The Bright Hour

What does it mean to truly live when you know you are dying? In The Bright Hour, poet Nina Riggs asks this question not as an abstract philosophical exercise, but as a lived reality. Written in lucid, lyrical prose as she faced terminal breast cancer at age thirty-eight, Riggs’s memoir is a love letter to life’s fragile brightness, a meditation on mortality, and a testament to how ordinary moments can shimmer with meaning when time is short. She argues that confronting death honestly allows us to live more fully—what philosopher Michel de Montaigne called learning to die so that we can learn to live.

Riggs’s story is profoundly personal yet universal: she documents the months after her diagnosis, her mother’s death from cancer, her own treatments and recurrence, and the precious, mundane days with her husband John and their two young sons, Freddy and Benny. It’s not a triumphant cancer memoir about beating the odds, but a clear-eyed exploration of love, fear, humor, and acceptance. As in the essays of her ancestor Ralph Waldo Emerson, Riggs finds transcendence in daily life—morning light, children’s laughter, a good joke. But her voice is franker, more modern: she swears, texts friends, and jokes about her mastectomy scar. Beneath the wit is relentless inquiry: How do you love days that might be your last? How do you prepare your family for a world without you?

Finding the Bright Hour

The title comes from a line by Emerson: “I am cheered with the moist, warm, glittering, budding and melodious hour … to cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body and to become as large as the World.” For Riggs, every day becomes a bright hour—a fleeting reprieve from illness and fear. She sees the ordinary as luminous: a bike ride with her kids, the smell of the sea, her son’s absurd jokes. These moments are not escapes from mortality but glimpses of wholeness within it. Living with terminal illness, she suggests, doesn’t mean you stop being alive. It means you learn how to hold beauty and terror in the same breath.

Through all stages of her story—her mother’s decline, her own surgeries and chemo treatments, conversations with her husband about wills and hospice—Riggs resists sentimentality. She laughs about “casserole bitches” with her friend Ginny (also battling metastatic cancer). She compares radiation gowns to medieval armor. She describes the cancer center’s underground floor as “Level 00, the nukes.” The humor is not defiance but survival: a form of grace. As in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, language becomes her shield, turning chaos into meaning.

From Suspicious Country to Acceptance

Early on, Riggs quotes Montaigne’s metaphor of life as “suspicious country,” a landscape haunted by death yet teeming with vitality. Over time, we see her move from anxious vigilance—constantly scanning her body for danger—to a calmer awareness. This transformation doesn’t come through religious faith but through presence. She finds mentorship in Montaigne’s stoicism, in Emerson’s transcendental embrace of nature, and in her own poetic eye for detail. Like Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she learns to see without needing to fully understand.

Riggs’s core claim is that dying is not the opposite of living but its intense continuation. You can’t control what happens, but you can choose how to see it. A broken spine and a terminal diagnosis don’t erase wonder; they amplify it. Death, she insists, is not “the end of the world” because the world—the children, the husband, the blooming trees—continues. We live on when others live on loving us. In that way, the book’s subject is not just death but devotion: a woman writing herself into her family’s memory, planting love that will outlast her body.

Why This Matters

You don’t need to be dying to need this book. Riggs’s reflections remind any reader how to inhabit time with more attention and tenderness. Her chapters—snapshots of domestic life, reflections on art and philosophy—ask us to slow down, to love imperfectly but fiercely, to recognize that the bright hour is always now. She invites you to look your mortality in the eye not to despair, but to wake up. As she writes near the end, quoting her son’s imaginative language: when you are a newborn puppy, you “scrummle”—a sound of life itself, digging toward something, even though you're already home.

Riggs’s lens on death and meaning is deeply shaped by philosophy. She turns to her intellectual lineage—Ralph Waldo Emerson, her great-great-great grandfather, and Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century French essayist—for companionship in her illness. These thinkers become her invisible teachers, offering a vocabulary to understand what is happening to her body and to her mind.

Montaigne’s Stoic Humanity

Montaigne wrote during times of plague and civil unrest, and he treated each essay as an exploration of life’s uncertainties. Riggs sees her cancer as her own variant of the plague. She rereads the essay in which Montaigne describes his brother’s death from a tennis ball injury: a random, absurd accident that reminded him to be aware of death at every moment. From Montaigne she adopts the phrase “suspicious country”—to live knowing death is always nearby, but still choosing to walk unguarded.

His question—“What do I know?”—becomes her mantra. Riggs isn’t seeking certainty or miracles; she is seeking clarity, acceptance, and curiosity. When she quotes him saying, “I want death to find me planting my cabbages,” she reframes her act of parenting, cooking, and writing as precisely that planting—work worth doing even if the harvest may never come. (Like in Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, acceptance is not resignation but alignment with what matters.)

Emerson’s Transcendental Optimism

Emerson, whose words frame the book’s title, believed each person participates in a larger divine nature. Riggs inherits not the sermonizing Emerson of textbooks, but the ruminating man who saw holiness in sunlight and wildflowers. In one moving passage, she recalls learning as a girl that her ancestor believed “nature is church,” and laughs about failing Audubon camp. Yet in sickness, she begins to feel his truth: “Nature is a perpetual effect.” Her walks in rain-soaked Greensboro neighborhoods become her pilgrimages. Water becomes sacrament; clean laundry becomes communion bread.

The bright hour, then, is Emerson’s glowing moment made personal—minutes when pain and wonder coexist. Riggs writes, “I’m terrified. I’m fine. The world is changed and exactly as before.” Through Emerson, she discovers that the self expands even in dying, as if consciousness itself becomes porous—his “transparent eyeball” turned inside-out.

In reading these writers, Riggs doesn’t escape suffering; she gives it shape. Philosophy becomes her steady companion in uncertainty, like the cane she later names Faith. Montaigne gives her language for mortality; Emerson gives her permission to see the luminous world. Together they anchor the memoir’s radiant tone: curious, tender, unflinching.

Riggs’s fiercest love—and deepest sorrow—revolves around her sons. Her efforts to talk about mortality with Freddy and Benny turn the abstract philosophy of death into the intimacy of family life. This is not only a story of a mother dying; it’s a story of mothering through dying, of teaching children how to keep living.

Confronting Fear with Honesty

When Riggs struggles to explain her illness to her boys, she rejects false reassurance. Freddy, newly diagnosed with diabetes himself, understands medical realities; Benny deals in fantasy. She matches each of them at their level. In one heartbreaking scene, Benny wishes her breast could “grow back without any cancer in it.” Freddy writes comic books where superheroes defeat the “Cell Creep.” Riggs treats these moments not as naïve, but as children’s ways of achieving the same thing she does through writing—control through imagination.

Mother as Witness and Guide

Riggs documents rituals of parenting that become sacred as time shortens: lunches packed, bedtime stories read, her body curled next to theirs in the dark. She watches them fly down hills on bikes and says, “Look, I’m here; I’m alive.” Like Anne Lamott’s reflections in Operating Instructions, motherhood is both mundane and metaphysical, grounding her in a world that will soon continue without her. When her son becomes the “Grim Reaper” for Halloween, she smiles and says, “That’s precisely how it goes.” Death and play coexist.

Love as Legacy

Riggs recognizes that her children will carry her forward in memory and temperament. She writes lists of lessons she fears no one else will teach them: table manners, long division, kindness. Yet she trusts that love itself will be their education. In a luminous section recalling listening to Stevie Wonder with her father, she sees continuity spanning generations. “When you fall in love with your kids,” she writes, “you fall in love forever.” The cab of a pickup on a dark highway, a hospital bed where mother and son huddle—both become sanctuaries of eternal love.

Riggs’s marriage to John Duberstein evolves from the ordinary chaos of young family life into an extraordinary partnership forged by mortality. He is by turns husband, lover, joke partner, caregiver, and eventual widower. Their intimacy remains physical and fragile, interwoven with fear and humor.

Intimacy under Pressure

When Riggs jokes, “You’re not allowed to leave your bald, one-breasted wife,” we hear both her wit and her plea. They navigate sexuality after mastectomy with awkward tenderness—John’s question, “Where can I put my hands so I don’t hurt you?” meets her honest “Nowhere.” Love is still alive, but changed. Their bond becomes an ongoing conversation about permission: to desire, to grieve, to go on living.

In their private language—inside jokes from children’s books, mock-serious debates over grammar, their “Damaged Goods” card business with Ginny—humor is survival. When everything else falls away, laughter endures.

The Work of Saying Goodbye

Riggs refuses to wall off reality. She drafts wills, imagines financial scenarios, and even teases John about his “future second wife,” not as morbid speculation but as practical love. The chapter “Item 18-B,” in which a financial planner’s spreadsheet shows her income ending at age forty-four, captures the surreal arithmetic of dying young. Yet she doesn’t flinch. Love, she implies, is allowing your partner to survive you without guilt.

After her death, in his afterword, John affirms her hope: she prepared him by teaching him how to stay open to the world. Their marriage becomes a model of what philosopher Irvin Yalom calls “existential courage”—staying connected in the face of impermanence. Every scene of domestic intimacy is, at heart, a lesson in letting go.

Riggs turns her diary of illness into art—not by pretending to transcend suffering, but by illuminating its textures. Her style blends poetic compression with journalistic clarity, transforming hospital hallways into landscapes of meaning. She writes as a working poet, reader, and mother, but most of all as a witness of the human condition.

Turning Pain into Language

Her prose mirrors her poetic training: sharp images, exact verbs, musical rhythm. A broken vertebra becomes a “lump of cancerous mush.” Radiation burns look like having been “to Hawaii.” This accuracy is her rebellion against denial. It recalls Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, where naming pain is an act of empowerment. For Riggs, metaphor is medicine—the only kind still within her control.

She stitches humor and horror seamlessly: the breast prosthetics jokingly called “Pink Critter,” the chemo bay that feels like “Camp Radiation.” In these vignettes, she performs alchemy—transforming fear into empathy for everyone waiting on Level 00 or walking out with burned skin and uncertain futures.

Beauty Without Sentimentality

Riggs’s aesthetic is that of unpolished beauty. She describes the “purple house” next door, the neighbor endlessly sweeping his patio, the mulched garden she builds under steroids. Each scene contrasts control with surrender—a daily act of finding symmetry in chaos. Her attention is her prayer. As she writes of sweeping catkins until her skin breaks, she joins a lineage of writers (like Annie Dillard or Thich Nhat Hanh) who find holiness in maintenance.

Art becomes not escape but acceptance: proof that our small gestures—writing a line, planting a flower—matter precisely because they vanish. Creating is her way of making peace with impermanence.

Even as her illness isolates her, Riggs builds a sisterhood of the dying. Her closest companion, Ginny, shares her diagnosis, her dark humor, and her willingness to look unflinchingly at death. Their friendship becomes an antidote to fear—a way to humanize what the world avoids.

Shared Humor as Defiance

Together they invent “Damaged Goods,” their imaginary line of brutally honest cancer greeting cards: “Thank you for the flowers. I hope they die before I do.” They text during treatments, teasing about “nipple tattoos” and “road trips down the nipple highway.” This humor isn’t cruelty—it’s agency. By joking about death, they reclaim authorship of their story. In their banter, despair becomes something to laugh through, not around.

Bearing Witness to Each Other

Ginny’s decline parallels Riggs’s own, teaching her about empathy and grace. They talk frankly about parenting from the grave, record messages for their children, and commiserate about their failing bodies. When Ginny dies three days before Riggs, their story becomes an elegy for shared courage. John later calls Ginny one of the “badass women” who lit Nina’s way. Through one another, they transform dying from solitary confinement into community.

Riggs also sustains friendships that tether her to the living: Tita, her lifelong confidant who texts irreverent encouragement and drives her to scans, and her father, her steadfast anchor. The web of relationships reveals that even as the body withers, connection expands—a counterargument to isolation.

Unlike many memoirs of illness, The Bright Hour is free of false hope. Riggs neither battles cancer nor surrenders to it; she lives with it as a fact of being. She writes testaments, drafts wills, and blurts dark jokes—but always with the steady awareness that she is practicing for death as for any difficult art.

Her panic attack at a convent retreat captures her honesty: she feels the terror of separateness, screams into her pillow, then walks out to the woods and breathes again. Acceptance isn’t constant serenity; it’s returning, over and over, to the present moment. Later, leaning on her cane named Faith, she writes, “Some days I don’t need Faith at all. Other days I depend on her heavily.” Faith here means not belief in heaven, but trust in being—exactly as Montaigne prescribed.

Learning to See Clearly

Riggs calls dying a process of “myopia,” a narrowing of vision to what matters most. At first that limited focus terrifies her; eventually it becomes revelation. The closer she gets to death, the more vibrant life becomes. She describes her final months not as endings but as rides: walks with her father, laughter over the piano, the boys playing apocalypse games in the yard. “There is life—this bright hour.” The last sentence repeats the miracle of the ordinary.

Her philosophy aligns with contemporary existential writers like Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air) and the Stoic idea that coming to terms with mortality intensifies joy. Riggs doesn’t ask for transcendence; she invites insight. Death, she proves, is simply the next room in the house of life.