Memorial Days

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

Geraldine Brooks received a phone call from a resident doctor at a hospital in Washington, DC, telling her that her husband, 60-year-old Tony Horwitz, collapsed on the street from a heart attack and did not survive. Tony was on a book tour and in excellent health by all outward appearances. Brooks was in shock when she heard this and was unable to process the information, and the doctor was cold and unsympathetic. She was in Massachusetts and asked for help about what to do next. The doctor said that Tony’s body had already been sent to the morgue and that the DC police would be in touch. Just moments before the fateful call, Brooks was speaking with her son on the phone, working on her book Horse, and reading an email from Tony. Now, she was alone, uncertain of what to do next, and suddenly overwhelmed by the news.

Three years after Tony’s death, Brooks travels to Flinders Island, off the coast of Tasmania, to do what she calls “the unfinished work of grieving” (7). She describes her grieving over the last three years as performative, unauthentic, and restrictive.