Review: Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks is an award winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist. She had a many decades long, happy marriage to author and celebrated journalist Tony Horwitz with whom she had two sons. Her beautiful and moving memoir, Memorial Days, is her account of Horwitz’s sudden, unexpected death while he was on book tour, her days of shock navigating ridiculous bureaucracy immediately following his death, and then four years later on the sparsely populated island of Flinders off the coast of Australia when she finally took the time and space to go and be fully immersed in her grief.

She weaves her narrative back and forth between that terrible Memorial Day weekend in 2019 and her 2023 remote sojourn in a couple of small cottages far from people and civilization to reflect back on her shared life and love with Horwitz. She recounts the news of her husband’s death and the aftermath in a straightforward, objective way, reporting her reactions, the logistics of a last minute flight from their home in Martha’s Vineyard to DC on a holiday weekend, trying the convince medical professionals she wants and needs to see her husband’s body, telling her sons about their father’s death—preferably before they heard about it thanks to the speed of our current news cycle, having to face and/or learn the marital tasks that were always Horwitz’s purview, and more, all while trying to finish the novel that would become Horse. The 2023 chapters are more contemplative and emotional, examining her deep loss, finding solace in nature and aloneness, and allowing herself to stop trying to move forward and just to feel whatever it is she needs to feel. Brooks is a gorgeous writer and this is an intimate, honest, and personal look into what it is to lose a beloved spouse.