Book Review: Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

By Guest Columnist Lauren von Foregger

Grief is the great equalizer, the near universal experience. Indiscriminatory, grief can, for example, unexpectedly and temporarily render legs useless, make breathing impossible or produce great animal sounds from a mere human body. It can happen anywhere, to any one of us.

     Grief lurks; it bides its time and often strikes at the most inopportune moment. It doesn’t follow social constructs of appropriateness; it does not wear a watch. It puts us all on an even playing field.

     Geraldine Brooks’ memoir Memorial Days offers readers a poignant, unflinching look at her jagged journey toward peace following the sudden and unexpected death of her husband. On Memorial Day, 2019, Brooks receives the shattering news that Tony, her sixty-year-old, healthy, fun and vibrant husband, has collapsed and died on a sidewalk in Washington, D.C.

     What follows is a whirlwind of tasks and, for years, Brooks suppresses the crushing weight of her grief. Three years later, she sets out to find some semblance of reconciliation within herself, seeking solace in the one place that feels most natural to her: Tasmania. It is there, on the rugged island off the coast of Australia, that Brooks faces the raw, repressed grief she has been running from.

     This is not Geraldine Brooks’ first venture into the world of writing. Among her long list of works is her 2020 novel Horse, which topped the fiction charts for weeks, becoming a beloved fixture in the hearts of readers, mine included. At the time I read it, I had no idea that Brooks had written the second half of that novel after her husband’s death, during the early, uncertain days of the pandemic.

     But Memorial Days is something much more visceral than a novel. In Memorial Days, Brooks’ narrative shifts between the days and weeks following Tony’s death and her time spent in Tasmania. Both timelines are imbued with humor and pain, as they wrestle with the vulnerability of being human, the process of grief, and the cost of moving forward.

     “I have vaulted right over denial, anger, bargaining and depression and landed in the soft sands of acceptance,” Brooks writes. “I now know that, even as I wrote those words, I was in denial. I didn’t believe he was dead. I expected him to come bursting through the door, throwing clothes out of his bag, loudly regaling me with funny tales from the road. The vault I had attempted was impossible. Those sands were quicksand.”

     Alone on Tasmania, Brooks treks through rugged terrain, reads through her late husband’s journals, gathers sea asparagus, and sleeps by the fire of a woodstove. She wears the same clothes for days on end, throws herself into the cold sea, watches sunsets. But mostly, she waits. She gives her sorrow the space it demands, allowing it the time it needs to release itself.

     Brooks writes about society’s tendency to rush grief, to push those mourning to feel better, to move on.

     “I wish we could resist those things,” she writes, lamenting how people often expect grief to be neatly packed away in a reasonable time. Grief, however, is ever-present, lingering on the edges, patiently shaking its head. It understands it is here for the long haul, and so, too, must we remain for the unrelenting sadness of those we love, even after we feel it should have been properly stowed away.

     “When I started to write fiction,” Brooks writes, “I came across a piece of advice on the craft of novel writing. Your task, as a novelist, is to keep pushing your protagonist’s head under water throughout the narrative. But when you get to the end, you must decide: Will you sink them, or let them swim? I put my face in the clear, briny water. I stretch out my body. I swim.”

     Memorial Days is for anyone who has wrestled with what it truly means to move forward after loss. It’s a story for all of us.