You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
jingliu01 's review for:
The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying
by Nina Riggs
Nina Riggs’ The Bright Hour is called, by some, “this year’s When Breath Becomes Air”. There are obvious parallels. Both authors were diagnosed with terminal cancer at the prime of their lives: Paul Kalanithi was a young star neurosurgeon with a glorious career and a happy family life ahead of him when he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer; Nina Riggs was a young mother and a poet when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, but the cancer, to everyone’s surprise, metastasized like wildfire throughout her body in a few short months.
Neither of them is still with us in this world, and it is ungenerous to compare two people whose lives ended so early and so tragically. But I don’t agree that The Bright Hour is another When Breath Becomes Air. The two authors had vastly different perspectives, and the readers will gain different, though all valuable, insights.
Obviously, a part of the book is about her cancer, the struggle, the fear, and the sense of loss. There was the dream in which she begged Death to give her more time for the sake of her young children; there was not knowing how to tell the kids the truth; there was all the pain that came with the treatment and the resignation when nothing would help anymore. The messy stuff. But surprisingly, these are only a portion of the book. A large portion of the book is not about cancer, but about life – which just happened to be accompanied by cancer. Buying a couch online, watching chicks snatched away by an osprey or a fox; an adorable new dog; kids getting in trouble at camp; a mysterious scooter at a motel… And the messy stuff that is unrelated to her illness: mother’s passing, best friend’s cancer… Her description of the little things in life is lyrical, calm and unsentimental. Yes, life is messy, but it is all we have. When a life without cancer is no longer a possibility, days with cancer can still be interesting and still worth living.
The book is also about getting ready for death, and it’s beyond telling the family or sorting out the finance. It’s really about acceptance. Cancer patients’ lives might look like walking a tightrope; but everyone’s life is, to a certain extent, walking a tightrope. Most of us simply don’t know what’s ahead of us. Accepting the uncertainty of life and how little control we have, accepting Fate, and accepting our fear is an underlying theme of the book. There is a quiet courage that shines through in her humor, defiance, and the complete lack of complaining about her fate.
Nina is right that life is messy for everyone; it’s just that, for cancer patients, the source of the mess is much better defined. For someone like me, whose life had been for many years uneventful, the messiness of life was a difficult concept until I experienced career setbacks and illness in the family. But hardship seems to have a way to sharpen our perception and our mind, and to make us think hard about what it is about life that we truly care. In the end, it may well be that the important thing is indeed accepting life as it is, “staring into the abyss, seeing that it is dark and full of the unknowns – and being OK with that.”
My only complaint about the book is that Nina mentioned Ralph Waldo Emerson too many times. RWE is her great great great great-grandpa (something like it), and I understand there is the urge to explore how this philosopher influenced her. But this theme came up too often and got old quickly. Sorry, Nina.
Neither of them is still with us in this world, and it is ungenerous to compare two people whose lives ended so early and so tragically. But I don’t agree that The Bright Hour is another When Breath Becomes Air. The two authors had vastly different perspectives, and the readers will gain different, though all valuable, insights.
Obviously, a part of the book is about her cancer, the struggle, the fear, and the sense of loss. There was the dream in which she begged Death to give her more time for the sake of her young children; there was not knowing how to tell the kids the truth; there was all the pain that came with the treatment and the resignation when nothing would help anymore. The messy stuff. But surprisingly, these are only a portion of the book. A large portion of the book is not about cancer, but about life – which just happened to be accompanied by cancer. Buying a couch online, watching chicks snatched away by an osprey or a fox; an adorable new dog; kids getting in trouble at camp; a mysterious scooter at a motel… And the messy stuff that is unrelated to her illness: mother’s passing, best friend’s cancer… Her description of the little things in life is lyrical, calm and unsentimental. Yes, life is messy, but it is all we have. When a life without cancer is no longer a possibility, days with cancer can still be interesting and still worth living.
The book is also about getting ready for death, and it’s beyond telling the family or sorting out the finance. It’s really about acceptance. Cancer patients’ lives might look like walking a tightrope; but everyone’s life is, to a certain extent, walking a tightrope. Most of us simply don’t know what’s ahead of us. Accepting the uncertainty of life and how little control we have, accepting Fate, and accepting our fear is an underlying theme of the book. There is a quiet courage that shines through in her humor, defiance, and the complete lack of complaining about her fate.
Nina is right that life is messy for everyone; it’s just that, for cancer patients, the source of the mess is much better defined. For someone like me, whose life had been for many years uneventful, the messiness of life was a difficult concept until I experienced career setbacks and illness in the family. But hardship seems to have a way to sharpen our perception and our mind, and to make us think hard about what it is about life that we truly care. In the end, it may well be that the important thing is indeed accepting life as it is, “staring into the abyss, seeing that it is dark and full of the unknowns – and being OK with that.”
My only complaint about the book is that Nina mentioned Ralph Waldo Emerson too many times. RWE is her great great great great-grandpa (something like it), and I understand there is the urge to explore how this philosopher influenced her. But this theme came up too often and got old quickly. Sorry, Nina.