The Bright Hour

Cancer had already played a significant role in the author's family history, so she had coping mechanisms to fall back on.

There are some phone calls that you hope never to get. At the age of 37, Nina Riggs received one of them. It was her oncologist, calling to inform her that she had breast cancer.

The news was devastating, as any cancer diagnosis would have been, but it didn’t come as a complete surprise.

Cancer had already played a significant role in Riggs’s family. This was revealed to its full extent when she sat down with a genetic counselor to look at her family tree.

Just a few years earlier, her mother had been diagnosed with cancer and was coming to the end of her fight against the disease. Both of her mother’s parents had suffered from some form of cancer in their lifetimes, and her mother’s sister had an early melanoma – cancerous cells that haven’t spread beyond the first layers of skin.

What was even more surprising, however, was that her grandfather had also had breast cancer, a rarity in men. On the paternal side, a great-aunt and an aunt had also had breast cancer.

Only 11 percent of cancer diagnoses can be linked with certainty to genetic causes, but the prevalence of cancer in Riggs’s family definitely suggested that genetics were somehow at play.

Still grappling with the diagnosis, Riggs searched for consolation in philosophy, as her mother had done after her own diagnosis. Her mother had read works by sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, and so she, too, dug out her tattered copy of his essays.

Montaigne was well acquainted with death. His brother died young, at 23; five of his daughters died in the years that followed; and his best friend fell victim to the plague.

Yet despite suffering these losses, Montaigne believed you should open yourself to death and accept its inevitability. Thus, he always left the door to his estate buildings unlocked, though bandits and looters were known to roam the countryside. His attitude toward death, and the way in which he chose to live his life, were great consolations to Riggs.