Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks
224 pages
Published February 2025 by Penguin Publishing Group
Publisher's Summary:
Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz – just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy – collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.
After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at the beach. But all of this ended abruptly when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.
Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony’s death.
A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.
My Thoughts:
""Is this the home of Tony Horowitz?"
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..."
And, so, now he's in the OR. And, so, now we've admitted him for a procedure. And, so, now we're
keeping him for observation.
So many things that logically should have followed.
But she said none of these things. Instead, the illogical thing.
He's dead.
No."
How's that for packing a punch to open a book?
I'd forgotten that this was a memoir when I started it. As I read these words, I was thinking to myself, "Wow, this is the way to make the death of a loved one sound real." Well, of course it was. Even so, I'm so impressed by Brooks' ability to make that moment, six years ago, still feel so very real and raw.
Brooks writes about her own grief, about helping her sons and in-laws deal with their grief, about trying to understand how a person as healthy as Tony appeared to be could die so suddenly, about their lives together. She didn't make a saint of him. All of it brought Tony to life and made it even easier to understand why his loss was so difficult to bear.
This book really resonated with me, for the storytelling, for the writing, and because I could so relate to it. No, I have not lost my husband. But I have faced the diagnosis of my husband's cancer and lived through figuring out how to tell my children, how to comfort them while also facing my own possible future, of having to manage the shock and sadness of others. I have dealt with the very sudden loss of my mother and all of the strategic decisions that had to be made for months afterward that put off of my own grief to an extent. I could understand the need to step away from it all to have time to allow myself to feel everything.
Brooks did all of that while trying to finish the novel she was working on at the time of Tony's death, Horse. Because life moves forward, no matter how much we need it to stop for a little while.
