Death loves a heartache

Memorial Days: A Memoir *****
Geraldine Brooks
Little Brown

It was the kind of phone call that everyone dreads. But as author and journalist Geraldine Brooks reveals in her 11th book Memorial Days, the call she received at her home on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts on May 25, 2019, was particularly dreadful. It was at 18 minutes past 1pm that day when an unknown, exhausted resident doctor told Brooks that her beloved husband of 35 years, Tony Horwitz, had collapsed in a Washington DC street and couldn’t be revived.

Even now, nearly six years after that moment, Brooks recalls only fragmentary details of what that doctor said about the circumstances of Tony’s death. “Not my husband out on the road, energetically promoting his latest book,” thought Brooks. “My husband, younger than I am — hilarious, bursting with vitality.” She now recalls: “You can’t absorb that information. I needed to hear it several times before my ears would even comprehend it.” But the doctor became impatient with Brooks when she asked her to repeat those details. Instead the doctor gave her the number of the next resident on duty to the ER, brusquely told her to make sure the police in Washington DC could reach her, then hung up. The next doctor turned out to have as little empathy, and was even rude. Indeed, as Brooks goes on to write, it was only “the first brutality in what I would learn is a brutal, broken system”.

For Memorial Days is not only an unflinching reckoning with sudden loss as well as a luminous account of a remarkable love story, it also bears witness to a health system that is indeed as brutal as it is broken. Studded with jewel-like sentences that pierce the heart, this book must surely also one of the most beautiful, if heart-rending, memoirs written in recent years. Australian-born Brooks is, of course, no slouch when it comes to crafting magical sentences. She has garnered a devoted global readership along with numerous accolades for her non-fiction — notably Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence — as well as for novels such as Horse, The Secret Chord, Caleb’s Crossing, Year of Wonders and the Pulitzer Prize-winning March.

But Memorial Days, her shortest book, manages to inscribe itself deep into the heart and mind like no other. Realising in the moments after that life-changing call that if she let go she may never get back up, Brooks suppressed her all-too-human need to howl. “I made a kind of crazy decision in the moment that I couldn’t let go of my emotions because I had so many absolutely essential things to do, including protecting my kids’ emotions, so I couldn’t let myself do what the natural instinct was. I just had to push it way down. But there’s a real price to be paid for that, which I learnt over time.”

Dealing with the bureaucracy of death brought another round of brutalities for Brooks who had to travel to identity Tony’s body, which turned out to be, she says: “A nightmare. I wasn’t allowed to see his body and that really shocked me. I had to identify him from a photo of his corpse, which was another brutality.” Then despite the fact Horwitz had left a will, she says, “Some crazy person at the courthouse decided that my then 16-year-old son needed a court-appointment guardian to look after his interests. And I said absolutely not. I will not have my rights as a mother interfered with in that way. They would never do that to a living father.”

Not only did Brooks then have to deal with a court case about that matter, she discovered that their family medical insurance had been cancelled the moment Tony had died, but she had not been informed. “Who kicks widows and orphans off? And I’d paid for it; the rapacious amount that you have to pay. We had been completely exposed to the craziness of the American potentially bankrupting health system without being informed of that. So much of what happened was just wrong, and I’m not alone here. It’s not ‘woe is me.’ This is a system that is just so far off the track in lacking empathy for people.”

It’s perhaps not surprising that it took her another three years and a decision to hunker down to write, alone in a shack on remote, sparsely populated Flinders Island, off Tasmania, to deal with “that howl had become the beast in the basement of my heart. I need to find a way to set it free,” she writes. As she now explains: “It took me a long time to realise that because I was too busy pretending that I was OK when I wasn’t OK.” It took her a year to “crawl back” to her desk to complete her acclaimed 2022 novel Horse, then she put on a brave front throughout her book tour for it. “Twenty minutes of amusing patter about the woes of taking up horseback riding in your 50s — I mean it was all a big performance and I was exhausted, honestly, and that’s when I realised something had to change.”

Her narrative alternates between America in 2019, where she relives the weeks following Horwitz’s death, and Flinders Island in 2023, where she could be alone with her memories, particularly of her husband. “I could just think about him, undistracted by any of the normal or even pleasant disruptions of my ordinary life. He was a big personality. He was very funny, but he was also a man of immense moral purpose. Dedicated to trying to understand what made people think the way they thought and do the things they did. Totally open-hearted, very generous and funny. Funny hilarious — that’s what I miss the most.”

Brooks and Horwitz were not just partners in marriage but also partners in their work. During their years as foreign correspondents they had reported together and often had joint bylines, recounts Brooks. “Then we both turned to a different kind of book writing [but] we were still each other’s first and last editors. We talked about our work constantly.” Horwitz, an esteemed historian as well as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was on tour promoting his 10th book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide when he died. “He would have loved to have known the outpouring of appreciation for him from noted American historians. I don't think he knew how much he was loved and admired for his take on American history.”

Having won his Pulitzer for his reporting on the income inequality that was developing in America during the 80s and 90s and the reasons for it, Horwitz was a very early examiner of the American political divide. “His 1996 book Confederates in the Attic looked at how all the unfinished issues of the civil war were still in play, and they really doubled up into the active politics of America in the decade that followed that book. And when I watched that mob invading the capital on January 6,” says Brooks, “I thought, Tony probably knows about a quarter of those guys. He specialised in those neo-confederate groups, their mentality and the question of why the country is so divided.”

Before she met Horwitz, who needed to live in America, Brooks says her life had been directing her to Flinders Island, so she chose to stay there in solitude as a way of glimpsing what might have been. “His whole life’s work was understanding that crazy country and he needed to be there to do it. And I could do what I do really anywhere, so that was the one marital battle that I had to surrender.”

Already at work on a new novel, Brooks says it was only after reliving the loss of her husband that she realised the recommended clinical treatment for PTSD and complicated grief is exactly what she did. “You have to keep reliving it and trying to remember more detail every time. I learnt that. And gradually on Flinders, I was able to set aside all this stuff I’d been carrying. The biggest thing that happened there was the realisation that I had to stop being angry about not having the life that I’d expected to have and be grateful for the one I do have.

“You cannot control what happens,” she adds, “you can only control how you respond to it.”

GERALDINE BROOKS ON THE BOOKS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED HER

I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company: A Novel Of Lewis And Clark by Brian Hall

I absolutely love this, and it’s a model of how to conjure voices from the past. It’s a reimagining of the Lewis and Clark expedition across America and there are fascinating characters involved in that, apart from the main explorers Lewis and Clark. There was Sacagawea, who was a Shoshone woman and their guide, and Thomas Jefferson, who was very intimately involved. The book just grabs these different voices so perfectly.

The Wolf Hall Trilogy by Hilary Mantel

This is the historical fiction I admire the most and I bow down to the late Mantel and her magisterial trilogy. I think all three books are incredible. She captures Thomas Cromwell at such a molecular level it’s hard to believe she wasn’t Cromwell in a past life. The main thing is the way she inhabits his consciousness; it is as if you are breathing the mists of the Thames River and feeling the nap of the velvet fabrics he wore. It captures a man in full in a way I haven’t seen done [before].

The Persian Boy by Mary Renault

I love this book because it turned me on to the potential of historical fiction. It tells of Alexander the Great's years of service, but it’s a first-person account through the eyes of his Persian servant. I love the idea of a first-person narrator and I’ve I think emulated what she does, in that she can take you into a time and place where all the assumptions and belief systems are complexly different from ours, but yet the human heart and the emotions of love and fear are exactly the same, so you can identify with it. All her books about ancient history are wonderful. I think about her as the kind of gateway drug to real history, because after I read them in my teens I wanted to know more about ancient Greece and Persia.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

It’s a beautiful book set during the American Civil War and is about the interior life of a deserter. It’s kind of like The Odyssey by Homer, because it’s about a soldier trying to get home. The writing is just superb.

The Sun Walks Down by Fiona MacFarlane

Everybody should read this book — it’s a magnificent novel. It’s almost a pulse-pounding story about a child lost in the bush, but it ramifies and reverberates into all the lives around that child and gets into some very, very big themes of Australian history. It does so in a way that never distracts you from the storytelling.