Wednesday, February 5, 2025
This poignant book on grief ultimately teaches gladness.
“Memorial Days: A Memoir” by Geraldine Brooks is a spectacular ode to grieving and an elegant homage to marriage. Three years after her husband, Anthony (Tony) Lander Horwitz, collapsed on a Washington, D.C., street at the age of 60, she was still reeling. Unable to accept what had happened to her “six-day-a-week gym rat …bursting with vitality,” she questioned the official cause of death: ventricular fibrillation.
She interviewed his doctors, and what one cardiologist told her could put all cardiologists out of business:
“I can give you a battery of tests, tell you all’s fine, and the warranty on that is the time it takes you to get to the parking lot, where you could drop dead from a heart attack.”
Then came the crush of bereavement — two heartsick sons, stunned in-laws, and unbelieving friends, plus the lawyers, accountants, insurance agents, and their incessant forms and reams of documents. Finally, Brooks called a time-out to reckon with the trauma of her husband’s death. She needed to be alone, to confront misery on her own terms, which meant wrapping herself in solitude.
To do this, she flew more than 10,000 miles from her home on Martha’s Vineyard to Flinders Island off the coast of South Australia. Born in Sydney, she wanted to deal with her anguish at home near the Pacific Ocean, “framed by sandstone headlands and sinuous gum trees.” Only there did she feel she could heal from her wretched loss. “I am not a deist,” she writes. “No god will answer my cries. The wideness I seek is in nature, in quiet, in time.”
Many artists have sought the same to reset and restore creativity. The poet Emily Dickinson praised her days in “the solitude of space,” as did the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, who spent much alone time at her New Mexico ranch, and the billionaire Bill Gates speaks often about his solitary “think weeks.” Geraldine Brooks traveled halfway around the world to exorcise “the beast of grief clinging to me, claws intractable as fishhooks.”
She began her remote retreat by going days without seeing another human being as she soaked herself in sorrow. “Grief is praise,” she writes, citing Martín Prechtel’s “The Smell of Rain on Dust,” “because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.” She thrived on the melancholy Victor Hugo described as “the happiness of being sad.”
Widows weep and writers write. They pour their grief on the page as they fight for words to explain the gnawing pit of loss. Brooks seems to have absorbed the entire corpus: Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking”; Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Widow’s Story”; Elizabeth Alexander’s “The Light of the World”; Lynn Caine’s “Widow”; Janet De Neefe’s “Fragrant Rice”; and Leigh Sales’s “Any Ordinary Day.”
When Brooks decided to rent that shack on the rugged Australian coastline, she packed some of her husband’s daily journals. “These were his private thoughts and, apart from one explosive incident early in our courtship, I had never violated that privacy.” Now, she longed to read his words and know his thoughts before she donated his trove to Columbia University, where they’d met in the graduate school of journalism.
Brooks opened the journals, hoping to find her “sunny, funny lover.” Instead, she found “dark thoughts, fears, the insecure ramblings of insomniac nights” from a man despairing that success had eluded him. He would later write five books and win the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
She writes of the compromise she made in 1984 when they married. “We each loved our country but he relied on his. It was his muse. It fed the work that was his passion.” He followed her career to Cairo when she was Mideast bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, but when it came to their forever home, he insisted on returning to the U.S. For Brooks, like the biblical Ruth, it was “wither thou goest,” but not without pain. “I accepted an expatriation I did not want and raised my sons in a country whose values and choices often felt incomprehensible.”
Having converted to Judaism when she married Horwitz — “I didn’t want to be the end of an ancient lineage that had survived pogroms and the Shoah” — Brooks admits that she and her husband were not observant. “Had we been…I would have had a road map through my grief, telling me exactly what to do and when to do it.”
Instead of Jewish ritual, she relied upon nature, particularly “the porphyritic granite” of Flinders Island. She restores herself with its “Coarse gravels. Silica-rich soils. Folded sedimentary sequences. Scattered, scoured, angular blocks of siltstone, honeycombed by wind and sea…The Blue Tier batholith. Upper Devonian period.” She adds, “There is nothing like a geological timeline to put you in your place.” (And to send a reader googling “limpets,” “casuarinas,” “abraded,” “spline,” “susurrus,” and “moraine.”)
Brooks enchants with her descriptions of Australia, the fragrant forests filled with blooming ti trees, swooping green rosellas, and the bracing scent of eucalyptus. There, she wrestled with the will to survive. After several weeks alone, she managed to vanquish the beast and emerged to write “Memorial Days” — a masterpiece.
Editor’s note: Geraldine Brooks will be in conversation with Kara Swisher at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C., 7 p.m., Monday, Feb. 10. Learn more here.
Georgetown resident Kitty Kelley has written several best-sellers, including “The Family: The Real Story Behind the Bush Dynasty.” Recent books include “Let Freedom Ring: Stanley Tretick’s Iconic Images of the March on Washington.” She serves on the board of BIO (Biographers International Organization) and Washington Independent Review of Books, where this review first appeared.