A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and belated healing after the unexpected death of her larger-than-life husband, Tony Horwitz, from the bestselling, award-winning author of ”Horse.”
Many cultural and religious traditions around the world put up guardrails around the bereaved: those who are grieving are expected step away from the world for a period of forty or more days, bystanders to quietly help. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists-health insurance boondoggles, concerns about making ends meet, even reaching our loved ones' remains, can prove a challenge. 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 start a family, raising 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: booking travel to reach Tony's body, navigating thickets of financial bureaucracy, resuming work, caring for her two young adult sons. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf at the center of her life.
Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself time to mourn the dynamic, singular Tony. In a shack on a pristine but rugged coastline where she often went days without seeing another soul, Geraldine drew on Jewish, Shiite Islamic, and Eastern Orthodox Christian traditions to create her own grieving ritual in the hope of moving forward, not without sadness but with some semblance of peace. Fueled by the deep conviction that our approach to death and grieving must change, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a marriage between soulmates that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.
