We die the way we live, idiosyncratically.

Taken together, these three books suggest that universal truths, even in extremis, are elusive. Riggs, a poet, wrote a blog about living with stage 4 breast cancer, as well as personal essays on the subject, before her death just as The Bright Hour was going to press earlier this year.

Both men were young (46 and 36) when they received their terminal prognoses, as was the late Nina Riggs, author of the lovely new memoir The Bright Hour. Neither Pausch nor Kalanithi were known as writers before they set out to chronicle the approach of their own deaths (from pancreatic and lung cancer, respectively), although Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon, had literary aspirations. Writers have always contemplated their own deaths, of course, most famously Michel de Montaigne, the first modern essayist, whom Kalanithi quotes: “To study philosophy is to learn to die.” But most authors, like the rest of us, don’t get around to thinking about it until late in their lives. Books like Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture and Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air spend weeks on the New York Times best-seller list (115 for the former, and for the later, 60 and counting), in part for their promise to share some of the clarity their authors earned in the hardest possible way.

The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs