aside, I also mention this book she would love by Greensboro poet Nina Riggs.

  In seconds, I see the floating dots on Facebook, signaling that a response is on its way. “Wow, look what I found on the side of Mama’s bed,” she writes, attaching a photo of the cover of The Bright Hour, with its pastel pops of color — blue and orange splatters — like soft fireworks on a white background.
  READ: Why I Cry in Church

  “OK, I have chills all over my body,” I reply. “That is cray-cray, as they say, which is to say this feels like love to me, like we are surrounded by something larger than ourselves. You will love this book, which fell into your lap, while you were sitting with your mother.”

  In the minute that follows, Sophie must have consulted her sister about the coincidence:

  “As it turns out,” she writes back, “My sister was friends with Ginny (in the book), who asked her to pre-order the book. Truly cra-cra.”

  I wonder for a moment about the correct spelling of “cray-cray,” a phrase I have actually never before typed in a sentence. (It turns out that we are both correct, which seems oddly appropriate.)

  “Oh my goodness, the Ginny who died one month before Nina?” I write. “So here you are with your mother, looking at a book about living and dying, a book I’ve been reading to understand my own parents’ death. As my mom always said, the Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  In The Bright Hour, the descriptions of the chemo room include “the keen eyes of the hazmat-suited nurses, the steady drip-dripping of the IV, laughter, the smell of French fries, ginger ale tabs fizz-popping open, texts pinging in all directions.”

  During this scene, Nina asks herself if she’s doing OK, checking in with her own body in this space that involves a coin toss of healing and loss. With her vivid observations, she makes us believe that we will be OK too. If she can cherish this “beautiful, vibrant, living world” and face death mere months before her story comes into our world, then somehow I believe that we can too.
  Mallory McDuff

  Mallory McDuff, Ph.D. teaches at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C. She is the author of the books Natural Saints (OUP, 2010) and Sacred Acts (New Society Publishers, 2012) and co-author of Conservation Education and Outreach Techniques (OUP, 2015).
  Don't Miss a Story!
  Get Sojourners delivered straight to your inbox.
  Your e-mail

• Readings
  https://www.readings.com.au/review/the-bright-hour-by-nina-riggs
  Word count: 309

  QUOTED: "There are no answers in this book, but there is integrity and wit."

  The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs

  Reviewed by Chris Gordon
  30 May 2017

  ‘I’m hoping that writing my way through this new suspicious country will help me figure it all out,’ says Nina Riggs, after she finds out that her breast cancer has spread throughout her body.

  In this book, she shares how to live with dire news when you have a career, friendships, a partner and children. Her experiences, written as articles – some of which have been published in various American journals, others that seem to belong only with her family – are passages that can easily tear you apart, with equal dread and admiration. The writing is excellent, poetic in parts (she did teach poetry), and is used as a barrier against the cold, medical language that describes her descent. Riggs’s mother dies of cancer. Her young sons head off to a cancer support camp. Her back hurts. Her doctor remains optimistic and yet we know, yet she knows, that there is only one ending for this story.

  There does seem to be an increase in the number of books currently published that deal with recording the last months of life (Riggs died after finishing this book). It has its own title: grief literature. The common thread in memoirs of this type is that we know, as the reader, that the author is uninhibited by loss. This is true of Riggs’s memoir. There are no answers in this book, but there is integrity and wit. You will cry. You will think about her family. And you will consider your own good life. ‘Dying,’ said Riggs’s mother, ‘is not the end of the world’. The Bright Hour is the proof.

• Turnaround
  https://theturnaroundblog.com/2017/08/01/august-book-of-the-month-the-bright-hour-by-nina-riggs/
  Word count: 641

  QUOTED: "The Bright Hour is so incredibly universal in subject matter that the readership potential is immense; it spans ages, genders, sexualities, race – it is, essentially, a book for everyone as it deals with one of the most human themes of them all: living and dying."

  August Book of the Month: The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs

  9781911231134

  Our Book of the Month pick for August is possibly one of the most life-affirming books you’re likely to read. Penned by the great-great-great granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour is a luminous and contemplative memoir about living with breast cancer. Riggs was diagnosed in January 2015 and it metastasised later that year, just months after her mother had died from the same disease. In The Bright Hour, she writes about what it is like to live with ‘death in the room’ – and it’s every bit as wise, poignant, and heartbreaking as you’d imagine.

  It’s also witty, warm, and contemplative. Riggs talks about parenting, love, pain, and life in general with such optimism and joy that it’s impossible not to be sucked in. She tells her story through a series of absurd, often hilarious vignettes, drawn from a life that has ‘no real future or arc left to it, yet it still goes on as if it does.’ Riggs is every bit as much a writer as her ancestor was; known primarily for her poetry, the prose in The Bright Hour is simply stunning, offering glimpses into a writer’s life that will charm anyone who has ever enjoyed reading a story. Here, life is offset by the presence of death – it is unflinching and raw, but most of all it is a celebration of life and of finding comfort in the day-to-day.

  Nina Riggs sadly died in February this year, making The Bright Hour all the more heart-wrenching. It is being compared to When Breath Becomes Air, the bestselling 2016 memoir by dying surgeon Paul Kalanithi. Something of a sensation when it was published, the book pulled in praise from major media outlets across the globe. Much like When Breath Becomes Air, The Bright Hour is so incredibly universal in subject matter that the readership potential is immense; it spans ages, genders, sexualities, race – it is, essentially, a book for everyone as it deals with one of the most human themes of them all: living and dying.

  The Bright Hour has already garnered some fantastic praise:

  “The Bright Hour is a stunning work, a heart-rending meditation on life – not just how to appreciate it while you’re living it, but how to embrace its end, too. It is this year’s When Breath Becomes Air.” – The Washington Post

  “A luminous, heartbreaking symphony of wit, wisdom, pain, parenting, and perseverance against insurmountable odds.” – Kirkus, Starred Review

  “Deeply affecting…a simultaneously heartbreaking and funny account of living with loss and the specter of death. As [Riggs] lyrically, unflinchingly details her reality, she finds beauty and truth that comfort even amid the crushing sadness.” – People

  “Riggs reminds us that we are all in this world until we leave it; the gallows humor surrounding her mother’s funeral will make readers howl guiltily but appreciatively… Everyone should read this beautifully crafted book as it imbues life and loved ones with a particularly transcendent glow.” – Library Journal

  We can expect more of the same in the UK when The Bright Hour hits shelves this August. An unlikely summer read, perhaps, but one that is sure to completely blow away UK readers when they get hold of a copy.

  Posted by Jenn

  The Bright Hour is published by Text Publishing on 3rd August 2017 (£12.99, Paperback, 9781911231134)

• Oprah
  http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/nina-riggs-the-bright-hour-memoir-about-dying
  Word count: 770

  Nina Riggs' Memoir About Dying Is a Powerful Reminder About Living Well
  By Kelly Corrigan
  the bright hour
  Illustration: Martin O'Neille
  Throughout her life, poet Nina Riggs sought refuge in the written word. But following a cancer diagnosis at 37, she began writing and reading with a fury. Four months after Riggs’s death comes The Bright Hour, her profound and poignant memoir. Kelly Corrigan contemplates the author’s journey and her belief in the power of literature to help us grapple with challenges—even those we can’t survive.

  I wake up before 6, sneak past my daughter’s room, and make my way downstairs in the dark, hugging the side of the steps that doesn’t creak. I scan the headlines on my cell while coffee fills the pot. I scroll through Twitter, looking for op-eds, while I drink my first cup. Before I refill, I plug my phone into the charger on the far counter, where I can’t reach it from my chair. Then I switch to whatever book I’m reading.

  I start the pages wound up, buzzed into anger by the combination of caffeine in my bloodstream and vitriol in the news. But if the book is good, I soon stop squinting, my shoulders loosen, I begin to lose time. I don’t notice the sun drawing a line on the wall beside me. I start to feel my life again. If the book is superb—as Nina Riggs’s The Bright Hour most certainly is—I reconnect with how intensely I love this imperfect world, how grateful I am to be in it.

  Riggs was a wife and mom in North Carolina who loved words and the wizards who brought them to life. When she was 38, with two young boys, her breast cancer became metastatic; among other things, The Bright Hour recounts “the endless parade of techs and nurses and doctors.” Between appointments and on her longest nights, she turned to Atul Gawande, Annie Dillard, Michel de Montaigne, and her great-great-great grandfather, who was—of all people—Ralph Waldo Emerson, her beacon.

  Riggs believed deeply in reading. In books, she writes, we find the most “beautiful, human kind of coping,” a way “to imagine the countless vulnerabilities and stories that fill the world.” Riggs read to have her hardest questions addressed, if not answered, and in her book she wonders: What are we to do with these faulty containers we live in? How are we to think about all the inevitable loss, but not obsess? What words will suffice for the last conversation we have with our children? She was passionate in her belief that debating the merits of a paragraph of prose or stanzas of poetry could open new territories of understanding.

  In her final year, Riggs writes, she found particular solace in Montaigne. A conundrum he raised in the essay “That Our Desires Are Augmented by Difficulty” struck her to her core, according to her husband, John, who shared his wife’s devotion to the French philosopher. Montaigne wrote that while others around him were adding fortifications to their homes during an unsafe time, he decided to leave his unbarricaded because “they were only lost by being guarded.” That essay, Riggs writes, also had meaning for Emerson, who describes Montaigne as tasting “every moment of the day,” including the painful ones because only pain enabled him to “feel himself and realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know we are awake.” The words of both men powered Riggs’s determination to keep death constantly in her field of vision without letting it darken every experience—an approach that allowed her moments of true happiness, even at the end, in a hospice room where her children played.

  Every book holds within it the potential to ease an aching part of us. Especially, it turns out, as the ache gives way to silence. Riggs died on February 26, 2017. Before she did, she took in the bright hour, when, Emerson tells us, we “cease...to be a prisoner of this sickly body and to become as large as the World.”

  I put down The Bright Hour a slightly different, and better, person—unbearably sad and also feeling, as Riggs did, “the hug of the world.” The coffee beside me was cold.

  The Bright Hour (Simon & Schuster)

  Want more stories like this delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the Oprah's Book Club Newsletter!
  From the July 2017 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine

• Boston Globe
  https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2017/06/01/young-mother-unsentimental-memoir-her-last-days/QJIsy5VDauGA65PN6pIzCL/story.html
  Word count: 865

  A young mother’s unsentimental memoir of her last days
  By Laura Collins-Hughes Globe Correspondent June 02, 2017

  Afew pages from the end of her book “The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying,” Nina Riggs is back in the hospital again. The cancer that began in her breast has reached her lungs, and she is wheeled down for a breathing test. En route, she passes room after room where the TV is on, each screen showing the same face. It is January 2017, and Donald J. Trump is the new president.

  Even if you have read the author’s bio, which speaks of Riggs in the past tense, and even if you have sneaked ahead and seen that her husband, John Duberstein, wrote the book’s brief epilogue and its moving acknowledgments, there is a startle factor to this mention of a cultural moment barely in our rearview mirror. Riggs was alive so very recently.

  She was only 39 when she died in February, a mere two years after being diagnosed with breast cancer. “The Bright Hour” is a deadline memoir — a vivid, immediate dispatch from the front lines of mortality and a record of a life by someone who wasn’t done living yet. But there is nothing maudlin in it. A poet who grew up mainly in Massachusetts and spent part of each summer at her family’s house on Naushon Island, off Cape Cod, Riggs was a New Englander to the core. Her capacity for staving off florid emotion serves the memoir well.

  That Riggs developed cancer in the first place wasn’t exactly surprising; her family tree abounds with it on both sides. “Oh, breast cancer,” a great aunt said. “That’s something I did in the 1970s.”
  Get The Weekender in your inbox:
  The Globe's top picks for what to see and do each weekend, in Boston and beyond.

  For Riggs, it began with what a doctor called “[o]ne small spot,” a description that made it sound vanquishable, not fatal — not the sort of thing that would keep her from seeing her sons, Freddy and Benny, then 8 and 5, grow up. And anyway, her mother, Jan, was the one who was terminally ill, with multiple myeloma. “Her favorite reply to any text intended to cheer her up is the Bitmoji with a hand coming out of a grave that says ‘Literally dying!’ ”

  Riggs tells us in the prologue, though, that her own cancer will not be cured, and she structures her book like the progress of the disease: Stage One, Stage Two, Stage Three, Stage Four. She takes her title from a journal entry by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “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.”

  A touchstone of hers, Emerson is her great-great-great grandfather on her father’s side — an association she makes too much of, as if it somehow boosted her credentials as a writer. She is fonder still of Montaigne and quotes him frequently, but when she suggests to her husband that they name their new dog after him, he says, in effect: Let’s not be jerks. Good call.

  When she riffs on James Joyce’s “The Dead,” though, rewriting a passage about snow to make it about chemotherapy-induced hair loss, the result is pretty glorious: “It had begun to fall again. She watched listlessly the hair, silver and brown, falling obliquely against the lamplight . . . ”

  “The Bright Hour” has rough patches that might have been smoothed if Riggs had had more time, but it gains confidence as it goes. It tends to work best when she is most down to earth, willfully dispensing with some of the standard trappings as she tells the story of her cancer experience. You will find no pink ribbons in this tale, and none of the usual rah-rah talk of beating the disease. After her mastectomy, her oncologist dissuades her from reconstructive surgery. “That’s a survivor issue,” the doctor says. “We’re not there yet.”

  The book chronicles what Duberstein aptly calls his wife’s “journey through the stygian realms of metastatic breast cancer,” but she does have company on that voyage: him; their sweet and worried sons; her gentle, steadfast father, Peter; and for a while at least, her mother — who is deeply sorry, as Riggs herself will be, to leave a child who needs her.

  There are others, too, of course, but this is Riggs’s closest circle, and her warm portraits of each of them are a large part of this book’s emotional power. So is something we don’t notice fully until it’s gone: the strength and clarity of Riggs’s voice, which never faded on the page, and which we won’t get to hear again.

  THE BRIGHT HOUR

  A Memoir of Living and Dying

  By Nina Riggs

  Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $25

  Laura Collins-Hughes can be reached at laura.collinshughes@gmail.com.

Word Count