“Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying” by Nina Riggs

At the hospice where I work, I always try to stay very calm on the phone when I am starting an admission.  The family members and clients I’m speaking to are often in crisis and feel overwhelmed.  I like to offer them patience with a comforting, yet reassuring voice. However, there is always one thing that rattles my calm voice – and that is entering the date of birth of a patient younger then me.  I was born in 1963, so to enter dates like 1975 or 1982 or 1991, makes me think quietly to myself each time, “This is just not fair.” However, after reading this book, I have a new perspective on what it is like to die young, and it is not about what is fair, but about making it count. My book this week is “Bright Hour” by Nina Riggs, a young writer and poet who died just short of her 40th birthday of incurable breast cancer in 2017. She left behind her husband, John, and two young sons.  The great-great-great granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the author tells the story of how she learned to love and appreciate life during the final year of her life. She finished the book and died only one month later, but not before “accepting the absurdity and the beauty of every day” given a future you cannot count on. Her memoir is sad and moving, but also a road map for finding joy and value in being a writer, a mother, a wife and a daughter. Several friends suggested that I read this book because I am such a romantic. At first I wondered how can a book about breast cancer be romantic? It turns out that Nina’s husband is now dating Lucy Kalanithi, the widow of Paul Kalanithi who wrote the best selling memoir “When Breath Becomes Air.” It sounds crazy to think that these two grieving people would not only find each other and meet, but also fall in love. To think that Paul’s young daughter might grow up with Nina’s two sons in a blended family seems like such a beautiful picture. You can’t help but smile at the happy ending. To purchase this book on Amazon click here.