The Bright Hour

by Nina Riggs

  Emerson’s journal, 1838: “I am cheered with the moist, warm, glittering, budding and melodious hour that takes down the narrow walls of my soul and extends its pulsation and life to the very horizon. That is morning; to cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body, and to become as large as the World.”

  * * *

  My cousin Bonnie arrives in Greensboro several hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve. She has taken the train down from Washington, DC, where her girlfriend’s father is dying of prostate cancer.

  “Bonnie’s Mortality Tour, 2015!” I say when we do a modified version of one of the fierce hugs we’ve been giving each other our whole lives. She’s been living in San Francisco for the last sixteen years—working as a massage therapist and now training to be an occupational therapist, and we don’t see each other very often anymore. A few days at the summer house in August, if we’re lucky.

  “Put me to work right now,” she says, rubbing her hands together, then over my head, my neck, my back. Bonnie has always represented to me the very epitome of my family: She’s strong and fearless and brilliant and magical, and her startling blue eyes look unnervingly like RWE’s. She sailed around the world with her parents and brother as a kid. In one of my favorite photographs of her she is shimmying up a palm tree in her bathing suit. She rode for an all-lesbian bike messenger service in San Francisco. She has a huge scar shaped exactly like Newfoundland on her inner calf from a motorcycle accident she had as a child.

  “I have brought massage oil and board games and origami paper and spices for the most delicious Moroccan stew in the universe,” she says.

  Later in the evening—an assortment of family and friends downstairs playing charades and drinking and laughing, the kids running around like wild animals, John and my dad grilling New Year’s Eve lamb—I’m lying on my bed while she rubs my feet.

  “So, it turns out I’m kind of dying,” I say to her. I haven’t spoken this directly to anyone yet.

  “Yeah,” she says. “So, what’s up with that? Why do you always have to be the first of us to do everything?”

  “Can you teach me how to make origami cranes?” I say.

  “I thought you would never ask,” she says.

  * * *

  Back when I was in the emergency room, the attending had said, “I don’t know what exactly will happen next, but you know that metastases put you at stage four. This is clearly an aggressive cancer. It recurred before we even finished treating it. It’s probably time to put your affairs in order and make a bucket list, as hard as that is to hear.”

  I had been stumped by the bucket list. It depressed me: “Oh my God I am so lame I can’t even come up with an interesting bucket list,” I whined in the hospital.

  “How about a ‘fuck-it’ list?” John suggested at some point. “Sort of the opposite. What can we just say ‘fuck it’ to and send splashing off into some sewer and not bother ourselves with anymore?”

  The catch is: it turns out not many things.

  I want all of it—all the things to do with living—and I want them to keep feeling messy and confusing and even sometimes boring. The carpool line and the backpacks and light that fills the room in the building where I wait while the kids take piano lessons. Dr. Cavanaugh sitting on my bedside looking me in the eyes and admitting she’s scared. The sound of my extended family laughing downstairs. My chemo hair growing in suddenly in thick, wild chunks.

  Light sabers cracking Christmas ornaments. A science fair project taking shape in some distant room. The drenched backyard full of runoff, and tiny, slimy, uncertain yard critters who had expected to remain buried in months of hard mud, peeking their heads out into the balmy New Year’s air, asking, Wait, what?

  4. The Perfect Couch

  Were I healthy enough right now, I would be sipping a glass of complimentary wine and running my hands over an exquisite accent pillow in an impossibly hip showroom called something like Space or Lust, while a sales assistant speaks to me of the virtues of aniline versus semi-aniline leather.

  “So you really think kiln-dried hardwood is worth the extra expense?” I’d be asking. And, “Does this come in a three-seater?”

  Instead, I’m propped in bed on a dozen pillows with my laptop, perusing online furniture stores: West Elm, Joybird, Crate and Barrel and something called Chairish.

  I am an Internet sofa-shopping fiend. I take breaks only when the oxy overwhelms me and my head starts to loll. I cannot rest until I have considered every midcentury-modern-with-a-hint-of-bohemian sofa the worldwide web has to offer. I pour over design sites like Apartment Therapy, Design Sponge and Domino: searching, searching.

  Since John and I got married sixteen years ago, we have never had a real grown-up couch. We’ve had plenty of well-loved misfits: “as is” Ikea specials, parental handoffs, craigslist semi-miracles, roadside rescues. First we were broke, and then we had babies. It never seemed like the right time to splurge on anything nice.

  And the misfits have been fine. We’re not fancy, and our taste is eclectic. Our house is full of objects that are stronger on personality than looks: the wood box my father and uncles sat on as children to lace their boots for sledding, a lumpy chaise by the front window in the world’s coziest reading nook.

  Anyway, whenever we have needed to get down to the serious business of life, we have always preferred to retreat to our bed: our war room, cocoon, escape hatch and, at times, dining room.

  But these days finding the perfect living-room couch has begun to feel like the most important thing I’ve ever done.

  Except, just when I find one I love, it turns out I can’t click “buy now.” And commitment issues have not generally been my problem. Houses, cars, job-switching, kid-having, plane-ticket-buying, restaurant-choosing, shoe-shopping, mastectomy: Bring it. Usually I just pick a good-seeming option and don’t look back.

  Within ten minutes of meeting John in the graveyard, I had already mentally signed on for life—although I waited at least a week to tell him that.

  But the couch. I can’t do it. Maybe I’m holding off until after my next big oncology appointment, as though something Dr. Cavanaugh may say will help determine whether I am willing to spend the extra money for Dacron batting and polydown cushions. She promised some new thoughts about treatment options: immunotherapy, clinical trials, off-label drugs, acupuncture, the dreaded “watchful waiting.”

  It’s a complicated calculus. On the one hand, a basic cost-benefit analysis: How much money do I want to spend on something I may not be around to really enjoy? On the other: Isn’t buying an expensive couch a kind of lovely expression of hopefulness? And after I’m gone, don’t I still want guests in my home to feel comfortable and stylish? Then again—O darkest demons!—maybe I should buy something hideous and uncomfortable, something the woman John remarries will be forced to keep because the dead wife bought it.

  Despite all the pamphlets the social workers gave us when I was in the hospital, we don’t really know how to talk to the boys yet. They know about the cancer and the back break, but they don’t really know what it all means.

  Instead I ask Benny, “What do you think of leather upholstery?”

  “Depends if it’s slippery or nuzzly,” he says.

  Excellent point. I think I need to take any bonded leather options—no matter how cute or economical they seem—off my favorites lists and go with top grain.

  * * *

  When Dr. Cavanaugh was sitting on the end of my bed that day in the hospital, I saw her glance toward the pamphlets that had been left on the bedside table: “What to Tell Your Children about Your Progressive Disease.”

  “Is it time to despair?” she said during a pause in our discussion about pain management and radiation, maybe reading one of the pamphlet headings. “No!” she proclaimed, staring straight at me. “No, it is not.”

  I trust her completely, even after the chemo failed twice and the cancer spread when she said it wouldn’t. Whatever it is in oncol
ogists that makes them want to be oncologists—that crazy mix of fierceness, optimism, arrogance and compassion—I get a contact high from it. It’s like love at first sight, or touching something on fire. It’s like making a choice and refusing to look back.

  * * *

  John is mildly new-couch averse, but he’s treading carefully. He knows me well enough to understand that when I’m dissertating on the merits of tufted cushions, I’m chewing on something else.

  “Custom upholstery, really? With two boys?” he asks, flipping through insurance statements on the counter. “Okay, well, I think you should get whatever you’re into.”

  One big upside of being told I have incurable cancer is that after all these years, my husband has finally stopped smugly saying, “It’s your funeral,” when I make a decision he doesn’t agree with.

  “Did you spend thousands of dollars on the Internet today?” he asks when he gets home from work and finds me with my pillows and hot-water bottles on the not-perfect couch where he left me in the morning, a low-slung rattan situation my parents bought as patio furniture in the early ’90s.

  “Not today,” I say.

  “Nice,” he says. “Do you want to go get in bed together and stare at the ceiling?”

  I do. We do.

  In January, the afternoon already looks like evening.

  “Can you believe we found out you have incurable cancer on, literally, the darkest day of the year?” John asks as we hold hands and stare up toward the same blank spot above our bed.

  “Yeah, I totally can,” I say. We both laugh.

  I have always loved the sound of him laughing: soft and comfortable, understated, offbeat, with unmistakably sleek midcentury lines.

  He takes me gingerly in his arms as if we are awkward teenagers. My back spasms, but I wiggle closer to him until I can put my head on his chest and hear his heart beating.

  Downstairs, the boys gaze at a screen on the old futon in the playroom. We will figure out what to do about them soon enough. They probably already know what’s up and are waiting for us to figure out how to say it. Their very existence is the one dark piece I cannot get right within all this. I can let go of a lot of things: plans, friends, career goals, places in the world I want to see, maybe even the love of my life. But I cannot figure out how to let go of mothering them.

  So maybe I don’t try to figure it out. Maybe I just aim to get the couch right: strong bones, high-quality leather, something earthy and animal and real. A surface that knows something of what it was to be alive, that warms to our touch and cools in our absence.

  Also: an expansive bench that fits all of us. Something that will hold us through everything that lies ahead—the loving, collapsing, and nuzzling. The dying, the grieving.

  I know my thoughts have probably diverged from whatever John is thinking about in the near dark of our bedroom. He is silent. Maybe he is dozing.

  Buying a sofa online, like many of life’s biggest decisions, takes research and trust, but mostly trust. As I lie here—John’s chest rising and falling under my cheek—I’m going to have to believe that regardless of clinical trials and future wives and free shipping, I’ll know it when I find the right one.

  5. Bright Spots

  About the kids, my therapist says: “Okay fine, maybe they won’t be okay. Maybe they’ll be complete fuckups. Let’s talk that out a little. Let’s imagine that scenario. Give me some really good details.”

  “Jail,” I say. “Sitting in Bojangles’ by themselves on Thanksgiving trying to score heroin. Them telling John to go fuck himself over the phone and then hanging up. Them telling each other to go fuck themselves.”

  “That’s good,” smiles my therapist. “No problem going to the dark place for you.”

  Then he says, “But maybe they’ll be more than okay. Maybe they’ll be amazing. I know many people who went through loss at a young age who became extraordinary adults. Maybe they’ll write award-winning movie scripts for a groundbreaking dark comedy inspired by the loss of their mother when they were children and win Oscars. Just picture them on the stage, holding that trophy.”

  I love this game. John is clapping loudly in the front row, a French actress on his arm. The boys clink their Oscars and point them at John. Then they toast toward heaven. “For Mom!” they say.

  A retired rabbi—the friend of a friend—writes me an email out of the blue about how he lost his mother when he was nine years old. In the message, he lists all the things he remembers about his mom and all the ways she remains in his life: her favorite flower, the books she read him, her sense of humor. “She is far from a hole in my life. She is an enormous presence that can never be replaced.” His words are a gift that I pull out some nights and let swirl through the room, brush over my skin like a tincture.

  * * *

  Now that the cancer has spread, I am scanned every six to eight weeks. Sometimes I think about things I could do in six to eight weeks: gestate a baby through half a trimester, master conversational Italian, achieve rock-hard abs, binge-watch Game of Thrones, hike the Camino de Santiago. Instead: it’s a wink, a blink, a flicker; one long exhale and a breath drawn in; John’s hand running down my back, his lips brushing my neck; the length of the camp session where we met.

  Tita comes with me to each new set of scans, and she knows the routine as well as I do: loose clothes; no bras, no zippers; drink lots of fluids. The receptionist loves to banter. The volunteer concierge is hard of hearing. Carla, the tech who takes patients back to the changing room, loves to talk about Jesus and the power of prayer. Sometimes she’ll stop in the middle of what she is doing and sing “Amazing Grace.” Tita and I aren’t sure whether to sing along. We clap. “Thank you so much,” I say. “That was beautiful.” I hear her humming it back in the tech station. They draw blood and then inject me with radioactive dye for the bone scan, contrast dye for the CT. Tita waits in the changing room while I have my CT, but they let her come sit with me in the room while I have the bone scan. The tech operates the scanner from the adjacent control room.

  For the bone scan, there is a large monitor in the room with you as you move through the machine—feet bound with an elastic band, arms wrapped in a straightjacket, warm blanket to keep you calm. Tita also gets a warm blanket, because it keeps her calm, too. The scan takes about twenty minutes, and as you emerge from the machine, the monitor lights up with your skeleton in real time, moving from the skull down the shoulders and spine and hips, and finally the legs and feet.

  From where Tita sits, she has a better view of the screen than I do. We try to talk about other things: child care, her half-written novel, her root canal saga, her friend Tony’s mom’s upcoming surgery, the short story collection we’re reading for book club, but we often end up staring at the screen. It’s like watching a teacher grade your test in front of you. It’s like watching live feed of the plane that you are flying in land while you’re in it.

  “At first I was thinking you definitely had vagina cancer but now I think it was just the radioactive stuff in your bladder,” says Tita from her chair as the machine works its way along my abdomen during my most recent scan. “It’s totally different from the other bright spots.”

  We examine the patch of concentrated light. Over the last six months—three or four scans, we have decided we are both savant bone-scan readers—clearly a second-career option. We’ve seen new tumors light up in my spine, my hips, my shoulder. We’ve predicted them all.

  “Phew,” I say. “Vagina cancer would be serious salt in the wound.”

  Tita’s right: When John and I go see Dr. Cavanaugh for the results the next day, it turns out that indeed I am free of vagina cancer. More bright spots on the skeleton, though. Those, I do not seem to be able to avoid at all. Scapula, pelvis, sternum.

  Bright spots, dark screen. The term “bright spot” takes on a whole new meaning, more like the opposite of silver lining: danger, bone pain, progression. More radiation. More pain medicine. More tests. Strange topsy-turvy
cancer stuff: With scans, you long for a darkened screen, a blacked-out skeletal city, a subdivision of foreclosed bones. Not one lit room to be found, not one headlamp on the road, not one fireplace smoldering, not one reading lamp brightening a page of dinosaurs in an upstairs bunk bed, not one single birthday candle awaiting its wish.

  No sign of life, no sign of anything about to begin.

  “I heard you talking about your botched root canal,” the tech said to Tita when he stepped back into the room after my last scan. “You should definitely go on antibiotics. Those things can be deadly. Hope you both have a great afternoon.”

  6. Vigipirate

  John turns forty, and I am well enough to go to France. February—eight days. My dad keeps the boys for us, and John’s mom flies in to help.

  “It makes no sense that we can’t go with you,” moans Freddy on my bed the night before we are supposed to leave.

  “It actually does make sense,” I tell him as I obsess over scarves and boots. “Just not to you. Dad and I need to do this. We have a whole marriage we have to take care of. Sometimes it’s important for us to focus on that.”

  “If you say so,” says my budding tween, lumping out of the room.

  I do say so, although not without my innards squeezing and aching as I also feel my world shrinking toward our cocoon of a home in the wake of the new diagnosis.

  * * *

  The gray-then-yellow light bouncing off the Seine in through the unshuttered windows of the beautiful apartment on the Île de la Cité that we are loaned by the grandmother of a dear friend is so exquisite that on the first night I lie awake crying until my stomach balls and aches and I spend most of the night in the bathroom.

  Inside the bathroom, the room only slightly bigger than my skin, I feel safe, held up, positioned: the river pushing past on both sides of the tiny island where the first settlements dug in, in the middle of the city that has scaled and rescaled its own walls. Tucked within the building, within the apartment: the deepest interior, the bathroom at the center of the world. There: I discover a packet of unopened grief. My mother. I try to soft-belly breathe.