Memorial Days

by Geraldine Brooks

I am taking something that our culture has stopped freely giving: the right to grieve.

“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.”

This will be, finally, the time when I will not have to prepare a face for the faces that I meet. The place where I will not have to pretend that things are normal and that I am okay.

I am not a deist. No god will answer my cries. The wideness I seek is in nature, in quiet, in time.

In her essay “On Grief” Jennifer Senior quotes a therapist who likens the survivors of loss to passengers on a plane that has crashed into a mountaintop and must find their way down. All have broken bones; none can assist the others. Each will have to make it down alone.

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

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

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.

I merely wish for the bereaved some time and space, however long, however short, for melancholy—what Victor Hugo described as the happiness of being sad.