Memorial Days: A Memoir

On Memorial Day in 2019, 35 years into a happy marriage, novelist Geraldine Brooks’ beloved husband Tony Horwitz drops dead on a Washington D.C. street. Brook’s memoir Memorial Days is less a re-visioning of her marriage than a remembering of the first days and months of widowhood, and the unavoidable acceptance of death’s finality.

In beautiful, sparse, and elusive prose, Brooks alternates the grief of then, in the United States immediately after Horwitz’s death, against the grief of now on Flinders Island off the coast of Australia, where she goes in 2023 to release her long-silenced howl of grief that had become “the beast in the basement of my heart.”

In the United States the daily minutiae of death (“I miss those laughs at the end of the day.”) begins with an exhausted emergency room doctor who brusquely tells Brooks that Horwitz is dead, continues on to the credit cards and medical insurance canceled with the filing of her husband’s death certificate, and so many other indignities in the “cruel bureaucracy of death.” Writes Brooks: “All the clocks do not stop. No one silences the phone. The dogs continue to bark, the pianos to play.”

On Flinders, where she could have lived, and might have lived, had Horwitz not convinced her to move instead to Martha’s Vineyard, Brooks writes “If this lovely island was in fact, the destination of my road not taken, what would that life have looked like, as I raised Australian kids and wrote Australian books? What would have been gained and what would have been lost?”

Brooks remembers but doesn’t reassess her husband and their marriage during her Flinder’s solitude. Their perfect life together, one she trusted completely, proved as fragile as Horwitz’s heart. She writes of Horwitz’s tendency toward over-work, physical risk, and hard drinking. She wonders if she could have done more to give him a bit more time. Brooks, though, turns her ire on the impersonal American way of death, and on death itself.

The death of a beloved is hard enough, but with it comes a second death as unyielding as the first. With Horwitz’s death comes a grief for “the life I would have had, the life I had counted on having. It was the life with sunset-facing rocking chairs, growing old with Tony beside me, laughing, arguing over the news, revisiting shared memories, and taking pride as our sons moved confidently into manhood. That life is gone; nothing will get it back.”

Perhaps that is why Brooks’ last chapter reads less as reflection than a manual of how to prepare for a spouse or family member’s inevitable yet always unexpected death. Or perhaps, when it's a happy marriage that irrevocably ends, there’s nothing left for Brooks to say except: “I resolve to appreciate the life I have had, surrounded by love, in another rare and beautiful place.”