This intimate memoir of grief is a lifeline to others dealing with loss

Grief is a perennial subject in memoir. This past year, Sloane Crosley published an acclaimed book about coping with the loss of a friend. Just last week, “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert announced her new memoir centered around the loss of her spouse. So, while a book such as Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” may have seemed so definitive in 2005 that it left very little else to say on the subject, instead, it may have encouraged others to examine their own experiences with grief.

But is there truly room for another memoir in this field? What else can be said about widowhood and the tragic absence of a loved one? Despite the ubiquity of death, there is also another common element to loss: Each one is as singular as the person who has passed. And in the wake of that loss hangs a mystery that can be as illuminating as it is bleak. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Geraldine Brooks explores all this in her intensely intimate and candid “Memorial Days: A Memoir,” about the death of her husband, celebrated writer, journalist and historian Tony Horwitz.

(Viking)

Brooks frames her book in two separate narratives; each amplifies the potency of the other. She begins by returning to the day that Tony died (and the days, weeks and months that followed). This narrative is braided with another that is grounded in Brooks’ reflections and actions four years later during a solo trip to Flinders Island, in remote Tasmania. Born and raised in Australia, Brooks had hoped to make this island her home. But by marrying a writer as deeply entrenched in American history as Horwitz, the author of “Confederates in the Attic,” she let this dream lie fallow as she became a foreign correspondent, and then a parent and novelist living on Martha’s Vineyard.

Theirs was an enviable life full of travel and intellectual engagement, buffered by an idyllic domesticity. At the time of his death, Horwitz was on the road, promoting his new book “Spying on the South.” Brooks and Horwitz had just spent a romantic weekend in Nashville, and Brooks had returned home to work on her novel-in-progress (what would become the bestseller “Horse”). Horwitz was eager to cap the book tour in his hometown of Washington, D.C. The couple,each in their early 60s, had been empty nesters for two years and were finding the grind of writing and publishing more rigorous than in the past. Horwitz’s coping mechanisms were increasingly taxing on his body, and the two looked forward to a break from this period marked by hard drinking and little sleep. Rest dangled in the distance, and she recalls: “What big plans we had. How many more adventures there would be for us, just as soon as Tony’s book was finished.”

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It was never meant to be. While walking home from breakfast, on May 27, 2019, Horwitz experienced a cardiac event that left him dead on the sidewalk, newspaper in hand. Though several people came to his aid, it was too late.

Though he had previously defied death in numerous international war zones, Horwitz was declared dead in the very hospital where he was born. Brooks captures the striking coincidences that marked his death with a poignancy tempered by her keen ability as a storyteller. “Tony died on Memorial Day, the American holiday that falls on the last Monday in May and honors the war dead,” she reflects. Without excessive flourish, she knows when to back away and let the facts speak for themselves. Yet, it’s this very self-awareness, closely linked to self-preservation, that kept Brooks from fully accepting Horwitz’s loss and succumbing to the deep sadness she could suppress for only so long.

“When I get to Flinders Island, I will begin my own memorial days. I am taking something that our culture has stopped freely giving: the right to grieve,” she writes. So it’s here, in this second narrative, which serves to balance the stoicism of her first narrative, that Brooks grants herself the space to surrender to feelings marked by longing and misgiving, gratitude and humor, deeply infused by her intense love for Horwitz and the life they created together as writers and partners.

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Here she reads his journals and reads about the geography of Flinders Island, where she had once envisioned living a life committed to conservation. She marvels at “the ever-changing light, the shifts in the weather, the choreography of the wallabies, the quizzical expressions of the Cape Barren geese. … I must take care I don’t twist an ankle on the slippery stones. I crave more heedless movement.” These close, exquisite descriptions of the landscape reveal a truth that Brooks knows quite well: This road not taken could have been as rewarding and enriching as the life she chose. It’s possible she would have become an award-winning nature writer as well as an activist and conservationist.

But these are not reflections grounded in regret. Instead, they offer a certain solace to Brooks, whose candid and ardent voice retains a steady faith in a life that left nothing on the table. She wonders whether theirs would have been a longer marriage and Horwitz’s a longer life if they hadn’t pushed so hard to make the most out of their days. Passages of self-recrimination bubble up in the book as she wonders whether she should have paid greater attention to Horwitz’s increased drinking. Nevertheless, what’s done is done. Brooks balances between the harsh reality of death and the sustaining comfort of memory.

Unlike others, this memoir, delicately written but without any precious patter, frames itself as a book of days. Overwrought metaphors aside, grief is less of an ocean and more of a series of days. Each one reveals new losses and new discoveries. But deftly availing herself of both her work as a journalist and a novelist, Brooks tracks the geography of grief with patience and grace as she comes to terms with the ongoing nature of outliving the ones you love most.

While it’s a slim memoir, “Memorial Days” is a book that is meant to be read slowly. Opting for the audiobook, which Brooks herself narrates, one can fully appreciate the gravity of her words and the rhythm of her bereavement as she pays tribute to her great love, the life they shared and the life she will live after his death. Curiously, Horwitz himself had little patience for Didion’s memoir of grief, as Brooks learned through marginalia that he scribbled into his galley for “The Year of Magical Thinking.”

“Name & product dropping. Padded,” criticized Horwitz, who served on the nonfiction committee that ultimately honored Didion with the National Book Award. Brooks laughs and disagrees with his “dismissive evaluation.” She offers more practical advice than Didion, but she too chronicles the swell of disorientation. Yet it’s moments like this, in which Brooks maintains a conversation with her late husband, when she shines. Her memoir is certainly a testament to her own unique loss, but it’s moreover a lifeline to others who will find themselves in this familiar, shattered landscape of grief.

Lauren LeBlanc is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.