The Bright Hour

by Nina Riggs

  I ask her if there is anything she still needs to tell me about things I could be doing better, any mothering she feels has been left undone. “You are a great person in many ways,” she says after a minute of thinking. “But sometimes you are too hard on people, which doesn’t become you, especially when it’s behind their back. And I really wish you were better about going to the dentist.”

  * * *

  She sees visions—wispy entities whirling around her, the Pope squatting perilously on the curtain in the corner, the lilies on the mantel turning inside out to reveal their beautiful innards. She has an aura of peacefulness and grace, despite her obvious discomfort. She has moments of great clarity.

  She wakes up one afternoon as I’m sitting in the chair in her room reading. “I know this song,” she says to the quiet room. “It is the music of a man and a woman arguing.” Then she slips back into sleep.

  But, who among us is not Ivan Ilyich—absolutely creamed at times by all the missteps we have taken, stunned by where these steps have led us? Surely there must be some wild stocktaking that is still to come for her? Or is that just the work of those who love her now—to loosen our pursuit of the fox, to pull in the reins and admire the peacefulness of the forest, to be aimless in it, to stop and look up and notice the way the light filters down through the canopy?

  23. Album

  The one where she and my dad are paddling toward the Seal Rocks in the double kayak. The one where she and my aunt Francie are headed off down the path, laughing and beckoning to the photographer. The one where she’s telling Charlie something important on the lawn after his wedding. The one where she’s holding snoozing Benny in her lap in the Adirondack chair. The one where she and I are smiling on the porch swing. The one where she’s standing on the very end of the breakwater by the boathouse—a silhouette, arms akimbo, wind whipping her hair. It is taken from a boat, and it is clear she is not greeting the photographer; she is seeing them off, although she is not waving or smiling. The tide is high, and silver waves splash the rocks. I’m fine where I am, her planted feet say, as if it is the end of summer and she is the only one staying behind.

  STAGE THREE

  1. Fifteen Signs Death Is Near

  If there were an exam on the caregiver booklet that hospice gave us, titled “Fifteen Signs that Death Is Near,” I feel confident that Charlie and I would both ace it.

  It’s almost midnight. We are sitting at the kitchen counter of our parents’ house, obsessively going over the checklist that attempts to break it down by weeks, days, hours, moments. Preparing for the unpreparable. Our mom is lying on a hospital bed in a nearby room.

  Her breathing pattern is changing. Check.

  She hardly drinks or eats. Check.

  Her extremities are cold and possibly tinged with blue. Check.

  She sleeps most of the time. Check.

  When she is awake, she is restless. Hallucinations are common—she may reach for things you cannot see. Yes: She seems to be working and reworking an invisible cat’s cradle with her delicate bluish fingers. Or playing with Silly Putty. Or poking a hole into another dimension.

  When she speaks, it is slow and difficult. She may refer to things you do not understand. “Who can trust the light?” she cries out with a start after hours of silence. Then: “Let’s get out of here!”

  You administer liquid morphine under her tongue from a big red bottle. Your criminal defense attorney husband assures you that you could make a fortune off it on the black market. Check.

  This passes as humor. Check.

  She doesn’t seem to be aware of you anymore. You are beyond exhausted. Check, check.

  Your dad is asleep for the first time in days in his clothes on his stomach the wrong way in the bed next to her hospital bed with the lights on. Check.

  “So, what’s your guess?” I ask Charlie.

  “I don’t know—a week, a few days?”

  We both stare back into the booklet, scanning for something that is not there. Strange creatures: we who try to excel at knowing the unknowable.

  Amelia, who is trained as a birth doula, seems to know better what to do. She lights candles and incense in my mom’s room. She changes the water for all the cut flowers, culls the wilted ones. She rubs lotion into my mom’s hands, performs some Reiki. “I’m really feeling her presence,” she says at one point.

  I can’t feel her at all. I try to talk to her when everyone leaves the room, but I have no idea what to say. “You don’t have to do this anymore,” I try. She rouses and almost seems to glare at me—bewildered, annoyed. As if I would be doing this if I knew how to stop, she seems to say with her eyes.

  Heartbeat and pulse may be irregular. Gurgling and congestion—known as the death rattle—are common and often more distressing for the caregiver than uncomfortable for the patient. She may seek—or demand—“permission” to go.

  Three and a half hours later, back at my house, my phone wakes me.

  “I think you need to come right now,” Charlie is saying.

  “Why?” I ask, my brain stubbornly playing dumb. My toes grope the floor for sandals and I clip my mastectomy drain to a fresh T-shirt and I run out into the warm night.

  2. What You’re Afraid to Do

  Back when I graduated from high school, one of my father’s cousins gave me a copy of an extremely readable book of anecdotes called Emerson in Concord, written by my great-great grandfather about his legendary father.

  One of my favorite parts is the revelation that Emerson’s famous aphorism Always do what you are afraid to do was actually an admonition from his fierce Aunt Mary, who helped his mother raise the children after his father died when RWE was eight.

  Emerson passed along this advice to his own children, and they to theirs. And here it finds me standing in my parents’ doorway in Greensboro. Walk into the house where her dead body waits. Watch your father weep.

  Enter the scene. Imagine it as your own.

  3. Something New Is About to Begin

  A couple hours after the sun rises on the morning she dies, we leave my mom’s body on the bed in her room and go for a walk to look at St. Mary’s House, the little clapboard chapel around the corner where we are thinking we’ll hold the memorial service. It’s an Episcopal campus ministry—and more of a cozy one-room house than a traditional church. Twelve years ago, I gave my graduate thesis poetry reading there—my parents snug on a couch watching me in the front row.

  My mom left conflicting instructions on the subject of her funeral. Do anything. Do whatever you want. Do nothing. It’s not like I’m going to be there.

  Later: Well, don’t do nothing. And if you decide to toss my ashes into the ocean make sure the tide is going out, not coming in. And I’d really like Mark and Anne to sing something. And someone to say something. And, Nina, I want you to read that poem you wrote about you and me arguing in Italy.

  Even later: Forget it. Do whatever you want. Just do something nice.

  The only thing she was consistent on: cremation. Do not let me rot in the ground!

  I take a selfie waiting in the driveway for the others to come outside: portrait of cancer patient with dead mother. Months later, scrolling back through my pictures, right after the ones I took of her body—her anemic arms covered in deep bruises, her eerily blissful face—I discover that out of instinct I’ve smiled widely for the camera.

  As we walk away from the house into the August morning it feels like we are passengers straggling out of the wreckage of a plane crash. We are weirdly giddy, not good company for anyone but ourselves—delirious, shattered, and still under the spell of the gallows humor we’ve become as dependent on as oxygen in the final weeks to stay sane.

  “It’s okay to leave her, right?” my dad asks.

  “I think so,” says Amelia. “I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?”

  It is the fantasy you have about your newborn after a particularly ruthless night—stepping outside, locking the door, and just walking q
uietly away from it all—only we actually do it.

  Friday morning in late summer: School has just gone back into session, and, in the collegey neighborhood around UNC-Greensboro where my parents live, the streets are starting to fill up with students. Our awkward group ambles down the block toward the chapel. The doors of St. Mary’s House are locked, but Charlie and Amelia—who have never been inside it—peer in the windows to get a sense of the space as we stand on the porch. Just then I recognize one of the backpacked students locking the door of her car and making her way toward campus—our kids’ babysitter, a graduate student, who we hadn’t seen in a few months since her schedule changed.

  “Hey—it’s Anneliesse!” I say to John. She is walking right past us, about to greet a friend on the sidewalk.

  Then I realize the friend is someone we know as well—another regular babysitter, Virginia, also a grad student.

  “Hey, you guys!” I am compelled to holler out. John and I walk toward them.

  “Hey! Good to see you! How have you been?” All that stuff.

  Charlie, Amelia, and my dad group silently behind us. What must we look like? Conspicuous. Or suspicious. Like maybe Virginia and Anneliesse are worried that the reason they haven’t seen us in a while is because we’ve joined a cult.

  “Great! Doing okay! How are you? How is the semester going so far?” It’s the only thing to say.

  The alternative: I have a mastectomy drain clipped under this loose shirt. My non-hair hurts. I haven’t slept in days. And my mom took her last brutal breath five hours ago. Right now she is lying by herself in her house around the corner. We’re scoping out this spot here for her funeral.

  I have no idea how to introduce my family to these two young women.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to everyone as we walk back toward the house. “I just couldn’t.”

  That night, Anne and Mark—two of my parents’ closest friends and the ones that have possibly been conscripted to sing at the service—come over to be with us. Their daughter, Molly, is the ground zero of babysitters for us. It is through her that we know Anneliesse and Virginia.

  Molly comes by the house, too, after her shift on the food truck where she’s working over the summer. Anne, Amelia, Molly, and I sit and cry together with my mom’s body.

  “Please apologize to Anneliesse and Virginia for me?” I ask Molly, telling her about running into them. “I’m sure I was so weird.”

  I’m sure I was so weird—a refrain I keep repeating, mostly to myself. Because it turns out, as the days and then weeks pass, she’s always right around the corner—alone in the house and newly dead. And I’m always announcing I’m okay, out here in the world where the sun is shining and something new is about to begin.

  4. The Crematorium

  We are following two black-suited undertakers across the one-hundred-degree parking lot out to a windowless metal building—my dad, Charlie, Amelia, me. John is at work, our kids at school. It is the day before the memorial service. My phone is buzzing in my pocket with texts of flight arrivals and last-minute arrangements.

  We are all frazzled by the heat and the events of the past week, but I almost certainly look the most haggard. The hair on my head is just starting to fill in. My T-shirt sags off my body on the surgery side. I move slowly. The next three months of chemo is scheduled to start the following week.

  “Dammit,” my mom said a few weeks ago. “I can’t believe I’m going to die right when you’re in the middle of all this. It’s killing me.” One of her wry smiles.

  The bulk of me is standing here in grief—in that unhinged and unpredictable way we are led toward things after a loss—but I have to admit that part of me is here for some kind of morbid test drive, death hitching a ride in my chest from my mom’s sickbed to this parking lot behind the funeral home.

  In the far back corner, in the corrugated metal building: the crematorium. The Uglification of America, my mom used to say when she would see this sort of cheap metal structure going up along some rural North Carolina highway, quickly announcing itself as a Dollar General or a liquor store. Now, inside one, her body awaits its final moments.

  We know they’ll have her in the hundred-dollar cardboard cremation casket we’d picked out at the funeral home. What we don’t expect is that it will look like a large white cake box.

  The morticians seem uncertain about us for wanting to be here—like it’s we who are the creepy ones. Honestly, I’m not sure we want to be here either, but Charlie feels strongly that we should see this through to the end, and we have agreed to try to support each other through whatever twists and turns our mother’s death takes us.

  We kept vigil at her bedside until she died. We kept her body in the house for several days after she was gone—taking turns sitting with her, watching her change and become increasingly less her.

  And now.

  This is the end, I think to myself.

  * * *

  Three days earlier we’d sat in the funeral home office with a different mortician—our next-door neighbor, Joe, a friend and the new father of a baby girl born the week my mom died—and asked about observing the cremation.

  “Uh, sure, that can definitely be arranged,” Joe said. Two of his great gifts: tact and kindness.

  On the glossy mahogany table in the funeral parlor was the flowered canister we’d brought from home—her stash can. “And can you put her ashes in this?” Charlie asked. “Sorry—it has kind of a strong smell. It’s where she kept her pot.”

  “Oh, definitely,” said Joe, nodding without blinking. “Not a problem.”

  I was actually relieved this was the container we’d shown up with. When I’d picked up my dad for the funeral home appointment, he climbed into my car holding the orange Tupperware pitcher we’d been mixing powder lemonade in since the 1970s. “Will this work?” he’d asked.

  “I don’t think so, Dad,” I’d said. “Maybe something—not from the kitchen?”

  When he ran back inside to get a different vessel, I’d snapped a photo of the pitcher sitting in the passenger seat and texted it to my mom’s number. “Please come back,” I’d written. “Dad wants to put you in this.”

  The first of a million nonreplies.

  * * *

  Inside the Uglification of America, it is one hundred degrees hotter than the hundred-degree parking lot. It looks like a garage, with a large cooler and even larger oven. The oven is, it seems, preheating.

  “Do you want to see the body first?” one of the undertakers asks us.

  She’s been in their refrigerator for five days. There is a sheet covering her face when they lift the cake box lid. Of the whole thing, I like that part the least. The undertaker pulls it back with some fanfare, and the four of us lean forward and peer in at her.

  She is no longer my mother—and that, I think, is part of what I’m supposed to understand by visiting her here in the metal box. Although I knew it already. I knew it the moment my phone rang at 3:00 a.m. and Charlie said, “I think you should come,” and I knew it when I skidded into the driveway and a startled rabbit in the grass by the gate stared back at me—unflinching, unmoved—as I slammed the car door and ran past it. I knew I was too late.

  She isn’t decomposed or anything like it, but her coloring is distinctly orange and waxy now, and her face is covered in beads of condensation. Only her hair looks like her—lovely wisps of graying brown swept back from her forehead. The purple flowers we’d strewn on her the morning she died are wilted and browning like a discarded corsage. Her eyes are sewn shut—uneven stitches between her eyelashes that look like the doll dresses she helped me sew in third grade. Her mouth is sewn shut as well.

  “She would definitely not like that!” I whisper to my dad. He squeezes my shoulder.

  The other undertaker turns to my dad. “Do you want to press the button for the incinerator?” he asks, as though my dad is the birthday boy at a special party. He starts showing him the levers and the different dials. My dad, who is usually
game for just about anything but who I can tell in this moment is going along with the undertaker’s shtick just to avoid further interaction, presses the green button.

  The oven door starts to open and then lurches suddenly, and someone else’s leftover ashes plume briefly into the air like a thought bubble or a dream about how little we belong here. We all jump back, and I can almost hear my mom yelling at my dad, “Jesus Christ, Peter—what are you trying to do to me?”

  When the door fully opens, they close the box and slide it in on a short conveyer belt, and the oven door clanks shut with my mom inside. There is no window. Somehow all this time I had imagined there would be a horrifying little window like on a potbelly stove. There is only a thick metal door and she is on the other side of it and we cannot enter and she will not return.

  The cremation itself will take four or five more hours to complete.

  “Okay, I’m good,” I say almost immediately. I’m light-headed and annoyed at whatever made me think this might be a reasonable thing to do. Outside, I need to squat down on my knees on the blacktop while my eyes adjust to the sun. My dad comes out with me and rubs my back. Charlie and Amelia stay inside a few minutes longer, but soon emerge.

  Charlie is ten years younger than I am—my parents’ second wind, a reversed vasectomy. Growing up, he and I never really fought with each other, or with our dad—it wasn’t part of the architecture of our childhood—but we all fought a lot with our mom. For a long time, that was what Charlie and I had in common. Me, maybe, because I’m so much like her—impulsive, demanding, emotional. Charlie, maybe, because he is her opposite: He can be hard to connect with, and she sometimes took that personally.