As A Reader

            Sometime after 6:00 p.m. Wednesday evening, I ordered The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying by Nina Riggs.  At midnight, I finished reading it.  Today, I am still thinking about it.

            Having written a breast cancer memoir via my blog, thinking about searching for a publisher, and knowing that I should become familiar with such books already on the market, I found The Bright Hour on Amazon.com.  The cover’s cheery splashes of color, its title, and its June 6, 2017 publication date intrigued me.  I read the sample pages and was immediately hooked.  I could not wait for a physical copy of the book to be mailed to me, so I hit the one-click button for immediate electronic delivery to my Kindle.

            Nina Riggs had the power of words and immediacy.  Her brief narrative chapters kept me spellbound as I raced through the reading, broken only by occasional pit stops.  Her many allusions to Ralph Waldo Emerson and her direct descendance from him delighted me.  (I have enjoyed Emerson since I was a teenager, even though I have rarely understood him and sometimes disagreed with him.  His portrait, his words, and the fact that both of my grandparents closely read his essays make him seem like a distant and kindly great uncle.)  Riggs’ equally frequent allusions to Montaigne made me determined to add him to my reading plans.

            Besides the brilliance of her writing, I was captured, of course, by the shared territory of triple negative breast cancer.  Breast cancer patients and survivors understand breast cancer patients and survivors.  Though each of us has a unique experience with the disease and the treatments, there is a fundamental connection. 

            Added to that shared territory was the setting of Riggs’ memoir, bittersweet to me because of the two months I spent with my sister as she was dying from ovarian cancer in 2009.  I remember Highway 54 and Graham, North Carolina—Anne lived in Saxapahaw but had a Graham post office box.  She was treated at UNC instead of Duke, but still it is the same general territory.  She spent the last month of her life in a horrid skilled nursing facility in Greensboro, dying two days before she was finally to be transferred to the Greensboro hospice.

            With those memories of my sister and the more recent memories of my breast cancer treatment, I read The Bright Hour, enthralled by every page and grieving all the way through for Riggs’ family members who are still in the throes of loss. 

            And still I’m gripped by her memoir.  As a writer, I see that my own story fits a different and specific market niche:  the Christian reader.  As a human being, I am amazed at Nina Riggs’ resilience.  And as a Christian, I am hopeful that at the end she found herself ushered into the love and glory of God’s presence.