I’m not mad for historical fiction but have read the book-group-big-hitters, such as Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks and more recently, The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell. I enjoyed these books but it doesn’t mean that authors of historical fiction are on my automatic-read list. Grief memoirs, however… hello automatic-read list.

Geraldine Brooks’s memoir, Memorial Days, describes two periods of time – firstly, Memorial Day 2019, when Brooks received a phone call to inform her that her husband, author Tony Horwitz, had collapsed and died on a footpath in Washington.

In books and movies no one gets this news alone. Someone comes to the door. Someone makes sure you’re sitting down, offers you water, asks whom you’d like them to call.
But no one had done me this kindness. A tired young doctor had picked up my husband’s cell phone, on which he had never set up a passcode, and hit the speed dial for HOME.
The first brutality in what I would learn is a brutal, broken system.

Secondly, her time spent years later on the rugged and remote Flinders Island, off the coast of Tasmania. There, in an isolated shack overlooking the ocean, Brooks begins her own ‘memorial days’ –

I am taking something that our culture has stopped freely giving: the right to grieve. … This will be, finally, the time when I will not have to prepare a face for the faces that I meet. The place where I will not have to pretend that things are normal and that I am okay. Because it has been more than three years and, contrary to appearances, I am not at all okay.

Elements of Brooks’s experience are given prominence, notably the shock of Tony’s unexpected death and the particular grief associated with that, as well as the exhausting and demanding ‘administration’ associated with a death. Although she wanted to shut herself and their sons away, Brooks was compelled to begin funeral arrangements, deal with Tony’s publisher, navigate the ‘red-tape’ associated with death, and takeover management of household finances.

The chapters describing the shock and the frenzy of activity immediately after Tony’s death, are interspersed with quietly contemplative chapters describing her time on Flinders Island and her reflections on mourning as a practice in other cultural and religious traditions. Parts of this are informative (she examines the mourning rituals of Australia’s First Nations, Orthodox Jews, the Balinese, and the Iranian Shiites) but it was Brooks’s spare and beautifully written observations about the natural environment that won me.

The limpets are huge and designer-striped in shades of sienna, cream, and russet.

I wake before dawn and watch the sunrise silvering the concave curves of the clouds and then turning them roseate, strewing the sky with pink petals.

Even though we are moving toward the end of summer, in this deep latitude light leaves the sky at a stately pace.

It is in nature and solitude that Brooks finds the emotional space to process Tony’s death.

Scattered, scoured, angular blocks of siltstone, honeycombed by wind and sea. Large K-feldspar phenocrysts. Basalt xenoliths… There is nothing like a geological timeline to put you in your place.

In terms of grief-education, the shock of a sudden death is described well – Brooks explores her physical, cognitive, social and emotional experience of grief. However, I was slightly disappointed to see the ‘stages of grief’ perpetuated –

I had vaulted right over denial, anger, bargaining, and depression and landed in the soft sands of acceptance… [but] The vault I had attempted was impossible. Those sands were quicksand.

Kübler-Ross’s ‘stages of grief‘ model was originally designed to describe the emotional shock people might experience following diagnosis of a terminal illness. Importantly, the model was never intended to be linear – there is no ‘pattern’ or way of predicting how a person’s grief will unfold. It’s a little frustrating that the model has taken a firm hold in popular culture, as it creates unrealistic expectations (which in turn compounds a person’s experience).

Also well described is the loneliness of grief. As I frequently remind my own clients, as much as you may want to, you can’t do someone else’s grieving for them. Of her son, Bizu, Brooks says, ‘…I did not know how lonely his journey would be and how little I would be able to help him.‘

Memorial Days is a welcome addition to my shelf of grief memoirs – thoughtful, reflective, and superbly written.

4/5

There are pockets of samphire – sea asparagus – the ocean’s best crunchy, salty snack.