Nina Riggs' The Bright Hour: A memoir of living and dying (Text Publishing) is no Pollyanna-style rendition of the end of a life which was all too short.
THE BRIGHT HOUR
A memoir of living and dying
Nina Riggs
Text Publishing
By ELSPETH McLEAN
For me, one of those comes from her husband John when he confesses early one morning, "I’m so afraid I can’t breathe."
The previous day they had learned at Riggs’ post-chemotherapy check her cancer had grown rather than reduced.
As they are preparing for bed, John tells Nina he can’t wait for things to get back to normal.
She is not having any of that. To think that way, she suggests, invalidates her life.
"I have to love these days in the same way I love any other. There might not be a ‘normal’ from here on out."
John doesn’t think she is being honest, that she is in ‘‘some kind of whacked-out denial’’.
She doesn’t budge: "These days are days," she tells him calmly and furiously.
"We choose how we hold them."
And while 38-year-old Riggs admits to being as scared as John is, she gets on with living and loving her days which ended in February this year, before she turned 40.
This is no Pollyanna-style rendition of the end of a life which was all too short. There is black humour and no shying away from the awfulness of illness and the sadness of a mother leaving two young sons, her husband and father. (While coping with Riggs’ diagnosis and illness, the family also has to deal with the death of Riggs’ mother.)
"I never stop being amazed by how simultaneously cruel and beautiful this world can be."
Riggs brings a poet’s eye for detail to her story and often returns to the writing of French 16th-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne, and also to that of her own great-great-great grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, for reflection and inspiration as she navigates her way through what remains. (Ironically, her slim book of poems, published in 2009, was called Lucky, Lucky. Having read and enjoyed that, I am greedily hopeful there may be some more poetry published posthumously.)
Little life events can loom large, such as her search to buy the perfect couch. While she ponders that she tells us she "cannot figure out how to let go of mothering" her sons.
"So maybe I don’t try to figure it out. Maybe I just aim to get the couch right: strong bones, high-quality leather, something earthy, animal, and real. A surface that knows something of what it was to be alive, that warms to our touch and cools in our absence.
"Also: an expansive bench that fits all of us. Something that will hold us through everything that lays ahead — the loving, collapsing, and nuzzling. The dying, the grieving."
As I was finishing reading this book, I was sad to learn of the death of the redoubtable health advocate Lynda Williams, another woman with a clear-eyed view of death and dying. (Check out her blog Dancing with Mr D at http://lyndasletters.nz/). I am sorry I missed out on sharing Riggs’ book with her, but I hope her whanau will appreciate a copy and maybe snuggle up on a couch to read it.
- Elspeth McLean is an ODT columnist and former health reporter.
Win a copy
The ODT has five copies of The Bright Hour, by Nina Riggs, to give away courtesy of Text Publishing. For your chance to win a copy, email books editor shane.gilchrist@odt.co.nz with your name and postal address in the body of the email, and "The Bright Hour" in the subject line, by 5pm on Tuesday, August 22.
LAST WEEK’S WINNERS
Winners of last week’s giveaway, The Secret Life, by Andrew O’Hagan, courtesy of Faber and Faber: Stuart Preddy, of Dunedin, Doris Gee, of Gore, Lloyd Wilkinson, of Arrowtown.
