The phone call that nobody wants to get was the phone call Geraldine Brooks got on May 27, 2019. Memorial Day.
“Is this the home of Tony Horwitz?”
“Yes.”
“Who am I speaking to?”
“This is his wife.”
Brooks, whose novel March won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, precisely recalls that opening exchange.
What followed, she writes in her lovely, poignant memoir, Memorial Days, was a blur, and remains so. Something about Horwitz, her husband of 35 years, collapsing on the street, something else about attempts to resuscitate him, then another thing about an ambulance bringing him to the hospital—as it happened, George Washington University, where Horwitz had been born 60 years earlier and where his father and grandfather had been surgeons.
Brooks was waiting to hear the logical thing—that Horwitz was in the O.R., that he had had a procedure, and, with that procedure complete, he was being kept overnight for observation.
Instead, the illogical thing: he was dead.
The particulars: Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The Wall Street Journal turned best-selling author (Confederates in the Attic, Baghdad Without a Map), died of myocarditis in Washington, D.C., while on tour to promote his latest—last—book, Spying on the South, an account of the perambulations of the 19th-century landscape architect and journalist Frederick Law Olmsted. (Horwitz died before learning that it, too, had hit the New York Times best-seller list.)
He was driven and intense both at his desk and on the StairMaster, a connoisseur of sunsets, a genius at friendship, an exuberant host at the couple’s home, on Martha’s Vineyard, a devoted father, an adoring husband.
Brooks dealt with the endless obligations and bookkeeping of death: reading condolence notes, responding to condolence notes, planning a memorial, helping her two sons cope, untangling the mess when the family’s health insurance was inadvertently canceled, quizzing the cardiologist—How had he let this happen?— who had been treating Horwitz for hereditary hypertension and high cholesterol. Per Horwitz’s instructions, burying his ashes, encased in a baseball mitt, in the field on Martha’s Vineyard where he’d played softball. Trying to remember to stop setting the table for four. And in one of the book’s most heart-twisting moments, accidentally running over and killing the family dog.
But mourning never quite got the attention it required. Nearly four years after Horwitz’s death, Brooks, a native of Australia, retreated to an island off the coast of Tasmania to tend to “the unfinished work of grieving.”
“I have come to realize that what I did that day in late May 2019 and what I was obliged to do in the days and months that followed have exacted an invisible price. I am going to this remote island to pay it.”
Nearly four years after her husband’s death, Geraldine Brooks retreated to an island off the coast of Tasmania to tend to “the unfinished work of grieving.”
She’d been to the island once before, with Horwitz, to research a novel that never got written. They’d both been struck by the haunted beauty of Flinders, where it could be “windy enough to blow the milk out of your tea,” but, like everything else having to do with the land Down Under, Horwitz never cared for it as much as Brooks did. “Smug and sun-struck” was how he referred to Australia in a journal entry. This attitude was the one major point of friction in their marriage.
Memorial Days unfolds in chapters that alternate between Brooks’s time on Flinders Island and her life in the United States—before, during, and after Horwitz.
The couple met when both were students at Columbia Journalism School. They couldn’t have been more different. Brooks, who was there on a fellowship, grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in Sydney with parents who were happy for her successes, but “they didn’t expect them and there was no sense that I’d disappoint them if I fell short.” Horwitz, meanwhile, grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, amid “a tribe of affluent high achievers.... It was understood that you must aspire to excellence, work hard, never stop striving.”
The two got involved during the last few weeks of class, in their case a less-than-ideal time to start a relationship. Horwitz was heading to the West Coast for an internship, and Brooks was joining the Cleveland bureau of The Wall Street Journal. A grad-school fling? Apparently not. A few weeks later, Horwitz ditched the internship for a job at a newspaper in Fort Wayne, Indiana—a mere four hours from Brooks’s apartment, in Ohio.
A year and a half later, they were married in France, later traveling the world for The Wall Street Journal. They settled down on Martha’s Vineyard in 2010 to write their books and raise their sons, one just out of college at the time of Horwitz’s death and the other a teenager at boarding school.
Brooks and Horwitz were blissful empty nesters, recently back from a trip to Oxford, England, and plotting how they might get back for a longer stay. “What big plans we had. How many more adventures there would be,” Brooks writes. “Plans. Oh, those.”
Brooks brought a cache of Horwitz’s journals to her rented shack, on Flinders, for reading matter, as well as some gifts from well-meaning friends—“books that recount that grim aftermath of losing a spouse.”
It may be the case that Memorial Days breaks no new ground in the densely populated “grieving spouse” genre. But Brooks brings to bear the descriptive powers, attention to detail, and straight shooting of the best reporters and a fine novelist’s grace and humanity.
Joanne Kaufman is a New York–based journalist and critic
