Over the next month, I will read Allegra Goodman’s Isola, Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound, and Weina Ramsel’s The Master Jeweler. All three authors live in Massachusetts, as does Geraldine Brooks. I so admired her memoir that I wrote copy for the Arlington Council on Aging library. Check it out:
Memorial Days is a memoir by Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks, a former journalist born in Australia who switched to writing fiction in 2001. She was deep in the manuscript for her sixth novel when the phone rang, and she learned that her husband Tony Horowitz had suffered a sudden heart attack at 60 and died. It was Memorial Day, 2019. In writing this fragile but beautiful memoir, she created not only a tribute to Tony but also an unassuming self-help guide for recovery from grief, or at least a better understanding of the pain that losing someone you love can create. She doesn’t suggest how to cope with such loss, but readers come away with information on what worked for her. Chapters alternate between two locations: Martha’s Vineyard, where the couple lived with their two children, and Flinders Island, where she sought refuge and learned to accept that her clever, witty husband was gone forever.
Flinders Island is located between Australia and Tasmania. The three-room shack Geraldine chose as her base doesn’t sound like the ideal Airbnb rental, with its woodstove for cooking and an outhouse rather than a modern bathroom. She discovered the island with Tony while scouting for a novel she never wrote and didn’t return until February 2023. She goes to Flinders Island seeking “the right to grieve. To shut out the world and its demands. To remember my love and to feel the immensity of his loss.” In this remote place, she sets out both to honor her husband’s memory and to care for herself. “This will be, finally, the time when I will not have to prepare a face for the faces that I meet. The place where I will not have to pretend that things are normal and that I am okay. Because it has been more than three years and, contrary to appearances, I am not okay.”
I had read Time of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague, so when I brought Memorial Days home from the library, I knew I would enjoy the book because of Brooks’ writing style. I did not expect to feel warm and fuzzy at reading about loss. Such is the magic of this book. The memoir had a calming effect as I followed Brooks’ wanderings along barren beaches. Her observations comforted me in a weird way as she picked up shells and examined bits of granite or watched birds. She managed to get through what must be one of the most difficult experiences in life and to write eloquently about it, and that, in itself, represents a victory.
I also appreciated her sharing of “the obstacle course of legally ending a life” related in the Martha’s Vineyard chapters, and her use of words. Like for instance in the description of caring for her elderly mother, she refers to the “thievery of Alzheimer’s,” which is what the disease must feel like to some caregivers: a loved one has been stolen away.
In the last chapter, Brooks shares what she gained by spending so much time alone. The acceptance that her life will never be the same without Tony, but also a decision to make each moment count, starting with appreciation for the beauty that surrounds us in nature.
Finally, she advises any readers who have also suffered the loss of a spouse to allow themselves to express the emotion that grief brings, rather than holding it in, to tell the story either to a therapist or a friend, to write it down. “Write the truest thing you know,” said Hemingway. This is what Geraldine Brooks does with Memorial Days.
