On May 27, 2019 --- Memorial Day --- Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Tony Horwitz collapsed and died on a Washington, DC sidewalk, less than two weeks before his 61st birthday. In her spare, beautiful memoir, MEMORIAL DAYS, his widow --- bestselling novelist and Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks --- offers both a frank and moving portrait of her grief and a touching tribute to her late husband and the life they shared for more than three decades.

Brooks received the news of Horwitz’s death in an abrupt phone call from a resident at George Washington University Medical Center while alone at the home on Martha’s Vineyard that they had shared since 2005. Their elder son, Nathaniel, was on a plane to Australia with his girlfriend, completing a post-college trip before starting his first job in Boston. Their younger son, Bizu, adopted at age five from Ethiopia and now a high school sophomore, was at his boarding school.

As she raced to catch the plane in Boston that would take her to her brother-in-law’s home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Brooks describes the fog of bewilderment in which she lived as she struggled to process the reality that her husband “with the toned body of a six-day-a-week gym rat” could be gone. “He’s way too busy living,” she writes. “He cannot possibly be dead.” Her every attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible falls short.

"Most people will find it easy to read MEMORIAL DAYS in a single sitting. The hard-earned lessons it imparts are ones that will endure for a lifetime."

When he died, Horwitz indeed was busy living and working. He was nearing the end of an exhausting book tour to promote SPYING ON THE SOUTH, a work he produced while adhering to a punishing regimen that saw him consuming Nicorette gum by the box, nibbling the stimulant Provigil, and washing that down with pints of coffee, chasing those hours of concentrated effort with an intense workout at the gym. To bring himself down at night, Horwitz consumed large quantities of wine that had his cardiologist expressing concern about his drinking. When he reported a pair of episodes of shortness of breath during exercise, it was enough for the doctor to schedule a battery of tests. Sadly, that intervention came too late.

Alternating with terse sections that describe the aftermath of Horwitz’s death, ending with the autopsy result that reveals its cause, and then the interment of his ashes in August 2019, is the story of what Brooks calls her own “memorial days” --- the several weeks she spent in February 2023 on tiny, remote Flinders Island, located off the northeast coast of Tasmania. The island, once part of a land bridge that connected Tasmania to Australia, Brooks’ homeland, is home to barely a thousand people. Over the course of her visit, she resides alone in two different tiny shacks, the first of which is so spartan it lacks indoor plumbing.

Nearly four years after Horwitz’s passing, Brooks recognizes that she’s never taken the time to properly mourn her loss, and this extended interlude is her attempt to compensate for the absence of an adequate expression of her grief. Fresh from a book tour for HORSE, she confesses to erecting “a facade that I have hidden behind, a fugitive from my own feelings.” She purposefully had dammed up a necessary flood of tears, admitting her fear “that if I started, I mightn’t be able to stop,” but now she is determined to “let sadness come and accept it.”

Brooks wanders the gorgeous island, nourished by striking topography that features a “juxtaposition of earth and water even more marvelous than Big Sur,” as she takes in its alluring flora and exotic nocturnal wildlife --- wallabies, pademelons and wombats. She spends hours paging through Horwitz’s journals dating back to their days as graduate students at Columbia Journalism School, where they met in 1983, and reflecting on their illustrious professional careers, conjoined for a time when they both worked as correspondents for the Wall Street Journal and shared a prize for their coverage of the first Iraq War.

Inevitably, Brooks feels “furious with death,” cheated out of what she’d always envisioned as many years of shared experience and accomplishment. Her emotions are a reminder that no days are promised to any of us, and time together can’t be taken for granted at any age. But by the end of her sojourn, her solitary time in nature has brought her a measure of peace.

Despite her book’s brevity, Brooks makes space for both informative and highly practical material. She describes the memorial customs of various traditions, including the Judaism she converted to when she married Horwitz in 1984, and the one known as “Sorry Business” among Australia’s First Nations People, as well as revealing the tragic persecution of the native people on Flinders Island in the 1830s.

Along with navigating some of the difficulties of the Massachusetts probate system, she recounts the terror of finding out that the family’s health insurance had been cancelled to illustrate the pitfalls of a marital division of labor. In their case, domestic chores fell to her, while Horwitz managed family finances. In the absence of meaningful overlap, she suggests that each spouse create a “Your Life: How It Works” document to make it easier for the survivor to navigate a solo future.

Brooks mentions Joan Didion’s THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING in passing, and the parallels between her experience and Didion’s are inescapable. But as she makes clear, every experience of grief is singular, and when it’s described with the emotional intelligence and eloquence of a writer like Brooks, it’s well worth adding to the sizable pile of books on this universal subject. Most people will find it easy to read MEMORIAL DAYS in a single sitting. The hard-earned lessons it imparts are ones that will endure for a lifetime.