The Bright Hour

by Nina Riggs

  “Sorry about that,” says Charlie, cry-laughing, Amelia leaning her head against him as we all walk arm-in-arm back to the car. “I don’t know if that was okay or horrible.”

  “It was okay,” says my dad. “Let’s just not ever do it again.”

  * * *

  After the cremation the rest of the afternoon is airport runs and phone calls, and the evening is soup and beers on the back patio with music and family and friends. An old best friend pulls into the driveway on her motorcycle, driven that day from New York. Amelia’s parents are here. John’s mom and sister have both flown in from out West. They walk through the gate. The neighbors bring dessert. All through this, the oven is at work in the back of that parking lot on the other side of town.

  * * *

  We hold two services. The first one is at tiny St. Mary’s House, where my parents’ and my friends all sit packed in a giant circle and look at each other, crying and smiling. The kids sit on pillows on the floor and form an impromptu band with a few of their friends to help Mark get through his beautiful rendition of an Everybodyfields song—“By Your Side”—on the guitar. They play harmonica and bongos and beat the wooden floor with their hands. They are exceptionally pleased with themselves.

  I’ve asked people to wear bright colors if they want because my mom loved bright clothes. Her favorite color was purple, although three days before she died she changed it to orange.

  “Orange,” she kept telling my dad. “Orange is the best.”

  “You want to eat an orange?” my dad would reply, always trying to feed her.

  “No,” she would shake her head fiercely. “I love orange.”

  Two nights before she died she had a nightmare that she was going to be abducted. She woke up agitated, restless, panicky. She couldn’t escape the dream world. Ativan didn’t work. Neither did the pain pills. “Let’s just think about orange,” my dad eventually tried. “Meditate on orange.” He rubbed her feet and talked her through every orange thought he could generate at 3:00 a.m. Finally, her breathing calmed and she slept again.

  A friend tells me that this is significant: In Buddhism, orange is considered to be a highly evolved color, representing illumination (who can trust the light?!) and essence—something full of wisdom, strength, and dignity.

  I love that she could go her whole life ardently loving purple, and then shift to an equally passionate affinity for orange less than a week before she died. It’s exactly like her: She had strong opinions but was never afraid to change them—to evolve or retract or alter. Her favorite way to start a sentence—“You know what your problem is?”—was closely rivaled by “You know what I was wrong about?”

  After the songs, Charlie reads a poem. Friends share memories. My dad—not one for public speaking—grips my hand as we sit on the chapel’s cozy couch.

  I apologize for not reading the poem she asked me to about Italy—I just can’t do it. I fail to follow Emerson’s Aunt Mary’s advice. And because I can’t stand seeing people feel unhappy, I tell silly slapstick stories that she loved to tell: the way she was a magnet for the ridiculous, the time she got stuck on an airplane toilet, the time the bumblebee flew up her nose, the time she was scooping up dog poop and it ended up in her hair, the time in San Francisco that she had gone pantie-less to the bank when I was a baby and she set me down on the floor while she filled out a form and I pulled her hippy skirt down to her ankles and wouldn’t let go. I feel her voice in my mouth.

  As I’m talking, a picture of the Virgin Mary hanging behind me suddenly falls off the wall and crashes to the floor. Lots of gasps and some laughter. “Jeez, Jan,” someone says. “Give it a rest already.”

  We end the service with an open-ended moment of silence. We tell people they are free to go whenever they want. Before the memorial, when we were planning this, I kept worrying that people would feel awkward or uncertain or like they needed to stay as long as others do. I wanted there to be a gong or bell at the end of the moment to let people know it was okay to go.

  Charlie was clearer: “It’s about honoring the unknowing and the awkwardness and the mystery of dying,” he said. “It’s unsettling—and that’s okay.”

  Oh my God, I thought. I am terrible at death. I don’t know how any of this is supposed to work at all.

  * * *

  It will be a couple days before we receive the ashes from the cremation because, as Joe the mortician tells me one morning in the driveway, after the incinerator, there is the cremulator—a high-speed blender of sorts that grinds the cremated bone fragments into approximately four pounds of rocky sand.

  Two days after the memorial service, Joe rings the doorbell holding the stash can. He’s home from work for a quick lunch, the hearse crowding the narrow driveway between our houses. His wife, Josie, is home full-time with the baby, and Joe is trying to get back to working a regular schedule. His eyes are raw with the shock of parenting. I can hear the sound of newborn cries through our open windows at all hours.

  “These are for you,” he says when I open the door, handing me the container. Four pounds.

  “Thank you,” I say, holding it awkwardly with both hands, wanting to put it under my arm, but knowing that would not be right either. “I hope you guys are doing okay over there.”

  “We are,” he says, smiling. “Tired—but she’s so great.”

  Fifteen minutes later I peer out the dining room window. The driveway is empty. I discover I’m still holding the canister, balanced on my hip and in the crook of my arm. I’ve let the dog out and straightened the couch cushions and made a grocery list, but I haven’t put it down. Through the screens, I can hear Josie humming and cooing to the baby—that mindless meandering tune of comfort and companionship—the loveliest of music, one of the first sounds I imagine I ever heard.

  5. Plunder

  One afternoon, I stop by my parents’ house to drop off some papers for my dad, who has gone back to work. My mom’s Prius is in the driveway. Her purse is hanging on the chair in the kitchen.

  Oh, good, I have to stop myself from thinking, she’s home.

  Their ancient beagle, Clyde, is sprawled snoring in the hall and does not look up. The house is hushed and glowing with afternoon sun, an orchid blooming on the dining room table. Everything seems as it should be. I walk into her bedroom.

  Seems—such a sneaky word.

  In the days right after she died, her bedroom smelled like, well—death. We all noticed it. Not an outright bad smell, but kind of a cocktail of all the smells of those final weeks and days and hours. Lotions, Clorox, incense, medicine, flowers, breath. Plus something else. Decay, I guess. The scent was in my nose for days.

  She died in bed around four in the morning on Friday, and we kept her body there all through the next day and into midmorning on Sunday. Hospice came around dawn on Friday to help us clean her and dress her—we opened the blinds and blasted the Beatles and put her in the funkiest outfit and covered her in purple flowers. She looked radiant. She would have swooned over the luminance of her skin.

  Something I didn’t expect: She didn’t leave all at once. And I don’t really mean that in an esoteric way at all. At first she was present, even though she was lifeless. But every time I would go into and out of her room, I would come back to something newly less “there.” The way her fingers were curled on her chest (those softest, most delicate hands—my earliest memory), her lips, the color of her skin. By Sunday morning it was her eyes—they’d changed to a vinyl-looking film; they were not hers at all.

  The same thing has happened with the death smell. When I walk in the bedroom, it is pristine—much as she kept it before she was sick enough to relinquish those duties to us. The cleaning lady has come. The marigold-print bedspread is crisp and fresh and square, her unguents are neatly aligned on the nightstand next to her glasses and her green comb, and her orderly stacks of camisoles and yoga pants all smell of fresh detergent.

  I walk around the room twice, sniffing at everything—searching
for just one whiff of her—organic, living/dying her. It is not here. So I stand in the room and cry for a long time.

  And then I steal all her shoes.

  I don’t really know what comes over me. It started happening even before she died, after she stopped being able to walk. I would go over to hang out and while she was dozing I’d poke around in her closet and try on sandals and boots and clogs I’d never given two thoughts to before. And then I’d leave with a pair.

  She’s about a half size smaller than me—and we don’t even totally align in terms of taste—but I can’t stop myself. I pile all her shoes into a big shopping bag and lug them to my house. And now I’m in my bedroom scrunching up my toes and tromping around in them.

  6. Red Devil

  The kids are deeply annoyed that I’m headed back into chemo. They hate it when I’m not there to pick them up from school, to schlep to piano lessons and swimming, to pack their snacks, help plan their class parties. And I appreciate that their enormous self-centeredness is still intact.

  “Didn’t they do a lot of chemo already?” Freddy asks at supper. “What kind is this one?”

  “It’s called Adriamycin,” I say. “It’s bright red. Like as red as Kool-Aid. The nurses called it the Red Devil.”

  “We’ll bring some home for you as a treat,” says John.

  “No thank you,” says Benny with genuine indignance.

  I tell the boys it won’t be much different from the last time.

  “But this time you have to do it without your mom,” Freddy points out. “I would hate that.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I have you guys. Seems like given all your super powers and epic warfare strategies, you might be able to help me with the Red Devil.”

  “The problem is they’re lazy,” says John. “They’re only interested in vanquishing evil when they’re in the right mood.”

  “Totally,” I say.

  That night John finds the boys asleep with the lights on in their bunk. Freddy has been drawing a comic book: Red Devil vs. the Cell Creep. You know the tale.

  7. Labor Day

  The second service is to scatter the ashes. Labor Day: We drive up to our family place on the Cape. Dozens of cousins and aunts and uncles. The landscape of vacation. The boys are thrilled to miss school, extend the summer a few more days. The hill is turning brown, the corners of the island are sharpened, the ocean has shifted from hazy gray-green to chilly navy.

  I feel the future coming like a promise: motherless September, more chemo, and after that—whatever it is that happens when the doctors set you adrift on the sea of after treatment.

  I sit on the porch swing before the ceremony and watch a guinea hen nervously pecking around in the lawn with her head bobbing up and down in the grass—a vigilant look to the task at her feet, another to the horizon, and again—and I understand what it is to dawdle in the sun on a perfect day and feel winter and grief in the warm breeze and in the dry rustle of the grasses and in the waves in the bay newly tipped with white.

  We had started the season with a flock of eight guinea hens—exotic-looking, high-strung, speckled fowl known for eating ticks, which infest the island. Beautiful, anxious birds. They roamed free around the yard during the day, laying eggs, disappearing together into the tall grasses, squabbling, munching on ticks and other bugs, and periodically working themselves into loud, seemingly unprovoked lathers.

  “Oh chill out, ladies,” we’d say when they would abruptly round a corner and zigzag madly across the lawn in a frantic rush toward nothing and away from nothing. They seemed to work each other up like a pack of kids telling ghost stories. “You’re fine, birdies. No worries.”

  At night they were cooped and quiet—safe from the coyotes that prowl and yip along the island beaches after dark—in a henhouse perched on the cliff near the ice-age boulder and the clothesline where even before my mom died I could sometimes feel her ghost and the outdoor shower with its mermaid mural and front-row view of fishing boats and sailboats and ferries shuttling vacationers out to the Vineyard.

  Early in the summer, the guineas made a nest in a thicket of poison ivy just off the road down to the barn, and we discovered they must not have all been hens one day when, after a great deal of squawking and fluttering, suddenly there was a collection of downy chicks huddled on the path.

  One was dead or nearly dead. The others were not yet very mobile, and all day the kids ran up and back reporting on the status of the babies and arguing over their names and personality traits—getting as close as the alarmist flock would permit before they would flap up and dive at the boys’ heads. Then, on one visit, the ruckus turned to something more serious, squawks turning to sirens, and the boys watched an osprey swoop down out of the sky and carry off one of the chicks—Clarence or Roberto or FuzzWuzz—and the boys began screeching and flapping themselves.

  And then again, minutes later, after the grown-ups had been pulled into the unfolding crisis, the osprey returned and snatched another. And then another.

  We yelled at the sky, “Stop that right now!” and the guineas all shrieked and the boys shook sticks in the air and the osprey with the chick in its grip looped up and out, disappearing over the hill and the gray-green waves, silent and unmoved as a paper airplane, and when, despite our efforts, every last chick was gone, we walked back to the house to explain with uncertainty in our throats about the cycle of life.

  We felt more tolerant of the guineas’ excitability after that—more of a kinship with their constant fretting. When one or two of them would get separated from the group and start to squawk, we’d say, “Hang on, you’ll find them in a minute,” and we’d crane our necks around until we spotted the flock pecking their way up the path from the boathouse or emerging from under the porch.

  Over the course of the summer, they disappeared one by one—the occasional catastrophe of dark-gray speckled feathers in the grass. We’d lost other guinea hens in seasons past, but never at this rate. The flock began to stick closer together; they were more rattled, shriller—if possible. We’d count them each night and felt relief when they all were tucked in their roost and the door closed. When we were down to one, my uncle found a fox den nestled in the cliff about seventy-five feet from the henhouse.

  * * *

  The final guinea hen. She busies herself under the porch and along the path during the day. She weaves in and out of the grasses. She does not stop moving until she returns to the roost on her own before dusk each evening. It seems it is not easy to find peace as the last living member of your species at the end of summer on an island in the chilly Atlantic. What must she be thinking? There is no fear as great as her fear. From time to time she lets loose a great squawk, standing at the highest spot on the hill—a desperate hollow call out into a world where the wind blows and the sun shines and children and dogs run in the lawn but where there is no one that matters to answer.

  As I watch her I remember a dream I’ve had that I am alone in a white empty room. I can hear Freddy and Benny talking, then arguing, and one of them starts to cry. But I can’t see them anywhere, and I cannot say a thing.

  * * *

  At noon, maybe sixty members of my dad’s expansive family—the family that has over the years become my mom’s family and many of her most beloved people—gather at her favorite spot by the flagpole, the spot where I like to picture her in the Adirondack chair, chatting with her sisters-in-law and gazing out at the water and laughing.

  It’s breezy and sunny up on the hill. We break flag protocol—which requires an act of Congress or presidential decree to fly a flag at half-mast—at the request of Freddy and Benny. It’s not the kind of thing my grandfather would have ever permitted, but: Times have changed. Once, in 1974—on my mom’s first visit to the Cape on a trip back East from San Francisco—my grandparents still vibrant and in charge—after a family picnic on horseback down island and a vigorous trail-clearing expedition (known affectionately as a “chopping party”), everyone had gathered in
the living room for cocktails. My grandfather was storytelling and holding forth as he loved to do: Harvard pranks, rowing regattas, feats of physical prowess, women he’d charmed.

  My mother, sitting on a lumpy cushion stuffed with horsehair next to the enormous picture window that gapes out at the water and the old-money mansions that line Vineyard Sound, looked around the room, set down her drink on the wooden chest that belonged to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandson, pulled out a cigarette and a match, lit up, and took the universe’s longest drag. I believe she relished the silence in the room and the shock on my grandfather’s face for forty years. The slightest smirk on RWE’s face in the portrait over the mantel suggests that the Concord Sage himself has still not recovered. Always do what you are afraid to do.

  My dad, the youngest and least assuming in a family of five other boys and a girl, had found his ticket. He didn’t know whether he wanted to disappear or celebrate, but he knew he was home—at last—with her.

  * * *

  He is standing next to me at the pole. I can feel him trembling. He whispers thank you to me—for doing the planning I guess, maybe for still being here. I have my hands on the shoulders of Freddy and Benny, who are wiggling with excitement at being the center of attention. John has his hand on the small of my back. In our ways, we hold each other upright.

  First my dad, then Charlie and I, take handfuls of her ashes and face the ocean and offer them up to the breeze. Freddy winds up and pretends to throw a fastball with his. A slow procession from the crowd takes their turns. We watch each one. The wind is such that for a moment each handful hangs in the air like a beautiful specter contemplating our group—nearly returning to us, then spirited away, sometimes almost a recognizable shape, sometimes something entirely unfamiliar.