On Memorial Day weekend in 2019, Geraldine Brooks received a life-changing phone call from a brusque hospital resident. Her husband of more than three decades, the writer Tony Horwitz, had died suddenly while on his book tour. In Memorial Days, Brooks describes the confusing and difficult weeks that followed: the rush from her home on Martha’s Vineyard to Washington, D.C., the sleepless first night, her reaction to his public obituaries and the headlong rush into the endless details that suddenly needed her attention. She intersperses these vivid renderings of grief’s early days with the story of her subsequent retreat three years later to Flinders Island, a remote island near Tasmania (Brooks was born in Australia) where she sequestered herself to finally, at last, grieve.
Brooks, who is the author of 10 books, including 2005’s Pulitzer Prize-winning March, paraphrases the writer Jennifer Senior, whose essay “On Grief” compares survivors of loss to passengers on an airplane that crashes on a mountaintop. The passengers emerge injured and each must travel down the mountain alone. This is the story of Brooks’ own journey down. With her in this dramatic and solitary landscape are Tony’s journals and books in which he’d written marginal notes, including Joan Didion’s acclaimed memoir about grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, which Tony, who was a judge on the National Book Award committee that year, found “name dropping” and “padded.” (Nonetheless, the book won the honor.) Brooks, reading his comments in her own moment of grief, wishes he’d given Joan Didion a break. “She worked in the movies; her friends happened to be famous. She can’t help that.” There is both humor and sorrow in these pages, and Tony emerges as an interesting and complicated figure, someone who loved life and was deeply driven. Brooks worries that his commitment to his final book, Spying on the South, accelerated his demise.
Tony has no grave. Instead, following his wishes, his ashes were tucked inside a baseball mitt and buried in the field where he played weekly ballgames. Memorial Days, a title which at once pays homage to the date of Tony’s death and the duration and purpose of Brooks’ solitary retreat, is another place of grief and memory. In its spare and direct pages, Brooks honors the writer, father and husband that she loves, and she offers her own story as a companion for others who are walking grief’s lonely path.
