Memorial Days

 

Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

Nonfiction - Memoir

2025

Finished on November 14, 2025

Rating: 4.5/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey to peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse.

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, D. C. sidewalk.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at Lambert’s Cove. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on Memorial Day 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 a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the varied ways those of other cultures grieve, such as the people of Australia's First Nations, the Balinese, and the Iranian Shiites, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.

I've only read two of Geraldine Brooks' novels (Year of Wonders and People of the Book), but now that I've read her recent memoir, I'm eager to try more of her books, especially Horse, which she completed after the death of her husband, Tony Horwitz. Memorial Days is an especially touching memoir in which Brooks recounts the days and weeks following the sudden death of her husband, while alternating chapters describe her retreat to Flinders Island three years later. 

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. To shut out the world and its demands. To remember my love and to feel the immensity of his loss. "Grief is praise," writes Martin Prechtel in his book The Smell of Rain on Dust, "because it is the natural way love honors what it misses."

and

When I finally fall asleep, I don't wake till late. It's a gray, windy morning, and the sea is high. I have only a loose notion of how I will spend my time here. I will walk and reflect, taking whatever nature cares to offer me. I will write down everything I can recall about Tony's death and its aftermath. I will allow myself time and space to think about our marriage and to experience the emotions I've suppressed.

It's been over twenty years since my husband and I received the shocking news of our eldest daughter's death, and much of Brooks' thoughts on grief resonated deeply with me. I remember reading Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking shortly after Rachel's untimely death, hoping to find some comfort in Didion's words. While I highlighted several passages, the book didn't speak to me like Memorial Days. (I still have my review for that book languishing in my draft folder, and I'm not sure why I never got around to publishing it. Maybe I'll work on that in the coming weeks.)

Random Thoughts:

Geraldine's husband died on Memorial Day in 2019. Our daughter was killed on Memorial Day weekend (but not the actual day) in 2005.

Geraldine wasn't able to share the awful news of Tony's death in person with her son, having to resort to phoning him at his boarding school.  

That call, the sound of my son's sobs, in a place too far to reach for him and hug him, was a new depth of darkness on a dark, dark day.

We were living in Nebraska, and our younger daughter was in college in Texas. Making that phone call was the worst thing I have ever had to do.

I woke out of it [a dream], and there was a minute or two when everything felt fine. He wasn't dead. How ridiculous to have thought that. Yesterday--that was a dream.

Then I came fully awake. I lost him a second time.

I remember the early days when we would wake from a fitful sleep, those first moments of consciousness when we had yet to remember Rachel was gone. Like Brooks, we felt as if we were losing her a second time, day after day after day.

My sons' stories are their own to tell. I will not do that here. I will only say that on the street corner, with Bizu sagged against me, I did not know how lonely his journey would be and how little I would be able to help him.

So often when parents are dealing with their own grief, children suffer the loss of their sibling (or parent) by themselves. It was all we could do to get through each day. I often wonder if we could have done more for Amy had she lived at home rather than so far away at college.

On Grief:

In her essay "On Grief" Jennifer Senior quotes a therapist who likens the survivors of loss to passengers on a plane that has crashed into a mountaintop and must find their way down. All have broken bones; none can assist the others. Each will have to make it down alone.

On Writing:

I have written this because I needed to do it. Part of the treatment for a "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 is what I have tried to do.

My husband and I each created blogs comprised of letters to Rachel in the early months after her death. Those therapeutic blogs helped us deal with our grief, as well as provide our friends and family with a glimpse into how we were coping. As Joan Didion said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”

Our culture is averse to sad. We want people to be happy. We're chagrined and slightly offended when they're not. There is a desire to cheer them up. And then, later, there will be a glancing at the wristwatch, a tapping of the foot if they cannot be cheered, if their grief is perceived to go on too long. I wish we could resist those things.

Memorial Days is a beautiful, honest, thought-provoking memoir that touched my heart. I wish I could reach out and give Geraldine a hug. 

Highly recommend.

People of the Book

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Fiction

2008 Penguin Books

Finished on February 15, 2022

Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

In 1996, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, which has been rescued from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images. When Hanna, a caustic loner with a passion for her work, discovers a series of tiny artifacts in its ancient binding—an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—she begins to unlock the book’s mysteries. The reader is ushered into an exquisitely detailed and atmospheric past, tracing the book’s journey from its salvation back to its creation.

In Bosnia during World War II, a Muslim risks his life to protect it from the Nazis. In the hedonistic salons of fin-de-siècle Vienna, the book becomes a pawn in the struggle against the city’s rising anti-Semitism. In inquisition-era Venice, a Catholic priest saves it from burning. In Barcelona in 1492, the scribe who wrote the text sees his family destroyed by the agonies of enforced exile. And in Seville in 1480, the reason for the Haggadah’s extraordinary illuminations is finally disclosed. Hanna’s investigation unexpectedly plunges her into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics. Her experiences will test her belief in herself and the man she has come to love.

Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is at once a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity, an ambitious, electrifying work by an acclaimed and beloved author.

People of the Book has languished on my shelf for over a decade, and I was finally inspired to give it a read after recently finishing Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell. I enjoy historical fiction and O'Farrell's novel brought to mind another novel about the Plague (Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks), which in turn motivated me to finally pick up Brooks' novel about the famed Sarajevo Haggadah. I was quickly drawn into the story and was fascinated by the history of the illuminated text, but about two-thirds into the novel it lost its momentum. I have mixed feelings about dual narratives and this one was especially frustrating. I struggled with the reverse chronology of the historical thread, annoyed that the characters I was just getting to know were replaced with a new set of individuals living not only in a different country, but also in a different century. People of the Book is educational and obviously well-researched, but it failed to hold my interest and I struggled to finish the final chapters. Perhaps my expectations were set too high.

Year of Wonders

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks
Historical Fiction
336 Pages
2001 Penguin Books
Finished on 8/12/08
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)



I used to love this season. The wood stacked by the door, the tang of its sap still speaking of forest. The hay made, all golden in the low afternoon light. The rumble of the apples tumbling into the cellar bins. Smells and sights and sounds that said this year it would be all right: there'd be food and warmth for the babies by the time the snows came. I used to love to walk in the apple orchard at this time of the year, to feel the soft give underfoot when I trod on a fallen fruit. Thick, sweet scents of rotting apple and wet wood. This year, the hay stooks are few and the woodpile scant, and neither matters much to me.

They brought the apples yesterday, a cartload for the rectory cellar. Later pickings, of course: I saw brown spots on more than a few. I had words with the carter over it, but he told me we were lucky to get as good as we got, and I suppose it's true enough. There are so few people to do the picking. So few people to do anything. And those of us who are left walk around as if we're half asleep. We are all so tired.

Publisher's Blurb:

When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition. As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love. As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders."

Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. Written with stunning emotional intelligence and introducing "an inspiring heroine" (The Wall Street Journal), Brooks blends love and learning, loss and renewal into a spellbinding and unforgettable read.

I love historical fiction: novels with fully realized characters (particularly strong female characters), richly textured plots and historical details that educate as well as entertain. Brooks has created a strong and believable narrator, reminiscent of Donna Cross's Joan (Pope Joan), Mary Doria Russell's Agnes (Dreamers of the Day), and Alan Brennert's Rachel (Moloka'i). In this fascinating debut novel, the author quickly draws the reader into an engrossing, suspenseful and surprisingly unpredictable story. It's one of those rare works that has a remarkable sense of time and place, touching the reader with powerful emotions as if they themselves had experienced the crisis.

When I have a tallow stub, I read until it gutters. Mrs. Mompellion always allowed me to take the stubs from the rectory, and although there are very few nowadays, I do not know how I would manage without. For the hour in which I am able to lose myself in someone else's thoughts is the greatest relief I can find from the burden of my own memories.

Brooks is a consummate storyteller and as I read the final paragraphs, I found myself planning ahead, hoping to find more books to read about the plague (always a sign of a good historical novel). I found the ending quite satisfying and even thought it left room for the possibility of a sequel.

You can listen to an interview with Geraldine Brooks on NPR's All Things Considered here.