4 stars for The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying by Nina Riggs.
A maelstrom of thoughts and emotions swirled within me each time as I pick up this book to continue from where I leave off. I want to read this book. Fast. Finish it quickly. But I also want it to last. Slow. Read it slowly.
Fast because I cannot wait to find out what happens next, to Nina, to her mother, to her good friend Ginny, to her father's dog, to the chasm between living and dying.
Slow because I cannot bear for the story to come to an end. I feel that as long as I am still reading the book, the events and happenings on the page that I am reading are taking place in the present. The book is alive; Nina, the protagonist, the author, is alive.
With short, easy-to-manage chapters, the collection of reminiscences is poetic, nostalgic and reflective of the writer's natural capacity for irony and deadpan humour. It is also very much doused with endless expressions of love, joy, fear, denial, anger, guilt, happiness, sadness, relief, longing, hope and acceptance.
In a wink, a blink, a flicker, I have reached the end of the memoir. Nina is no longer alive. I am overcome with sadness and a sense of loss and emptiness.
The Bright Hour is another good reminder to us that life is short. Live a life - work to live, not live to work. Laugh more often - laughter is the best medicine. Love with your heart - love encompasses all. Live, laugh, love.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition
Publication date: 16 Jan 2018
*** Notable passage 1 ***
Sometimes the most important thing is knowing when to quit. Sometimes being heroic is knowing when to say enough is enough.
*** Notable passage 2 ***
..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 cover obscuring the depths a bit more — sometimes the wind blowing it off a little, sometimes a nice dense cover.
*** Notable passage 3 ***
Everything is strange — so unlike anything we have done before—and everything, too, is exactly as we imagined.
*** Notable passage 4 ***
We are breathless, but we love the days. They are promises. They are the only way to walk from one night to the other.
~ The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying
Nina Riggs
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An exquisite memoir about how to live—and love—every day with “death in the room,” from poet Nina Riggs, mother of two young sons and the direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the tradition of When Breath Becomes Air.
“We are breathless, but we love the days. They are promises. They are the only way to walk from one night to the other.”
Nina Riggs was just thirty-seven years old when initially diagnosed with breast cancer—one small spot. Within a year, the mother of two sons, ages seven and nine, and married sixteen years to her best friend, received the devastating news that her cancer was terminal.
How does one live each day, “unattached to outcome”? How does one approach the moments, big and small, with both love and honesty?
Exploring motherhood, marriage, friendship, and memory, even as she wrestles with the legacy of her great-great-great grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nina Riggs’s breathtaking memoir continues the urgent conversation that Paul Kalanithi began in his gorgeous When Breath Becomes Air. She asks, what makes a meaningful life when one has limited time?
Brilliantly written, disarmingly funny, and deeply moving, The Bright Hour is about how to love all the days, even the bad ones, and it’s about the way literature, especially Emerson, and Nina’s other muse, Montaigne, can be a balm and a form of prayer. It’s a book about looking death squarely in the face and saying “this is what will be.”
Especially poignant in these uncertain times, The Bright Hour urges us to live well and not lose sight of what makes us human: love, art, music, words.
*Blurb from Goodreads*
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