I remember a night of inconsolable mourning when I played records way too loud, drank too much and scribbled pages into my tear-splattered journal.
This eruption of anger and sadness came more than two years after my longtime partner died at 32 of AIDS-related illness.
While I don’t recall what sparked the delayed reaction, it allows me to relate to Geraldine Brooks’ illuminating new memoir, which recounts the death of her husband, writer and historian Tony Horwitz. He died on Memorial Day in 2019 at age 60, but Brooks sequestered herself on a remote Australian island to write about him more than three years later.
Even in death, life intervenes. Or a pandemic. Or numbness, deadlines, details, denial.
“I have come to realize that my life since Tony’s death has been one endless, exhausting performance,” writes Brooks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (for “March”) and journalist. “I have cast myself in a role: woman being normal.”
In a powerful, slender book packed with quotable observations, she writes that she has not allowed herself “the wild wideness of an elaborate, florid, demonstrative grief.” It’s a great sentence, but Brooks’ tone is more clear-eyed than wild, more flinty and reportorial than florid, full of heart and sentiment; never gushy.
Being married to a writer as fine as Brooks would ease the sting of anyone’s death.
We live in an era when medicine often extends lives; Brooks’ husband of 35 years died suddenly, crumpling to the street one day while visiting Washington, D.C., near the end of an exhausting tour to promote his latest book. Strangers called for help. He was dead before an ambulance got him to the nearest hospital.