The Bright Hour

by Nina Riggs

  Something shifted in college at UNC. I began walking outside again—on the deep woodsy paths that surround Chapel Hill—and I took a small seminar-style class on nineteenth-century American literature. I didn’t mention my Emerson connection. I discovered the beautiful, intimate, messy honesty of his journals as a way to start loving his writing.

  * * *

  This morning on my walk—with the creek full and all the wildlife energized by the rain—I’m thinking about an essay by another one of my favorite writers, Annie Dillard: “Seeing” from her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. There she writes: “It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open.” Dillard enters nature with a giant Emersonian eye—reverent, rhapsodic—almost ecclesiastic. She reminds us again and again to clear our vision of expectations, to try to see without understanding.

  Pilgrim is a beautiful word. I love the thin rhyming i sounds in both syllables. And the surprising seriousness of “grim.” It’s from the Latin peregrinus—meaning foreign. Same root as peregrine, like the falcon. Bird of prey, fastest member of the animal kingdom. Adventure married to strength and purpose—tinged with the strange.

  Growing up in Massachusetts, pilgrim meant pageants with songs and construction paper buckle hats and white collars. Also: field trips to Plymouth Plantation and cramped old ships and too much salt-water taffy on the bus ride home.

  Later, in college, reading The Pilgrim’s Progress—that desperate, tortured journey, I associated it with the idea of walking with sacred purpose. The idea of seeking. The ominous landmarks: the Valley of Humiliation, the Doubting Castle. There is always room and time for a journey: Every road trip of my twenties justified in this way. Emerson called the guest room in his house the Pilgrim’s Chamber. Some of its prominent pilgrim residents: Margaret Fuller, Thoreau.

  “After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests,” Dillard writes in “Seeing” as she watches dusk come to Tinker Creek, night knitting an “eyeless mask” over her face.

  When it comes to illness, dying, death—those darknesses—it seems we are still so very much Plymouth Pilgrims—all fear and fretting and fortifications, and a strong sense of our own alienness in a hostile land. We don’t begin to know what to do with ourselves. We cross our arms over our chests and try to look on the bright side as we starve.

  I think the tumors in my breast are getting bigger instead of smaller. They ache. They protrude. At least I imagine that they do. One more month: I can hardly wait to get them out.

  * * *

  One of the best things I’ve read about that puritanical pilgrim lot is that—aside from God—they really loved wine and clean laundry.

  My favorite pilgrim is the poet Anne Bradstreet. She was torn from her homeland and family and she spent three months seasick belowdecks coming to America. She suffered smallpox, paralysis, and tuberculosis. She gave birth to eight children in ten years—and they all lived. She was the first woman to publish a book of poems in the New World (at age thirty-eight), despite being relegated by her community to an intensely domestic role. And she gave her poems wonderful solid names like “By Night when Others Soundly Slept” and “Verses upon the Burning of our House, July 10th, 1666” and “A Letter to her Husband, Absent upon Publick Employment.”

  She and her husband arrived from England with Governor John Winthrop and his company of Puritans on June 14, 1630, on the flagship Arbella—a ship that reportedly carried three times as much alcohol as water on its passage across the Atlantic. Nearly all ten thousand gallons of wine had been consumed by the time they set their sea-weary feet on soil in Salem, Massachusetts.

  Before they left England—as they waited anchored just offshore aboard the ship for the right weather conditions to begin their crossing—a small group of them braved the white-capped swells to row back to Yarmouth to scrub clean their linen neckerchiefs one last time before setting out for the ultimate wilderness. I just love that. It’s a beautiful, human kind of coping.

  Clean laundry, wine.

  * * *

  Tonight John has gone to the bar to meet some friends. Emergency beer. He needs this as badly as I need the mastectomy. I can feel the Arbella tacking through the night toward my kitchen window. Stack of dishes to dry, my children to fold into their beds, but enter Anne Bradstreet: both of us so far from home in this kitchen. Neither of us can feel ground beneath our feet. We stand at the dining room table sorting clean laundry. “These towels are so soft and warm,” she marvels, sipping from her glass. Her husband is up on deck spotting some green shore, and mine is down the hill at the bar like a pin on a map of a place I’ve visited.

  John Winthrop noted in his journal that before they ever saw the New World, they smelled it: “so pleasant a sweet ether, as did much refresh us, & there came the smell off the shore like the smell of a garden.”

  * * *

  Pilgrim. Peregrinus. Foreigner. I am trying to uncross my arms in the darkness. I am trying to keep my eyes open.

  Early this afternoon on the back deck there was a ruckus in the upper branches of the giant oak. Two or three crows were loudly mobbing a hawk, and the hawk was sitting on the branch stoically ignoring the whole to-do. What is this? I was thinking. Couldn’t that hawk make mincemeat of those crows in about three seconds if it chose to? But then in a minute or so it was over—the crows having moved on, the hawk still perched on the branch, its genius eyes working the horizon.

  I’m terrified. I’m fine. The world is changed and exactly as before. There are crows in my hair. I have no hair. Bring me a jug of wine. Bring me a kerchief to scrub spotlessly clean.

  7. Damaged Goods

  My friend Ginny who lives down in Charleston has the same kind of breast cancer as I do, and we like to text each other with ideas for a line of morbid prefab cancer patient thank-you cards to real and imaginary people that Ginny calls the “casserole bitches.” She’s a trust and estates lawyer, so she’s an expert in casserole bitches and their eyelash batting.

  Our business is going to be called Damaged Goods and we plan to leave our children wealthy.

  Thank you for the taco casserole. It worked even better than my stool softeners.

  Thoughts and prayers are great, but Ativan and pot are better.

  Thank you for the flowers. I hope they die before I do.

  All your phone messages about how not knowing exactly what’s going on with me has stressed you out really helped me put things in perspective.

  Xanax is white, Zofran is blue, steroids make me feel like throttling you.

  When they found Ginny’s cancer, a few weeks after they found mine, it had already jumped into one of her lymph nodes. Ginny is a Carolina grad just like I am, so naturally she named her evil cancerous node after Tar Heel nemesis Christian Laettner. Neither of us know what to make of relying on Duke to save my life. She named her breast tumor after another famous Dookie, Bobby Hurley. “The chemo is going to blast those motherfuckers to obscurity,” she texts.

  8. Drama

  Nine p.m., and my half-front-toothed older son is loitering in our bedroom after his nightly insulin shot. He’s pretending to tell me about an idea he had for a comic book, but he keeps stealing looks at the TV screen, paused in Netflix binge mode on the Watch the Next Episode screen with the little text teaser below.

  CHASING LIFE: Episode 12. April’s cancer goes into remission, but her return to work isn’t as smooth. Meanwhile, Leo languishes in a coma.

  “So, you’re watching a cancer show?” he finally says sheepishly. “Why would you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess it makes me feel a little more normal. Plus it has really terrible writing, so it makes me laugh.”

  “Terrible how?” he asks.

  “Terrible like characters bawling, ‘Well, maybe you forgot, but I have cancer!!!’ ”

  “Oh,” he says. “That kind of terrible. Like, ‘Calm down. We know. We’re sorry about your cancer but p
lease stop yelling.’ ”

  “Yes,” I say. “Just like that.”

  9. Geography

  On the latest mammogram images, it looks like you’re staring down from an airplane at night. The two tumors are lit-up cities—say Greensboro and Winston-Salem. And the four-centimeter stretch between them is Interstate 40, illuminated by headlights. We won’t know exactly how trafficky I-40 is until the surgeon gets in there.

  According to Dr. Cavanaugh, this is a stupid way for cancer to behave. Smart cancer explodes itself like an atom bomb—mushrooming out wherever possible and jumping on the lymph node train to ride to the far reaches of the body and set up diabolic satellite campuses there. Stupid cancer makes a tumor, gets bored, sidles around, builds a nearby tumor. We hope.

  Cavanaugh is not afraid of saying things like hopefully cured and probably no more chemo. But she also sends me for more imaging—the packed room of anxious women ranging from twenty to ninety all in our identical gray dressing gowns, half of us texting, half knitting—just to confirm the geography, as she says. As though having a map makes the trail less snowy.

  10. The Wolf’s Lair

  Here’s how the doctors will figure out whether or not your cancer has likely spread: The day before surgery, under an imaging machine in a cold basement room, a needle will be inserted into your tumor and you will be injected with a blue radioactive isotope dye.

  As the stinging wears off, you will lie very still. The machine will be the only one that speaks to you—a robot voice commanding you to breathe.

  Next, you will be sent off to have some lunch. You will sit in the sun on the patio of the Cancer Café eating a turkey wrap and watching a couple your parents’ age, both in wheelchairs, one of whom has become tangled in his oxygen lines, the other of whom is tenderly unwrapping the line from where it is caught in the wheel as she holds her cigarette aloft.

  Later, back in the basement, a radiologist will track the path of the isotope with a Geiger counter. Whatever surrounding lymph nodes light up will be the nodes the tumor most likely drains to—the sentinel nodes—therefore, the ones most likely to contain escaping cancer cells. They will still be lit up when the surgeon goes in there the next day.

  These are the ones he will pop out and send off to the pathologist who will chop and smear and stain them onto slides to examine under the microscope in a darkened room like your two sons memorizing dinosaur books and baseball cards with flashlights after lights out.

  * * *

  Only one node lights up during the sentinel-node mapping. Lone sentinel at the castle gate.

  “Is that bad?” I ask the tech.

  “There is no good or bad,” he says. He sounds tired. “It just means you have one sentinel.”

  * * *

  “I have no guard or sentinel but the stars,” said Montaigne, noting how the heavily guarded homes of his neighbors were frequently attacked—and his was not. “My home is closed to none who knock upon its gate, with only a doorman as guardian—and ‘guardian’ only in the old-fashioned sense; he serves less to defend my fate than to present it with greater elegance and grace.”

  Montaigne would have sent my sentinel home as well, I guess—off into the misty, Aquitaine night. No locks, for him. No guards, no food tasters.

  I’m rereading the Montaigne biography. Age thirty-eight was a big year for him as well: Following his father’s death a couple years earlier, he retired from public life in Bordeaux, where he had been a well-known statesman, sequestered himself on his family estate in the countryside, and started work on his famous essays.

  “Don’t you think it’s wild that Montaigne never had a food tester—given how politically prominent he was during such a fractious time?” I ask John.

  “It’s very him. Montaigne the Stoic,” he says. “I bet your Puritan ancestors wouldn’t have had food tasters either. Nothing cures a dose of poison like a stiff upper lip and a brisk walk.”

  John loves Montaigne as much as I do. He’s the first person who told me to read him. “But really, I think it’s only serious despots that have food tasters. The Emperor Claudius, Hitler, Vladimir Putin. Probably Donald Trump. The guilty ones.”

  I slip down an Internet rabbit hole one morning reading about the life of Margot Woelk, the only one of Hitler’s fifteen food tasters—his conscripted “poison brigade”—to survive the war. She’s almost a hundred now:

  “The food was delicious . . . asparagus, bell peppers, everything you can imagine,” she tells the interviewer about their menu in the bunker. The wild, fresh flavors of peacetime. “But . . . we could never enjoy [it].”

  An armed bus would pick her up each morning from her mother-in-law’s house, and she was taken to a barracks in a nearby town where the food was prepared to be taken to Hilter’s Wolfsschanze headquarters—the Wolf’s Lair. The tasting took place each day between 11:00 a.m. and noon.

  She remembers crying in terror with each bite, seated with the other single Aryan girls around a wooden table guarded by the SS. For two and a half years. Sometimes girls would drop to the floor in agony, but it was from anxiety not poison.

  Seven decades later, Margot has apparently kept the habit of eating in tiny, cautious bites. In one article I find, she is nibbling the crumbs of a coffee cake as she talks to the journalist.

  Although she never saw Hitler in person, she says she despised the person she risked her life for every day. He was a really repugnant man. And a pig.

  I was led here by the metaphor—let the castle be unlocked—but now I can’t hold it straight. Am I Hitler? Or is Hitler the tumor? This isn’t even a metaphor, is it? It’s only a different hard story. But Margot and I have one thing in common: our bodies. Our bodies are not our own. Hers was requisitioned by the SS; mine by illness, medicine.

  * * *

  “Where will your breast go,” Freddy asks, “you know, after they cut it off.”

  “Probably a drawer in a basement lab somewhere at Duke,” I say. “Well, they keep the tumor for future testing, but I guess they maybe throw out the breast.”

  John teases me later. “That’s a great image for a kid to have in his head. Emotional Trauma for five hundred please, Alex.”

  “What in the world was I supposed to say?” I ask. I never know what I am supposed to say. Honestly: neither does John. We look into getting therapists for the kids. “It would be so awesome if someone knew the right things to say,” I text Ginny. Ginny’s kids are two years older than mine. Her daughter, eleven, on the cusp of understanding everything. “Amen,” she says.

  After the surgery, when John and I walk together down a corridor at Duke, he’ll sometimes make his voice all high-pitched and eerie. “Niii-na, where are you? It’s your breast here. I miss you. Hellllp meee, Niii-na.”

  * * *

  Try to see without understanding. The first time I see a surgical drain up close is about a week before the mastectomy in the breast clinic waiting room. I have no idea what it is. It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open. A very young woman, maybe twenty-five, chatting with the receptionist, with two clear bulbs clipped to a glittery belt on her jeans, a liquid-filled tube looping down at her hips on each side and then disappearing up under her shirt. They are filled with a brilliant orange-red fluid that looks like Gatorade. She starts to laugh really hard, then catches herself, touching the juice-filled bulbs tenderly. “Aw, man,” jokes the receptionist. “Sucks when you can’t even laugh.” Our arms crossed over our chests.

  11. Memory of Elephants

  Like a school of fish or a pride of lions or a murder of crows, a group of elephants is called a “memory.” A memory of elephants.

  Nothing thunderous in that phrase—nothing like what is suggested by a herd of elephants or a parade of elephants. More like elephants drinking from a low lake at sunrise. Or a spot where elephants used to be drinking, but are no longer. Something enormous and consuming and ethereal.

  Not unlike anesthesia, really, which—as the absence of all sensation—l
eaves you with incisions and deep aches and crisp bandages you cannot empirically account for and are therefore compelled to make sense of by conjuring a collection of massive and unshakable dreamlike certainties.

  Surgery goes smoothly. Beforehand, my parents slip upstairs before my mom’s appointment with Dr. Gasparetto to send me off into the spinning nothingness.

  John is right next to me when I wake up—and then fall back asleep—and wake up again—and conk out again. His mom has flown in from Oregon to watch our kids back in Greensboro. “They’re doing great,” he says. “They’re having a blast. They haven’t asked about you once.”

  He massages my hand, smiles at my dopiness, and makes fun of me on social media: Nina is doing great and she’s higher than a Gary Busey convention. Her first description of her “new body” was to look down her hospital gown, look up, hold up one finger and say “uno; not dos.”

  The sound of the Pirates playing an evening game on a distant TV in a distant universe seems to sift like light through the hospital blinds as I slowly reenter the world.

  And then there is my surgeon peering down at me, telling me what an excellent job he has done and that my sentinel node looks negative and making jokes I can’t follow even though I’m pretty sure they are the same jokes he was making before surgery.

  * * *

  On the subject of elephants, the recovery room feels full of them—a memory of elephants.

  There is the cancer elephant: What will the lymph node tell us when it returns from pathology? Another elephant: Where is my missing breast? We have uno not dos. And then my mom’s elephant, that unpredictable beast, which shrinks and grows, sometimes looking familiar, but other times so strange and coarse I think it is actually a rhinoceros—part of a crash of rhinos, or a stubbornness of rhinos.