Memorial Days

by Geraldine Brooks

To remember my love and to feel the immensity of his loss. “Grief is praise,” writes Martín Prechtel in his book The Smell of Rain on Dust, “because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”

The wideness I seek is in nature, in quiet, in time.

As much as I expected, then hoped, then longed for him to see things differently, he never came to appreciate

“We imprint like baby goslings, on a type of horizon. On a type of sky,” Barbara Kingsolver told a reporter who asked her what she loved about Appalachia.

let sadness come and accept it. This is how it is now. Lonely.

All this, I want to share with Tony. I want him alive beside me, to feel the sting as the wind picks up, to bundle up on the deck and hold my hand through the late twilight,

What big plans we had. How many more adventures there would be for us, just as soon as

The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander, A

miss those laughs at the end of the day.

“On Grief” Jennifer Senior

All have broken bones; none can assist the others. Each

I’m sorry. Sorry I didn’t take better care of you. Sorry I wasn’t with you.

Sorry I can’t be with you now.

for a further thirty days, or sheloshim, the mourner doesn’t wear or buy new clothes, cut hair, listen to music, or take part in any celebrations. At the end of that thirty days, a spouse’s mourning observance is considered to be over.

“When a relation dies, we wait a long time with the sorrow,”

Islam a widow observes iddah, a three- or four-month partial withdrawal from the world. She can go to work and do necessary things, but she should not otherwise leave her home, dress up, or socialize.

I’ve always loved his hands. Big, meaty, peasant’s hands. His touch, insistent with desire. The weight of his arm flung over me before we fell asleep. I held his hand. I didn’t want to ever let it go.

I haven’t cried like that for Tony. I should have, the moment I received the news of his death. But I was afraid to give way to it.

How can I mourn my one loss amid such an abundance of death?

also felt anguish for all the people who had suffered losses on this day whose beloveds’ quirks and jokes and accomplishments would never be publicly noted. Whose

Tony has left me. He’s gone on without me. That part is clear enough. But I am the one who still mingles with our old friends, who has the nights out, who still savors the precious experiences of the living. He is the one excluded. He is the one missing out. So why am I angry at him? Not merely angry but enraged to an intensity I never felt toward him, even in our worst arguments.

I am not angry with Tony. I am furious with death.

Modern life is a juggling act, and if you don’t keep those flaming torches moving swiftly through the air—if you lose your focus and drop one—the whole stage might catch fire and collapse beneath you.

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Remembering how I used to enjoy feeding a big mob of people around my table, I have tried to continue. But without him, the gaggles will never be the same.

“Happiness writes white,” said the French author Henry de Montherlant; it is not easily inscribed on the page.

How could I have been so blind?

A memorial is like a joyless wedding, one to which the whole world is invited, and of that infinite set of possible guests, you have only a vague idea how many will show up. The imperative to get it right—to do justice to the life—is immense. It is another thing that a grieving person is ill-equipped to do.

“Do your work. It might not be your best work, but it will be good work, and it will be what saves you.”

Nature is a remorseless reminder of human insignificance. Daytime, nighttime—there’s no escape from the realization of how little we matter.

is an extraordinary chance to have existed at all, a rare and marvelous happenstance to have lived and experienced consciousness.

now, for all the beauty, for all the support of loving friends, I wanted to be elsewhere. I felt a desperate urge to run away from this empty home and its press of memories.

was miserable in Sydney, because Tony and I had been so happy there.

Oppressed by nostalgia, mourning the blackened bushland, the agony of burned animals, I could find no solace in Sydney.

So I ran away again, to Paris—a

take the weight of it and hurl it back into the air, another howl. Under again, then toward the east, the place of the first light. The light Tony will never see again. I wail for him, for the life he no longer has, for the life we no longer have together.

resolve to appreciate the life I have had, surrounded by love, in another rare and beautiful place.

I have written this because I needed to do it. Part of the treatment for “complicated grief” is to relive the trauma of the death, returning to the moments again and again, striving each time to recall more detail. That’s what I have tried to do.

“The predicament when writing about a sudden, untimely death: the more you remember, the more elusive that death becom...

suffering it in the way I needed to suffer.

Make it safe for people to talk about Tony,

The beauty and the suffering are equally true.”

grief I had been carrying for the life I would have had, the life I had counted on having.

That life is gone; nothing will get it back. I have accepted that. I have embarked on making the life I have as vivid and consequential as I can. Do your work, said Bader Ginsburg. So, that is what I do.

And finally, in whatever way works for you, tell your story.

“Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless,” he said.

He will be dead, in the present, in my present, for as long as I am alive. I cannot change that story. I can only change myself. Write the truest thing you know, said old man Hemingway. Dear reader, this is it.