The Bright Hour

by Nina Riggs

  Montaigne, the aging man, on life: “I am making myself ready to lose it, without regret, but as a thing that is lost by its very nature.”

  Me, some nights, tucking the boys into their beds, singing an old camp song my mom used to sing: “Mmm, I want to linger here / Mmm, a little longer here / Mmm, a little longer here with you.”

  STAGE FOUR

  1. Darkest Day

  It is the darkest day and Christmas week. Class parties, holiday recitals, sugar cookies and gingerbread men, that uneasy word survivor fluttering around us like those last leaves on the oak. It has been almost a year since diagnosis—weeks since I’ve seen Dr. Cavanaugh—and I am on the second-to-last of thirty radiation treatments: the final step of my cancer protocol. My mom has been gone almost exactly four months.

  My lower back has been bothering me since I started radiation—sometimes an ache or a throb, other times more of a spasm—but I have been going to physical therapy and trying Pilates in an attempt to rebuild my core strength, which has been decimated by months of chemo and decreased activity.

  I see my radiation oncologist, Dr. Rosenblum, each week, and each week—with great sympathy in her eyes—she commiserates about the woes of back pain. She had a bulging disc when her son was a toddler. She prescribes painkillers and muscle relaxants. She sets up a referral to an orthopedist: She is concerned I have a slipped disc.

  Some days I can hardly get out of bed. John brings my dinner upstairs. The kids act like they are visiting me at a nursing home. “How have you been, Mom? Can we get you anything?”

  My dad brings me a heating pad and a back brace and my mother’s old walker. He sits on my bed and rubs my feet.

  “Oh my God, I hate that walker so much,” I say. It is covered in tan Burberry fabric. But it helps me get out of bed, shuffle to the bathroom. “This is pathetic,” I say over and over. Sometimes I wince and curse if my back starts to spasm while I am walking. The kids hate it. I see them freeze when I yelp.

  “Can you not do that anymore, Mom?” says Freddy. “It’s scaring me.”

  My mother broke her back three years ago—multiple myeloma attacks the bones—and she was in ungodly pain for a couple weeks. I am a little worried about the connection, but my pain improves from time to time, and my dad and John keep reminding me: You are not your mom. It isn’t helpful to compare your situation to hers.

  When the pain gets even worse, my dad shows up with the portable bedside commode my mom got after her back broke. I haven’t seen it since the weeks when she was dying, before she lost the use of her legs. She was so weak that we would need to stand beside her to hold her upright—her bruised arms trying to grip ours.

  “You haven’t earned your place in this world until you’ve wiped your mother’s bottom,” she joked to me and Charlie.

  “Oh please, Mom,” I would say, “Montaigne would say you haven’t lived until you’ve wiped your mother’s bottom.”

  Later it was diapers.

  “Now this is more like it,” I said when she would lie there muttering I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry as we would roll her from side to side, perfecting the art of withdrawing the used chuck at the same time as lying down a fresh one. “Now we’re really earning our keep on this planet.”

  “Oh, fuck that thing,” I say when my dad walks in with the portable commode. But since the moment yesterday when I tripped on the sidewalk, I have hardly been able to move. Step on a crack, you break your mama’s back I keep repeating to myself.

  I can’t sleep, and when I am able to manage to even get on the toilet seat, the pain is such that I can’t relax my bladder enough to pee.

  “I am suffering,” I say to John in the night, feeling a little melodramatic but also thinking: Yes, I believe this is what suffering is. John drives me in for treatment the next morning and I need a wheelchair.

  “Don’t you think I should be taking you to the ER?” John says. I can tell he’s trying to hold it together.

  “No! That’s insane,” I say. “We’re already at the hospital. We’re fine.”

  The receptionist slaps a yellow FALL RISK bracelet on my wrist. Marie and the other techs are playing A Motown Christmas and dancing. Someone has made bags and bags of snickerdoodles. I can’t get on the radiation table without a spasm.

  “This is getting ridiculous,” says Marie in the kindest way someone can utter those words. “I think we need to page Dr. Rosenblum.”

  * * *

  A bus. A cough. A rusty nail: Death sits near each one of us at every turn. Sometimes we are too aware, but mostly we push it away. Sometimes it looks exactly like life. Orange: The colors of the sky are the same when the sun rises as when it disappears.

  “Dying isn’t the end of the world.” What would Montaigne have made of my mom’s little quip?

  When Montaigne was thirty years old, his soulmate and best friend, Étienne de La Boétie, died of the plague—sudden and gruesome. Montaigne wrestled with love, horror, and a rudimentary understanding of contagion at La Boétie’s bedside and then recorded his friend’s death with unflinching detail in a letter he later wrote to his father. He adored La Boétie so deeply: “The greatest living [man] I have known . . . truly a complete soul whose beauty shone forth in every direction.” The loss provoked much of Montaigne’s signature commitment to live with an awareness of death in the room—an awareness of being always in suspicious country.

  * * *

  Someone pages Dr. Rosenblum. There is a stretcher. We are wheeling through corridor after corridor. I’m no longer in the radiation wing of the cancer center.

  In the Emergency Department, death enters the room looking like a young, cheerful attending. “Good news is,” he says, scooting close on the rolling stool, “your labs look mostly normal.”

  “But one thing to note.” He squirms a little on the stool. “It seems from the MRI that you do have a significant fracture in your spine, at the L2 vertebra. And the way it is broken is very worrisome. It’s not a trauma break. It’s a pathological break, likely caused by a tumor that has metastasized from your breast.”

  “Okay,” I say. I can’t look at John. “Any chance it could be anything else?”

  “I am so sorry, but no,” he says. “I’m so sorry. I hate telling people these things and I’m not very good at it. We’re going to admit you upstairs. You will probably have surgery right away.”

  A stream of doctors after that—one, a radiation resident I have come to know, crouching down to eye level with me, gripping my hand and not pushing away her tears. Then a surgeon. Then a neurologist. Then Dr. Rosenblum standing over me with the face of a mother whose daughter is very late for curfew. She keeps patting my hair: “How could this have happened? I am so, so sorry.”

  John’s eyes from the visitor chair reflect my own face back to me again and again: Wait, what? We kept asking each other, What?

  2. Helicopter

  Suspicious country: ninth floor, oncology ward. Outside the window, a view of the helicopter taking off from and landing on the hospital roof. Quieter than it should be, the rotors spinning long after the frenzy of action disappears. “Your kids are gonna love that when they come visit, aren’t they?” says a nurse who I can’t see, who is typing on a computer somewhere behind me.

  Do I know the answer to this one? Benny used to love fans and helicopters as a baby. He called helicopters “cagooies.” Is that different from being thirsty? I half think through the morphine. I am extremely thirsty, and that thirst seems in this moment to be the hardest problem I’ve ever been asked to solve. I smile just in case that is what I am supposed to do. Or was Freddy the fan lover? No. Definitely Benny. Freddy loved lights. I have been admitted up here. I almost remember that. John was here. Where are the kids? Who has the kids? Everyone has the kids except me. Who has the ice chips? A doctor has just finished talking; a doctor is about to talk. It is Christmas Eve. I have had surgery. They have removed my L2 vertebra, a big lump of cancerous mush. They have installed a titanium cage
with impressive screws that they show John on X-ray before I wake up, and then they email him a picture to show me.

  “You are doing great,” says a nurse. “They’ve cleared you to try standing up. Do you want to?”

  I don’t know the answer to this either, but then I am standing up. John is taking a picture. “Wow!” he is saying. He is putting it on Facebook. “Oh my God,” says everyone I know. “Amazing!” Facebook is saying. “Can’t believe this is happening to you! What can we do?” I am scrolling and scrolling. “Thank you,” I am saying to Facebook. “I love you so so much. More than anything in the world. You are so beautiful.”

  John texts: “Maybe you should put your phone away and try to get some sleep. Maybe not the best time to be on Facebook.” I look around the room. He is not here. He is nowhere. It is too dark to see what the helicopter is doing. I imagine the rotors: silent, still. Maybe no one will need them Christmas Eve. Now John is calling. Now he is a voice.

  “I am in Greensboro—at your dad’s. I have the kids. Charlie and Amelia are here. So is Jennie.” Jennie, John’s sister and one of my closest friends, lives in Tucson. Everyone has arrived for Christmas. “Jennie needs to talk to you for a minute,” says John.

  “I am trying to figure out stockings,” she is saying.

  I remember now I never wrapped the kids’ presents. My back hurt too much, the paper and tape was too hard to get to. In the back of the linen closet behind the sheets, I tell her. And in the little cabinet next to my bedside. And in my closet. And above the refrigerator. And there’s something in that T.J. Maxx bag behind the green chair. That deck of Harry Potter playing cards is for Freddy. The Pokémon watch is for Benny. Sugar-free gummy worms and chocolate wrapped to look like a hamburger. Jennie is laughing: “How on earth are you remembering all this?” She is also part crying: “Can’t wait to see you. Will I get to see you?”

  At some point in the night I wake up: John is back. I can see his outline asleep in the uncomfortable chair. “There is something I need to tell you,” I say to him when he stirs. “There are tickets. Two tickets to Paris in our names in my email. For your birthday.”

  “What?” he says, not quite awake. “What are you talking about?”

  “For the end of January,” I say. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

  He is turning forty in a couple weeks, and I wanted to take him to France after our tough year. It was a splurge, an impulse. We lived in Paris as newlyweds when John was in graduate school—before law school—and we haven’t been back since having kids. It’s his favorite place on earth: He makes sense there in a way I have never made sense anywhere.

  “Seriously?” he says, trying to roll over in the chair. “You might have gone a little over the top if this is your way of letting me in on the surprise.”

  “I want you to know the tickets are there.” I say. “Just in case.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I can call the airline in the morning and try to cancel.”

  “No,” I say. “We’re going to Paris. I don’t know how exactly, but I’m going to Paris with you.”

  “Okay,” he says. I can hear his breathing slip into sleep again.

  A few hours later—Christmas morning—I’m awake again just before dawn: the shape of the dark helicopter against the darker sky. The rotors are still. “Merry Christmas,” says a nurse who is measuring my urine into a jug in the bathroom. “Do you want some pain meds? Do you want another stool softener?”

  * * *

  A man named Nurse Jon shows up in my hospital room while Tita and my dad are sitting with me. He tells us he moonlights as a stress management specialist when he’s not working the oncology floor. He has a hypnotic voice and an almost eerie command of the room. He purrs to us about breathing techniques and mantras and allowing ourselves to be held by the bed or the chair. “You soften your belly,” he says. “You send your breath there. Softest belly. Softest breath. You let your muscles relax: soft belly. You let the world hold you up.”

  “May I demonstrate my techniques?” he asks, but already we are under some kind of spell.

  My dad has his eyes closed. Tita leans back in her chair. Time stretches and bends as he guides us with his voice into an impeccably quiet place. I feel my morphine controller fall out of my hand, but do not reach for it. Nurses and techs seemed to hover at the door, but sense his spell and are uncompelled to disturb us.

  Only one person knocks at the door and it is Dr. Cavanaugh. It’s the first time I’ve seen her since I’ve been at the hospital. She smiles, but in her ocean eyes I can see all the trenches and ledges of a cancer doctor.

  “I don’t ever come over here,” she says. “Just know you’re special.”

  Then when she sees Nurse Jon, she freezes and starts to back out. “Oh, it’s you!” she says. “I’ll come back later!” I cannot emphasize enough how unusual a stance this is for Dr. Cavanaugh.

  “No, no—please come in!” I insist, and so she finds a space to sit on the edge of my bed, joining the four of us in my closet of a room.

  She is unusually calm and relaxed in his presence—I bet anything she has one of his breathing CDs, I think—as he seems to disappear into the corner of the room while she talks about my latest scans: Right now the cancer is focused on the spot on my lower spine. Surgery stabilizes the spine, but can’t get rid of all the cancer. We will do radiation there. This won’t get rid of all the cancer either, but it should help with pain. A few spots higher up the spine are lighting up, and we will keep watching them. CT scan of the organs looks clean. Brain scan: clean. We will rescan in a couple weeks, we will make a plan.

  “I’m not going to say I’m not worried,” she says. “Some patients in your situation don’t make it to their first set of scans. Others go for a couple years. We’ll have to see.”

  I try to soften my belly. I try to feel for the world holding me up.

  “Listen to what this man has to say,” she says as she leaves, glancing at Nurse Jon in the corner. “Not to scare you, but what he has to offer you is way more valuable than anything I have.”

  * * *

  Later that night Tita texts to say she got back to Greensboro safely but that Drew has just been in a car accident down the street from our house.

  “He’s okay,” she writes. “Maybe a broken rib. He ran the red light down at the corner. Didn’t have the kids in the car. Other person is fine, too. He says he was distracted and never saw the light. Car likely totaled. But he’s okay—I promise. Do some Nurse Jon breathing. Get some morphine sleep.”

  Later, when I am home from the hospital, she tells me the story of getting the phone call and packing the kids into the car in the rain and driving the three blocks down to the corner. The sirens and the ambulance and people standing around and the cars in the wrong places in the road. “I knew he was alive because he had called me,” she says. “But I couldn’t figure out how to believe that he was okay, given what I was seeing.”

  I know just what she means. It’s how I’ve felt every second since the doctor came to see me in the emergency room.

  Much later Drew tells me he had been crying. He had run to the nearby grocery to buy eggs and pork chops after Tita returned home from seeing me. He was half-aware in the store that he was not thinking clearly.

  “I really don’t remember any of it,” he tells me. “Only screaming in the car, after the airbag.” I know Drew at Christmastime: He cries in front of the tree late at night with all the house lights off, drinking scotch and listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue. He cries when his sons pad down the stairs in their footie pajamas.

  I know this crying is different, and that my situation is complicit. I am still waiting to cry, and to feel the slam of my steel body crashing into another.

  * * *

  When my family comes to the hospital on Christmas Day, everyone squeezes onto my bed for lack of a better option. Where would my mom sit? I am thinking. There is no room for my mom in this new situation.

  The boys com
pletely ignore the helicopter when I point it out, and I don’t push it: Perhaps they have already outgrown these sorts of spectacles—driving around town, I pointed out John Deere tractors and earthmoving equipment for years after they stopped caring. They are dying to show me a PowerPoint presentation that Jennie has helped them make on their new laptop of the Christmas I have missed at home. Merry Merry Merry Mom, it says. Wish this wasn’t happening!

  As they are getting ready to leave Freddy asks me: “So, have they had to send that helicopter out today?”

  “No, not today,” I say.

  “That’s good,” he says, resting his head on my shoulder.

  3. Little Disc of Ruin

  For years I have had a recurring dream that I am choking on a battery. Different types of batteries: triple A, 9-volt, lithium watch. Each time, I awake with panic, and I can always feel the very real sensation of the hard shape disappearing down my esophagus. The crisis has passed, I think, coughing and gasping for breath, but I am still doomed.

  My first night home from the hospital, I wake up from a battery dream around 2:00 a.m. I had fallen asleep hard without brushing my teeth or washing my face or taking off my clothes.

  But then suddenly: the battery, panic, then everything else—the unreturned library books on the table by the front door; the unplayed voicemails; the unwalked dogs; the uncollapsed recycling; unread emails; unwritten thank yous; unfinished parenting; the universe coming undone at the seams.

  What is the hard thing you are swallowing tonight? I lie there asking myself. Oh, just mortality. Oh just a little disc of ruin.

  Forty minutes into the freak-out, I think of Nurse Jon: soft belly, support of the world, a positive mantra embedded into the inhale and exhale of each breath. Thank / you I find myself saying. Thank and then you. And then the sun is brightening the sky and the kids are crawling into the bed.