Geraldine Brooks is a brilliant author, but has perhaps outdone herself in “Memorial Days: A Memoir.” With exquisite writing, the book is a gorgeous love letter to her husband, Tony Horwitz, who at just 60 years old, entirely unexpectedly, dropped dead on a D.C. street in 2019. “Memorial Days” is simultaneously a balm to the soul for anyone who has lost a loved one, especially if they were left to pick up the pieces after a significant loss.
Brooks drops us to the heart of the matter on the first page, writing with the immediacy of the present tense:
“Is this the home of Tony Horwitz?”
Yes
“Who am I speaking to?”
This is his wife
That is exact. The rest is a blur.
“Collapsed in the street … tried to resuscitate at the scene … brought to the hospital … couldn’t revive him …”
We are right beside Brooks as she desperately tries to find out more information about what happened, where Tony’s body is at the moment, and how to arrange an immediate flight from Martha’s Vineyard on, of all things, Memorial Day weekend. At the end of the racing chapter, she introduces one of the major thrusts of the memoir: the brutality and broken system surrounding the death of a loved one, in which red tape and to-do lists rob us of the very process of grieving.
Brooks’ short, beautifully paced chapters alternate between two journeys three years apart. One is a continuation of the first chapter, in which we jolt along with her as she encounters every obstacle and heartbreak from the moment of Horwitz’s death to his memorial on the Vineyard in September. In the second storyline, she speaks to us as her days unfold during her retreat to properly grieve on Flinders, a small, remote island off the coast of Australia. Brooks writes, “This will be, finally, the time when I will not have to prepare a face for the faces that I meet. The place where I will not have to pretend that things are normal, and that I am okay. Because it has been more than three years, and contrary to appearances, I am not at all okay. I have come to realize that my life since Tony’s death has been one endless, exhausting performance. I have cast myself in a role: woman being normal.”
While following the two compelling narratives, we marvel at Brooks’ skill in crafting powerful prose with a visceral impact. For instance, at the end of a Flinders chapter about why she has come, she writes, “Alone on this island at the ends of the earth, maybe, I will finally be able to break out of the matzar. But first I will need to get back to that moment in my sunlit study when I refused to allow myself to howl.
“That howl has become the beast in the basement of my heart. I need to find a way to set it free.”
Brooks weaves memories throughout the book, pulling back the curtain on her and Tony’s experiences as foreign correspondents, and later as authors, as well as their various travels and lives once they moved full-time to their beloved Vineyard. Throughout, the depth of their love and partnership shines through.
We learn, too, about the impact Tony’s death has on her writing. She was halfway through “Horse” when Tony died. With bills to pay, Brooks had to finish the book. Yet, since his death, she found it impossible: “Writing fiction requires wombat-hole immersion. You go down in that dark, narrow place where there is nothing else but you and the unspooling story. There was no space down there for court motions and tax filings, for memorial planning and condolence-note replies.
“And there was certainly no place for the beast of grief clinging to me, claws intractable as fishhooks.”
In the afterword, Brooks says, “I have written this because I needed to do it. Part of the treatment for ‘complicated grief’ is to relive the trauma of death, returning to the moments again and again, striving each time to recall more detail. That’s what I tried to do.”
And in so doing, Brooks gives us an enormous gift, generously sharing her intensely personal journey, which will touch many souls.
“Memorial Days: A Memoir” by Geraldine Brooks; available at Edgartown Books and Bunch of Grapes.
