MEMOIR
Memorial Days
Geraldine Brooks
Hachette, $32.99
Near the end of Geraldine Brooks’ superb novel, Horse, we witness the death of a significant character. It won’t spoil the story to point out that the partner of the deceased spends a sleepless night in their bed, face in the pillow, absorbing the scent of the missing person. They are required to identify the body from photos. They have trouble reaching loved ones by phone. They hit their head against an insensitive bureaucracy.
Brooks struggled to complete Horse following the death of her husband, Tony Horwitz, himself a celebrated author and historian. Horwitz, a man who went to the gym six days a week and had not gained weight in decades, dropped dead of a heart attack on a Washington DC street on Memorial Day, 2019. It was a devastating loss. He had been publicising his recently published book, which was about to enter the bestseller lists. It was as if he had died in the middle of a sentence.
Brooks with Tony and their sons Nathaniel and Bizu on Martha’s Vineyard.Credit: Courtesy of Geraldine Brooks
It is poignant how details of the days that followed seep into the texture of Horse, a book completed in pain. Memorial Days reveals that all the experiences listed above come from Brooks’ reality. It documents the minutiae of what happens in the wake of death. It moves gently beyond small, sharp details to consider the fuzzy blur of the big picture.
The bravest thing Brooks did was to do nothing, or at least very little. In the days and weeks after Tony’s death, there were tasks that required attention. Some of them, such as the difficulty of a widow in the United States getting access to her own credit card accounts, are maddening. Others, such as the gathering of family and friends, are heartfelt but exhausting.
Brooks is helped by ritual. She became a Jew when she married Tony “because I didn’t want to see the end of an ancient lineage that had survived pogroms and the Shoah”. She is “not a deist” but “our connection with the traditions was about culture and family”. She finds safe harbour in the phases of Jewish mourning: aninut, shiva, sheloshim and saying kaddish.
She acknowledges similar wisdom has stood the test of time in other traditions, such as Indigenous “sorry time” and the practice of iddah, in which a Muslim widow withdraws from the world for a few months. In my own tradition, the “month’s mind”, in which mourners gather 30 days or so after the funeral, can be just as important as the funeral itself. These communities have learnt over centuries that grief is long and human memory is short. We need both words and actions which are not of our own making.
Even so, Brooks finds she still has work to do. The business of bereavement has prevented her reaching the bare bones of what she is experiencing, so she takes herself to a lonely corner of Flinders Island. She and Horwitz had travelled the world together, working as correspondents in some hair-raising situations, including the Middle East. They spent years in which their main companionship was each other. Children came to them a bit later, including Bizu, whom they adopted from Ethiopia. They had a unique bond.
When they first got together, Brooks tried to persuade Horwitz to live in Australia. During that period, they spent time on Flinders Island, and it was here Brooks tried to write a novel about the remarkable Lady Jane Franklin, the wife of a Tasmanian governor but a force of nature in her own right. The book didn’t come together, and it was with Year of Wonders that Brooks’ career as a gifted novelist began.
Nevertheless, Flinders Island had scratched at her soul. She compares it to Martha’s Vineyard, the island in Massachusetts where the couple bought an 18th-century house. Now, Flinders Island provides precisely the rugged and truthful landscape that will out-manoeuvre all her defences. She rents a shack in a remote place and settles down “to uncover every memory of that time and experience the full measure of the grief I had denied myself”. Her mother might have described this as “wallowing”. It is anything but. “I settle into the solitude.” This involves long walks in nature, noticing the finest details of bird and plant life.
She forms a special bond with the Cape Barren goose - “social, monogamous, partial migrant, semiaquatic, congregatory”. The writing in these passages is gorgeous. They are quiet, vulnerable and tender. Any reader will admire the sheer guts this journey takes. Along the way, I realised I would not be able to follow in her footsteps, however much I might aspire to some kind of contemplative life.
Brooks finds comforting words from her friend, novelist Ann Patchett: “The beauty and the suffering are equally true.” She imagines what Victor Hugo described as “the happiness of being sad”. In a culture which is “averse to sad”, she resolves “to wait as long as it takes”. There is no contrived ending for Memorial Days. The book is radically and beautifully open in a world that deifies closure.
Michael McGirr’s latest book is Ideas to Save Your Life (Text).
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