Memorial Days: A Memoir

Good grief! Loss and healing on Flinder’s Island –  a book review by Dr Anne Sarzin

Jews pray with the psalmist, ‘Spare me, that I may again be glad, before I go hence and be no more’. We value being glad, we long to rejoice; we love life, we celebrate simchas with passionate hearts and dancing feet. We focus on life, postponing thoughts of the Angel of Death. We fear the unexpected cessation of life for which we are unprepared, when shards of broken dreams pierce our reality.

A brutal amputation from life occurred on Memorial Day 27 May 2019 in Washington DC, when celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning author, journalist and The Wall Street Journal’s war correspondent Tony Horwitz, aged 61, collapsed and died on a city pavement. It shouldn’t have happened. He was in the throes of a frenetic national book tour spruiking the merits of his latest brilliant work Spying on the South. Instantly a widow, Geraldine Brooks plunged into a dizzying maelstrom, comforting their two sons, dealing with expressions of sympathy from friends and colleagues, as well as fielding enquiries from news media around the world. There was the shock of bereavement but no time to grieve.

The couple lived on Martha’s Vineyard, an island on Massachusett’s east coast, a place of rural streams and lush greenery, perfect for dogs, horses and a family happily and harmoniously contained in their idyllic cocoon. With the brutal rupture of their close-knit unit, a deeply traumatised Brooks confronted her new reality. In the initial days, weeks and months, threads of Jewish mourning observance were woven into the fabric of their lives, adapted to their secular beliefs and acculturated lifestyle.

Three years later, still ‘broken and bereft’, Brooks travelled to Flinder’s Island off the coast of Tasmania and, alone, moved into a shack where she could acknowledge her loss and reflect on their 35 years of marriage and a remarkable partnership that was personally enriching and professionally rewarding. The book she wrote there, Memorial Days: A Memoir, is an emotional and intellectual post-mortem of sorts, an unflinching examination of their union with its remembered strengths and fault lines. This leads her, ultimately, to a heart-rending yet purging catharsis, the result of her honest enquiring mind probing life with and without Tony.

The memoir is skilfully written, two stories side-by-side, alternate chapters juxtaposing the landscape of sorrow, from which she fled, with the island’s positive energies from sea and sand and sky that help and heal. The Flinder’s chapters are often lyrical and poetic, with lines that linger and haunt the reader with their beauty.

Bereavement literature has made huge strides since 1969 when psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross launched her ground-breaking book On Death and Dying, in which she listed the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—at that time almost the only guidelines for the grief-stricken, apart from religious texts for orthodox believers.  Where does Brooks’ song of sorrow fit within the bereavement genre? Will it set a new standard for the contemplation of grief and the practice of mourning?  Does it mirror the hermit’s reclusiveness, withdrawing to meditate on the transience of attachments?

And how does her quest for a contented spirit and peaceful mind reflect, if at all, Judaic values and practices? Brooks lists Chabad.org as one of her sources, and her text is strewn with Hebrew and Yiddish words.  Early on, she writes that she is ‘trapped in the maytzar, the narrow place of the Hebrew scriptures’. She notes the psalmist cries out from a narrow place ‘and is answered from the “wideness” of God’. She describes the family’s Jewishness and observance of the major festivals. ‘Tony was a Jew, and I became one just before we married because I didn’t want to be the end of an ancient lineage that had survived pogroms and the Shoah,’ she writes. But they weren’t religious and Brooks writes that their connection was with the traditions around culture and family.  She acknowledges that had she mourned according to strict Jewish tradition, ‘I would have had a road map through the grief, telling me exactly what to do and when to do it’; and she expands on these time-honoured stages. She writes of ‘aninut’, a period of intense grief, the shiva and the recital of kaddish, the shloshim of 30 days, and explains, ‘The idea is to provide an outlet for grief but also a framework to integrate the loss and move on with living’. After Tony’s death, the pressures and complications of daily life escalated and ruled out these observances. Her unexpressed, unspoken and buried grief rapidly festered.

Nonetheless, despite the reservations, there was a memorable gathering on Martha’s Vinyard, when the family’s Rabbi read Psalms, as well as Tony’s own poems. It was a simple and moving service, ‘After that reading, we stood under the apple boughs and said kaddish’.

Brooks has written a lyrical, poetic and searingly honest interrogation of grief, memory and resilience. While it is a very personal story of rehabilitating her heart and life, it will provide comfort to many who know what it means to have lost precious beings they loved.

Memorial Days: A Memoir

Author: Geraldine Brooks

Publisher: Hachette Australia

2025