Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks is a perfect book for any reader who has loved Brooks’s novel Horse, or Caleb’s Crossing, March, or The Secret Chord. Her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Tony Horowitz (Confederates in the Attic, Spying on the South, Baghdad without a Map) died unexpectedly from a heart attack on a sidewalk in Washington, DC May 27, 2019, a day before leaving on an eight-day book tour. They had been married for 35   years, worked together as foreign correspondents for the Wall Street Journal, been each other’s sounding boards, editors, companions and soul mates.

This is a book about grieving and a memorial to the unsuspecting bliss of happy days, sharing ups and downs and ups again, finding time and place to deal with the loss and learning, then – one step at a

time – to return to work and go forward.  It’s in the genre of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, about coming to grips with the loss of husband John Gregory Dunne in 2003, but Brooks offers much more in the way of fine writing. Memorial Days is enriched for her clever turns of phrase, her painterly rendering of the natural world around her, against the honestly conveyed backdrop of grieving.

In 2023, Brooks returned to her native Australia to a primitive shack on a secluded island, to take long walks on the beach, to read and write, but most of all to remember. In the Australian setting, she is free finally to deal with her loss. At home on The Vineyard, she is surrounded by hordes of friends and an actively caring community, whose best of intentions have protected her from the hard work of grieving.The process, she writes, is to “begin to feel…. an unclenching of the soul.” An environmentalist, she captures the details of the island’s wildlife, its birds, its grasses, its rock formations, the weather patterns. She alternates chapters between time spent in that isolated cabin living in the bush and life in the rural area of West Tisbury in Martha’s Vineyard. (She is the next-door neighbor and good friend of my brother- and sister-in-law Fred and Jeanne Barron.)

One  of the most memorable takeaways from this book is a quote from another author, Martin Prechtel, who wrote, “Grief is praise because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.” It’s a lot to think about. The book is a gift not only to those who knew Tony Horowitz or knew his work, but also to anyone who must deal with the terrible impact of the loss of a dearly loved one.

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