Book Report: Memorial Days

7. Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days (2025) (4/27/25)

On the morning of Memorial Day 2019, author Geraldine Brooks received a phone call telling her that her husband, Tony Horwitz, who was on a book tour for his recently published Spying on the South: An Odyssey across the American Divide, had collapsed in Washington, DC, and died. Three years later, Brooks, who is Australian, took herself to a wild, relatively unpopulated island off the coast of Tasmania, to, finally, grieve his death. A process that included writing this book. 

I read her masterful Horse a couple of years ago, and I've read two of Horwitz's books—Baghdad without a Map, and Other Misadventures in Arabia, about being an itinerant journalist in that region, and Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, in which he retraces the final voyage of explorer James Cook—both of which I enjoyed very much (I read those before I started doing book reports). I did not know (or had forgotten) that the two were married—for thirty-five years. 

I am in the market lately for books on grieving, given my husband's cancer diagnosis. He's fine now, and hopefully will remain so, with treatment, for a while. Still, when a friend mentioned reading this short book and finding it moving, I rushed out to get a copy. 

It is a very easy read. Brooks is a wonderful observer and writer. The chapters are short, and alternate between the ongoing story of the days following Tony's death—rushing from their home on Martha's Vineyard to Washington, speaking with doctors, seeing his body, receiving condolences, dealing with the will and canceled credit cards, arranging memorial services, and the ever-returning jolt of, day after day, remembering that he's gone—and her weeks on Flinders Island, walking the beaches, swimming, observing the changing light and natural world around her, reading Tony's journals, and letting herself mourn. This is memoir, so we also hear some about Brooks's background—how she and Tony met, some of her early hopes (in which Flinders Island figures), the life they settled into as writers, partners, and parents, their happiness together. The rhythm of the telling is lovely. 

In one of the Flinders chapters, she begins by describing the Cape Barren goose, which nests on the island and which she encounters on her walks: "social, monogamous, partial migrant, semiaquatic, congregatory"—adjectives that "might have described Tony." 

These geese travel in large groups that have been given evocative names: gaggle, plump, skein, wedge, team. In my solitude I appreciate their sociability. 
     Tony was always much better in a gaggle than I. Though I managed to overcome my shyness by the time I finished my degree at Sydney Uni, I was never—will never be—the extrovert he was. I hid behind his outgoing social nature, clinging to him limpet-like at parties. When we had people over, I enjoyed making the food while he carried the conversation; a warmhearted, enthusiastic host.
     He could never have settled on a place as small as Flinders Island. His personality demanded a larger canvas. Martha's Vineyard had worked for him because its influx of summer residents was so large and diverse, swelling our small year-round pod of friends with others from across the world. Tony made connections easily; his genuine curiosity, his willingness to ask the unguarded question, to sometimes go out on precarious conversational limbs, disarmed people used to cautious deference. The longer we lived on the island, the wider this circle of friends became, until summer's social obligations sometimes seemed overwhelming. My more introverted nature occasionally yearned for the days when we'd known no one and spent our island beachcombing or rambling in the woods.
     In the summers since Tony died, I have found myself straining to retain the level of sociability of our old life together. The Cape Barren geese in their gaggles remind me how much I miss Tony's talent for hosting. Remembering how I used to enjoy feeding a big mob of people around my table, I have tried to continue.
     But without him, the gaggles will never be the same.

After a final swim during which she finally allows herself to howl her grief, she includes an afterword: "I have written this because I needed to do it," she says. "Part of the treatment for 'complicated grief' is to relive the trauma of the death, returning to the moments again and again, striving each time to recall more detail. That's what I've tried to do." It is also an opportunity to celebrate Tony, to keep him alive in her thoughts, and in the thoughts of people around her—including us readers. Now back home, she continues to make time for beauty, as she did on Flinders Island, and to do her work, to make "the life I have as vivid and consequential as I can." She allows space for melancholy, "what Victor Huge described as the happiness of being sad." She also offers a bit of practical advice: "Jot down all the tasks you don't bother to mention that keep the household afloat, the set of torches that only you have learned to juggle. All the little things your partner didn't expect to need to know, until the day they never expected to happen." 

And finally in whatever way works for you, tell your story.
     Write it down, speak it to a therapist, share it with your friends. Take control of this essential moment in the narrative of your life. . . .
     The story of a death is the story that dominates my life. Here I have retold it, rethought it. But I can't change it. Tony is dead. Present tense. He will be dead, in the present, in my present, for as long as I am alive. I cannot change that story. I can only change myself.

 

P.S. This is the fourth book this month. Granted, two of them were short. But hey, it feels good to be reading again—to be able to focus.