‘An unclenching of the soul’: Geraldine Brooks’ raw, gentle grief memoir has helped me navigate my own mourning
- Written by: Kathryn Shine, Associate Professor, Journalism, Curtin University
On May 27 2019, acclaimed Australian writer Geraldine Brooks received a call from the emergency department of a hospital in Washington DC. Her American husband of 35 years, Tony Horwitz, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, had collapsed while in DC promoting his latest book. He was pronounced dead soon after arriving at the hospital.
Brooks recounts her total disbelief:
Not Tony. Not him […] The sixty-year-old who still wears clothes the same size as the day I met him in his twenties. My husband – younger than I am, bursting with vitality. He’s way too busy living. He can’t possibly be dead.
For Brooks, who was at the family home on Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, there was no time to process this devastating news. She was straight onto a ferry and a flight to DC, to deal with the exhausting logistics and notifying that accompanies the death of a spouse.
Review: Memorial Days – Geraldine Brooks (Hachette)
Horwitz died on Memorial Day, the American holiday that falls on the last Monday in May and honours the war dead. Three years later, Brooks travels to Flinders Island, off the coast of Tasmania, to begin her own memorial days: to “wallow” in her grief, to “remember” Horwitz and “feel the immensity of his love”.
Memorial Days charts this experience, alternating between the immediate aftermath of the death and her time living alone in a remote shack on the island’s coast.
Truly feeling the loss
I had mixed feelings about reading and reviewing Memorial Days. My mother died five months ago and I wasn’t sure whether I was ready to absorb another story of grief. At the same time, I thought Brooks may help me to navigate the difficult and complicated process of mourning.
She is someone I have admired for a long time, as a journalist and a writer. Brooks achieved the dream of many journalists (myself included), of working as a foreign correspondent, including as Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.
She later became a writer of books, with a particular passion for historical fiction. March, her fictional story of the army chaplain father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. From her books, I knew Brooks to be a skilled, thoughtful and perceptive writer. I figured she’d have some wisdom to impart.
She did.
While Memorial Days is emotional and sometimes raw, it is a mostly gentle exploration of grief. After suppressing her despair for a long time, Brooks does finally allow herself to truly feel the loss. But her time alone on the rocky, timeless island also brings a sense of release. “I begin to feel an unfurling, an unclenching of the soul,” she writes. “It is a tentative thing, tender.”
Flinders Island is a fitting location, for a few reasons. Brooks and Horwitz had travelled there together in 2000, while Brooks was researching a book. It’s also a place with its own history of anguish, as a site for the forced exile of Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples from 1833–1847. The island’s inaccessibility offered a sense of space Brooks would have struggled to find elsewhere.
Brooks savours this respite from the usual elements of her life: kids, editors, publicists, neighbours, friends. She “revels” in having time to think about Horwitz without those distractions.
Honouring the dead
Being able to leave our lives to grieve in solitude may seem at first like a luxury few of us could afford. But when Brooks explains how many cultures dedicate time for grieving and protect the bereaved, it starts to seem like something we should consider.
Horwitz was Jewish, and Brooks converted to Judaism before they married. She explains that Orthodox Judaism divides mourning into various phases, including aninut, the time between death and burial whereby the mourner is not even to be offered condolences, since she is not in any state to be consoled.
This is followed by seven days of shiva, where they stay at home, accept condolences and reflect on the life of the lost person. Then, 30 days of sheloshim, a period of less intense mourning, where mourners begin to reintegrate themselves into society.
“Had we been observant Jews, I would have had a road map through my grief, telling me exactly what to do and when to do it,” she writes.
In Islam, a widow observes iddah, Brooks writes. Technically, this is a four-month period that must pass before any legitimate remarriage after a husband’s death. It can also be a period of recovery. “She can go to work and do necessary things, but she should not otherwise leave her home, dress up or socialize,” Brooks writes.
For Buddhists, ceremonies and prayers for the dead are conducted every seven days for seven weeks. She also describes the Aboriginal rite of Sorry Business, a series of obligations, responsibilities and traditions following the death of family members and loved ones.
These all recognise the impact of a death on loved ones and the community. They honour the dead in a way that Brooks did not feel she could.
She recounts how, within hours of her husband’s death, she felt she had to be brave, to be grateful. She “vaulted right over denial, anger, bargaining, and depression and landed in the soft sands of acceptance”.
Later, she came to realise her life since Horwitz had died had been “one endless, exhausting performance”. She writes:
I have cast myself in a role: woman being normal. I have moved around in public acting out a series of convincing scenes: PTO mum, conservation commissioner, author on tour. But nothing has been normal. Here, finally, the long-running show goes on hiatus.
On Flinders Island, Brooks creates some of her own rituals of mourning: taking long walks, swimming in the ocean, savouring her interactions with local wildlife, staring at the night sky. She finds solace in the wild beauty and immensity of nature, and shares her appreciation and awe with readers.
In an afterword, she describes the lingering influence of this experience:
At home now I make more time for the beauty. I make it a point to notice the trees, in all their various seasonal personalities. To be with critters that share my space. A nest of baby rabbits, a coin sized painted turtle hatchling, a fluffy mallard duckling out for its first swim – these encounters, more than anything else have the power to elevate me out of sadness.
The happiness of being sad
As the book unfolds, we learn more about her relationship with Horowitz. They met at New York’s Columbia University’s Graduate Journalism School, where Brooks was attending on a scholarship. They married upon graduating, then worked as journalists around the world.
During the first Gulf War, Horwitz was the first US reporter into Kuwait City with the liberating troops, she writes. They jointly won an Overseas Press Club Coverage Award in 1990 for their coverage of the war. Four years later, Horwitz won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series on low wage work in America.
They shared many fascinating and memorable experiences, but what Brooks missed most were the ordinary interactions and routines. The jokes and banter, the companionship, the sharing of meals, wine and stories, the making of plans, the watching of sunsets.
At the end of the book, there is a sense of resolution: Brooks feels more able to move on. To swim, rather than sink, as she says. Taking time for her own memorial days and writing about the experience allowed her to “put down one of the bundles in the baggage of her grief”. The loss of the life she would have had if her husband had lived, the future she had counted on having.
The mourning is not done. Grief doesn’t work that way. But the experience doesn’t have to be so hard, so painful, she concludes. “I merely wish for the bereaved some time and space, however long, however short, for melancholy – what Victor Hugo described as the happiness of being sad.”
Authors: Kathryn Shine, Associate Professor, Journalism, Curtin University
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