Riggs’ moving cancer memoir shines ‘ Bright’

Author explores what makes life meaningful when the days run short

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., eeee).

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 1, “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 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 steady- ing presence.

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.

We 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.” It’s the same perspective she takes with her own diagnosis.

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.

Nina Riggs passed away in February.

TONI TRUNO Author Nina Riggs was a descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson.