The Bright Hour

by Nina Riggs

  She is on her way home from work, she tells me when I answer. But she wanted to call because she’d promised.

  I can picture her tucked in some cool, pristine luxury sedan gliding along I-40. Unmelted iced coffee in the cup holder. Her blond hair still pulled back tidily from her face. A guided meditation CD whirring quietly in the player on pause.

  The restained pathology report is back and the tumors are as we thought—only maybe not quite as dumb as we hoped. The tumor board unanimously recommends that we do another four cycles of chemo—this time with Adriamycin, a harsher drug.

  And because it turns out a tenth of a millimeter margin isn’t enough to let anyone breathe easy, I will also have six weeks of radiation when the chemo is done.

  * * *

  My hair has just started growing back and it’s soft and downy and makes me feel human. My eyebrows are coming back, too—although in an incredibly disorganized way that I can kind of relate to. And I just rejoined the gym. As Dr. Cavanaugh is talking I feel like I’m hurtling backward, that I’m that many steps farther away from getting back to normal—whatever that is.

  “Nina,” she says as we start to hang up, “I just want you to know that I still feel like we’re in a good place on this.”

  I’m rethinking my image of serene, smooth-sailing Dr. Cavanaugh. It is 7 p.m. on a Monday night. She is headed home after a long day discussing tumors and telling patients who wouldn’t just let their phones go to voicemail that they need more chemo. Maybe worse. At home: her kids—two, not much older than mine, hastily crafted dinner, a mountain of email, a bag unpacked from the conference she returned from late last night. She probably used the only quiet moments of her whole day to call me from the highway.

  One time she told me about lying in her son’s bed while he asked her questions about how to ask a girl to a dance. I like to picture her in the dark like that, her head on his pillow, her confident, firm voice steadying the night. I can imagine exactly what it would feel like. It is a remarkable thing to feel the hug of the world keeping you safe—almost like standing out in the middle of six lanes of a chaotic highway, but tucked inside the pod of a tollbooth.

  When I come back to the dinner table, my mom has disappeared—the food on her plate barely touched. John and my dad are doling out dessert to the kids. I find her lying on the couch in the salon. “I’m okay,” she says, not opening her eyes. “Now tell me all about Dr. Cavanaugh’s latest plan to save the day.”

  18. Hospice

  I answer the door the first time the hospice nurse comes to visit my parents’ house. My mom is perched in the salon and my dad is making lunch. The kids are playing Wild West out in the yard—riding two tipped-over garbage cans as horses and wielding lassos. “Eat my dust, partner,” Freddy is yelling. Benny is squealing and neighing.

  “Oh my!” the hospice nurse says, with a smile that suggests she is more used to the hushed version of her job. “Ms. Riggs! It’s wonderful to meet you. I didn’t realize you had young kids.”

  She thinks I’m my mom. She’s noted the baldness and the surgical drain hanging clipped to my shirt that had to be reinstalled when my mastectomy site kept filling and refilling with fluid.

  “Oh no, I’m the daughter,” I say. “Sorry. I know it’s confusing.” Her smile wavers and also softens a little. “I’ll show you to my mom.”

  Imagine this: Even hospice nurses retain a sense of the way the world should work.

  19. The Blade

  Book club moves from the living room to the salon so my mom can lie down on her couch while we discuss. We have just read a graphic novel we all loved—chosen in part because she is struggling to focus when there is too much text—but I can’t relax. All I can think about is the part at the end of the discussion when we pick a date for our next meeting.

  I know that everyone in book club knows that the hospice nurse has suggested that given her status, my mom probably has about a month to six weeks left—but I’m wondering if they remember. I am panicking at the thought of choosing a date that she isn’t around for any longer. I feel like I’m six years old and about to be caught in some horrible lie—hurtling like an egg through midair. And I’m shocked at my inability to say something out loud to confront it, diffuse it even: So do they have book club in the afterlife?

  I am positive that the possibility that she won’t live to see our next meeting is not lost on her either, but she seems distracted tonight—disconnected from the discussion.

  “Are you okay?” I mouth to her.

  She nods, but then winces. “Can you ask Dad to bring me in my pain pills?”

  Then quickly to everyone else: “Don’t go, don’t go! This is just a new version of me having another glass of wine.” She never wants the party to end.

  Anne saves the day: “Seems like many of us will be unavailable for the month of August with summer vacations and all. Wouldn’t it be easier to leave the date open-ended for now?”

  Linda saves it again: “And maybe it would be fun for each of us to just come and report on our favorite book from the last year, from book club or not.”

  Tita nudges my arm as we stand to leave. “Call me when you get home if you want to talk.”

  Of course they all remember; of course it is not only me, trying to both preserve and crack open the lie that time doesn’t pass, that loss isn’t a blade so sharp that it can make you bleed long before you ever feel the sting.

  My mom stays curled up on the couch, her tiny body somehow seeming to have become a little smaller over the course of the evening.

  “You all be good,” she is saying, starting to doze. “I love you.”

  These are the things we all say at the end of book club now: I love you. Of course we do. Why haven’t we been saying that all along?

  20. The Purple House

  Next door to our little green bungalow is a house that has been painted deep purple for as long as I can remember, with symmetrical hot-pink pillars supporting the portico. For years, a black POW flag hung like a banner between the second-story windows.

  Years back, when John and I first moved to Greensboro for me to start grad school—before we lived here in Westerwood, our current neighborhood—I remember there was also a row of impeccable toilets that lined the front yard.

  At that point, I only vaguely knew that the purple spectacle was an act of protest. It had something to do with the eclectic, bungalow-y, artists-filled neighborhood being turned into a historic district with covenants and codes that would mean you needed to ask permission to paint your house a new color, among other things.

  Dan, our now-neighbor—decorated Vietnam vet and one of the few black residents of our largely white neighborhood—wasn’t having it. He saw the move to make a historic district as invasive of property owners’ rights and thought it smacked of underhanded segregationist techniques to keep the neighborhood white and upper-middle class.

  So, he and a smattering of other neighbors decided to paint their houses outlandish shades of purple. Dan’s was by far the most conspicuous, though—plus the toilets. And the signs that read, Jim Crow Is Alive in Westerwood. The contrast with the architectural stateliness of his Dutch colonial house and his immaculately manicured yard along the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare gave the gesture maximum impact.

  As it turns out, Westerwood never did become a historic district. But Dan also never repainted his house.

  Twelve years later, the toilets and protest signs are long gone and the purple is faded, but if I’m giving directions to anyone who has lived in our town for more than a few years, all I have to say is, “We’re next door to the purple house,” and they know exactly where I mean.

  I adore the purple house even though—and possibly because—it’s not in my own nature to be conspicuous. As a bald woman, I noted stricken looks from other moms at PTA meetings and grocery parking lots. I noted our mailman hurrying to avoid me on the stoop. Discomfort from waiters and shop attendants. The worried brow of the guy who hands me
my locker key at the gym.

  I hated it. But, as my head began to resprout, I also note that baldness served a role—like mourning clothes. I am going through something, it announces. Be gentle with me.

  “I miss my bald head,” emails my high-school friend Christy who also did chemo this year. She’s a couple months ahead of me in her treatment.

  “That is one very complicated emotion,” I reply.

  * * *

  Departing from baldness also denotes a departure from treatment. Whether cured or beyond a cure, there is still fear. Because treatment itself—effective or not—is a kind of solution. Dr. Cavanaugh says that her patients have told her that the hardest part of their treatment was the day they finished, the day they make the see-you-in-six-months appointment.

  “I do not at all like to cure one evil by another,” says Montaigne, no stranger to doctors or illness, who in one sense captures in a dozen words all of what feels wrong about cancer treatment today. “I hate remedies that are more of a nuisance than the sickness.”

  He would not have enjoyed chemo. But part of me argues with him here—although maybe I am the dupe. It is an unintentional side effect, but there is a dark harmony in going through treatment that I do not want to ignore either. In treatment, the wrongness I feel in my life is a wrongness reflected in my body—my steroid puffy face, my bald head, my lopsided chest. And spending my days at the cancer center: It’s something I’m part of. I make sense there somehow. A lot more sense than I make at the gym or the elementary school or the grocery store or work meetings—or all the other places I’ve sat outside of for too long in my car taking deep breaths as I attempt to return to civilian life.

  * * *

  The sound I most associate with being Dan’s neighbor is the leaf blower. He is at it nearly every day. He never stops moving—leaf blowing, mowing, weeding, hosing down, hammering, scrubbing, holding the line. Next to his pristine house, our low-slung not-purple craftsman looks like it was devoured by a forest.

  When I was spending a lot of time bald on our back deck—in the throes of chemo and buzzed out of my mind by the steroids—thinking, gardening, breathing, trying to get my footing in a world where I suddenly didn’t feel at home—I would often spend the day next to the sounds of Dan’s labor on the other side of the fence.

  “We have to learn that what cannot be cured must be endured,” Montaigne also says. You see why I talk to him all day.

  Over a period of several weeks in early summer, the deck was perpetually covered in drifts of these airy little clusters called “catkins,” fallen from the willow oak in the yard. You would sweep it clean and go inside for a glass of water, and come out to find it looked like an abandoned property. You’d pick up the broom again.

  One morning—in socks and pajamas and no hair—steroids, nausea, nothing tasting right, nothing looking right, nothing right to say to anyone—I stood on the deck and held the line: I kept sweeping. I could not stop any more than the catkins could stop falling from the oak. I passed the whole morning in this way, the soft skin between my thumb and pointer finger eventually worn raw.

  I think of Emerson, begrudgingly snared and re-snared by his garden. In his journal he writes: “With brow bent, with firm intent, I go musing in the garden walk. I stoop to pull up a weed that is choking the corn, and find there are two; close behind it is a third, and I reach out my arm to a fourth; behind that there are four thousand and one. I am heated and untuned, and by and by wake up from my idiot dream of chickweed and red-root, to find that I with adamantine purposes am chickweed and pipergrass myself.”

  All that time of my sweeping, I could hear Dan puttering. For hours, he’d been slightly hunched over his patio, spraying steady lines of Roundup between the infinite bricks, eradicating the chances of anything unwanted taking root.

  At one point as he walked up the back steps to his house, he paused and looked over at me sweeping—he who does not make easy eye contact even when someone is not bald in their pajamas—and we nodded at each other, as though acknowledging that the thing rattling loose in both of us was the same.

  21. The Nipple Highway

  I text Ginny: “I think we should consider expanding our business model to include a line of customizable photo cards so you can send your loved ones pictures of your nipple tattoos.”

  We’ve both been reading about this guy, Vinnie Myers, who is based in Maryland and New Orleans. He’s apparently the grandmaster of nipple tattooing. He used to be a regular tattoo artist, but now his website says: Many things have changed over the past few years and now I spend most of my time tattooing nipple areola tattoos on breast cancer warriors.

  His work is extraordinary, and women flock to him like pilgrims: nothing frou-frou. No flowers or dragons covering the scar. Just nipples of all varieties: pink and pubescent, dark and post-breastfeeding, large, small, one that even contains an artificial piercing. They look 3-dimensional and completely real.

  We’ve watched videos of Vinny working. He wears hipster glasses, a tie, and a straw porkpie hat. “He is clearly our guy,” I write.

  “Road trip down the nipple highway,” texts Ginny. “That’s our reward.”

  Right now I don’t even have a breast. The whole idea feels like an abstraction. “A kind of updated Thelma and Louise,” I text back. “We’re gonna need to get a convertible.”

  22. Myopia

  Dying provokes nearsightedness in the caregiver.

  We drive my mom back and forth to Duke, we spend long hours awaiting lab work and blood transfusions, we cancel teacher conferences and hair appointments, we administer water and pills, we greet hospice nurses, we sit at the bedside, we confer in the hallway outside her room, we wait. We become myopic about the whole thing, losing the ability to take stock of what all these efforts are about—and what they portend.

  Myopia. Myopia. I keep thinking about that word. There was a polo and hunt club named Myopia near where we lived in Massachusetts, founded in 1882 by four men who were all plagued by nearsightedness—although I didn’t know until much later that the name was a flourish of New England wit. The place had nothing to do with my life—we didn’t ride much, even though my dad’s family is “horsey”—and we definitely didn’t hunt, but myopia always sounded pastoral and mysterious and lovely to me. I remember driving by the discreet sign and long mysterious drive along Route 1A with some regularity, and my decidedly unhorsey mother often unable to stop herself from tittering over the name.

  “A la-di-da club called Myopia!” she would snark. “It doesn’t get any better than that!”

  My mom worked for years as a medical transcriptionist and she always knew all the good medical terms: fistula, ketoacidosis, decompensating, myocardial infarction. I vaguely understood the eccentric discontinuity of a fox hunting club named after the condition of being nearsighted, but I didn’t really get the bigger social-class implications of not seeing the forest for the trees until decades later. She would have appreciated knowing that one of the club’s founding members was my dad’s maternal great-great grandfather, John Murray Forbes—something I discover when I google the place after my mother dies.

  * * *

  My brother, Charlie, and his wife, Amelia, live in western Massachusetts, but they come stay at my parents’ house in Greensboro after my mom decides to stop treatment. They are quickly sucked into our myopic vortex. Charlie’s working on a history PhD and Amelia is considering studying divinity, but our most animated conversations are around the topic of toothbrushing alternatives and the log of opiates. Sometimes we forget what “problem” we are solving, what enormous stillness awaits at the end.

  My mom doesn’t, though. Her favorite reply to any text intended to cheer her up is the Bitmoji with a hand coming out of a grave that says “Literally dying!”

  Charlie is reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich aloud to her. She can’t read books anymore by herself—pain meds, focus—but she’s cognizant enough to absorb as he reads.

  “Well, one t
hing I know is that definitely won’t be me,” Charlie reports that she said of Ivan Ilyich’s brutal penultimate moments raging against the perceived darkness, drowning in the disbelief of life’s finitude.

  Charlie and I wonder about this. I mean, at one level, of course she’s right: She’s the opposite of Ivan Ilyich. Her life’s work has been looking straight at things—including death—and she’s worked on coming to terms with dying for nearly nine years.

  Still: “Do you find it unsettling that Mom hasn’t had more violent reactions to all of this?” Charlie texts shortly after her decision to withdraw from the endless parade of failed clinical trials.

  We’ve both recently seen the movie After the Wedding, where one of the main characters—faced with a brutal diagnosis—completely loses it, sobbing and thrashing dramatically about on the floor. “Not that I wish she was, obviously, just that I’m a little suspicious of her serenity about it all,” he writes.

  “I know!” I write back. “Sometimes I think she’s more of a Yankee than Dad.”

  That of course is not true. Her temper still flares from her deathbed—and her humor and her rebellious soul. The last words she speaks—several weeks from now—will be undeniably hers: I’m so fucking fat. But she has developed an emotional toughness to her that I find myself trying to imitate. She embodies some of that stoicism that Montaigne admired so much—a kind of fearless acceptance. Well, not fearlessness exactly—but a fearlessness of being afraid.

  * * *

  One morning I show up and sob in her lap. She rubs my back and looks at me sympathetically. “How are you not crying?” I ask, almost exasperated. She says, “I’ve done all my crying already, and I’m kind of over it. You’re just a little behind.”

  Sunlight sneaks in through the drawn blinds and casts odd patterns on the wood floor. She asks me to bring her an ice cream sandwich and her jewelry boxes and we spend the afternoon in her bed sorting through an ancient-smelling world of gems and old chains and stories about her mother. We put all her rings on all of our fingers. She gives me a gorgeous jade pendant. “If you’re ever looking for a gift for someone you don’t want to spend a lot of money on, just remember this stash exists.”