This will be, we realize, a sad book, yet it is infused with bright moments. Its author, Nina Riggs, a wife and mother of two boys, died of cancer in February 2017 before the book could be published. Yet she did her best to create a storehouse of her writing skills, her memories, her cherished beliefs, her hopes for the future --- for all who were left behind.

A poet and scholar, Riggs found out about her cancer while her mother was dying. At much the same time, a close friend contracted the same cancer that Riggs was diagnosed with, and during that period, one of Riggs’ boys was diagnosed with diabetes. So it wouldn’t be an easy journey, certainly not the life she had envisioned for all of them. Her disease began as a spot, such an innocuous discovery that the assumption was that this, too, would pass. So she and her husband, John, went on with their lives as boldly as before.

"A family history, a personal memoir, and a roadmap for others to follow, THE BRIGHT HOUR is a story to embrace, learn from and recommend to good friends."

But despite the treatments, the spot never quite went away. There was surgery and then the final pronouncement: the cancer had spread to her spine, it was breaking her bones, it would never be gone. The limiting prognosis, the timespan of months, was finally a reality. The word “light” took on a new meaning as the voracious cancer appeared on the MRIs, ironically, as bright patches. She was just 39. She and John went to Paris, recreating a sojourn from their shared college years. The family went to Disneyland. Riggs tried for clinical trials if only to help others in a future time she would never experience. There was counseling for the grown-ups, “cancer camp” for the boys. Then, in the last entry in this emotive memoir, she states, “I have to love these days the same as any other.”

Riggs published a book of poetry, LUCKY, LUCKY, in 2009, the title speaking of her determined optimism when her disease was not a factor. Later she would begin a blog called “Suspicious Country” (which is still available online), chronicling, along with John, many small details of her decision making, a process that cancer calls forth. As a poet she composed THE BRIGHT HOUR with delicacy, love of language, full awareness, and a realism that almost hurts to read and absorb. It is a journal of someone facing disease and death, but it is also about living through those prospects with open eyes and a refusal to be defeated.

Throughout her musings, Riggs quotes 16th-century French essayist and philosopher Michel de Montaigne. One such quotation is especially compelling: “Did you think you would never reach that point toward which you were constantly heading?” Herself a philosopher, Riggs opined, “Everything is strange --- so unlike anything we have done before --- and everything too is exactly as we imagined.”

A family history, a personal memoir, and a roadmap for others to follow, THE BRIGHT HOUR is a story to embrace, learn from and recommend to good friends.