'Memorial Days' by Geraldine Brooks

 

From the BLURB: 

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz - just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy - collapsed and died on a Washington, DC street.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, and living in Sydney, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humour, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on the US Memorial Day public holiday of 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to remote Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on the island's pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

I have loved Geraldine Brooks for the longest time. 'The Year of Wonders' is one of my favourite books (read the summer I graduated high school, so I also can't think of that story without if being a demarcation of my life too). I read everything she writes with a hunger and particular pride in her being Australian ... 'Memorial Days,' about events following the sudden death of her husband (author, journalist and historian Tony Horwitz) and the grief she needed to meet on Flinders Island in Tasmania some years later, is no different.

This is also a book about creativity - since both Brooks and her husband were writers. In musing on his death, Brooks is also wondering at the person (the artist) she would have been, had she not followed her husband to America and instead stayed in Tasmania, to become a fully Australian writer (Brooks' work has instead been marked by interesting tales she's seemingly collected in her travels; the plague village of Eyam in England for 'Wonders', and FanFiction borne from Louisa May Alcott's very New England 'Little Women' in her Pulitzer Prize-winning 'March). 'Memorial Days' is a tale of a few deaths in this way; 'Sliding Doors' wonderings at who she would have been, and the death of an idea to write about Jane Franklin (a British explorer to Tasmania ... I admit a curiosity about this story, but also a thorough disgust when Brooks reveals things she did to an adopted daughter.)

In this respect, I was reminded of another memoir by an Australian writer about the death of her playwright husband; the extraordinary 'Love, Death & Other Scenes' by Nova Weetman which came out last year, and I also *adored* (and ugly-cried my way through). The deaths are markedly different; Tony Horwitz dropped suddenly on the street from a cardiac event, in the middle of his book-tour. Playwright Aidan Fennessy died a long and painful death from cancer at the heigh of Covid in Melbourne lockdown. But both of these books also examine the audacities of bureaucracy in death; for Brooks it's navigating a callous and needlessly cruel American healthcare (and health insurance) system. For Nova Weetman, it was the aforementioned Covid adding layers of delay and complication to their memorials and grieving. In both I found connection to the writings of Caitlin Doughty, an American mortician and author who is a passionate advocate for things like green burial, but also for a more personal relationship with death and dying that the West seems uniquely inadequate at - for the ways medical and healthcare systems insist on distance and sanitising what should be a deeply personal and close experience, should loved ones require it.

Brooks' writing goes down like a robust glass of red in the reading ... her descriptions of the Flinders Island landscape are particularly delicious, cast against her unstable tripping towards some kind of marker for the other side of grief.

I was so deeply moved by this, as many will be, for thinking of people I've lost in my own life too - and how true Brooks' recommendations are, to aid the chores of death (little things like people making lists of all they do; what their passwords are, where the number for the plumber is kept, etc.) She is correct that death and dying bind all of us, and so I think everyone will find something to hurt or heal in this remarkable book.

And much like Brooks, I find it cruelly ironic that America is entering into this new wave of Trumpism fascism and Tony Horwitz - a journalist uniquely situated to report and comment on it! - isn't here to do so. I really do want to go and read his books 'Confederates in the Attic' and 'Spying on the South' now, and I think that's a gift Brooks has also given to readers and his legacy.

5/5