Viking
Review by David Starkey
It’s the specter that haunts the lives of every happy, long-married couple: one of them suddenly dies. In the case of Geraldine Brooks’s memoir Memorial Days, that person is her husband, the reporter and historian Tony Horwitz to whom she has been married for thirty-five years.
Horwitz’s death, on Memorial Day of 2019, apparently occurred in just minutes, as he was walking down a suburban street near his brother’s home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The cause, Brooks later learned, was myocarditis, an inflammation of the middle layer of the heart wall. And though she initially remembers her husband as fit and healthy, over the course of the book it becomes apparent there were tell-tale signs that the “delicate and complex system of electrical signals that make the heart pump” was about to be fatally disrupted.
Horwitz’s death is particularly bitter because life for the couple had generally been so sweet. Both had won Pulitzer Prizes—Horwitz for reporting and Brooks for her novel March—and they lived in an 18th-century house on Martha’s Vineyard profiled in the New York Times. Their older son, Nathaniel, had graduated from college and their adopted son, Bizu, was away at boarding school, which meant they now had time to travel and fully enjoy one another’s company.
One of the book’s central arguments is that all the demands American society places on the bereaved—arranging a funeral, contacting government agencies, updating health and insurance policies—makes true grieving all but impossible. Brooks soldiered on in part to be a rock for her children, but also because she felt she had no choice. There was no time or space for her to break down and let out the howl of sorrow she held inside.
Finally, almost four years after her husband’s passing, she flies to Flinders Island, an isolated and sparsely populated piece of land off the coast of Tasmania. Her plan is to “uncover every memory of that time and experience the full measure of the grief I had denied myself.” It is an up-and-down, often grueling process, but gradually she finds peace in a place where she can “wake before dawn and watch the sunrise silvering the concave curves of the clouds and then turning them roseate, strewing the sky with pink petals.”
The chapters alternate between locations associated with Tony’s death—Chevy Chase and the couple’s Vineyard home in West Tisbury—and Flinders Island. Generally, sections are short, three to six pages, so that time moves quickly between present and past. Flashbacks to earlier, happier days feature significantly throughout the book, though they are more present in the Flinders Island chapters. The effect, as Brooks intends, is to blur her life with and without Horwitz, and to make his death feel like the central event in their long relationship.
Her goal, of course, is to move past the overwhelming pain, and she accomplishes this, more or less. As she says in the Afterword, after a false, overly optimistic ending: “But it’s not the end. Not the end of grieving for Tony. That will go on.”
Granted, there are already plenty of beautifully written memoirs about the loss of a spouse—Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story and Donald Hall’s The Best Day the Worst Day come immediately to mind—but this is a genre that, alas and of course, will always need updating, and we are lucky to have this well-wrought, moving and ultimately comforting entry by a very talented writer.
