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.”

Because it has been more than three years and, contrary to appearances, I am not at all okay. I have come to realize that my life since Tony’s death has been one endless, exhausting performance. I have cast myself in a role: woman being normal.

“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. My imprinted horizon is the Pacific Ocean, framed by sandstone headlands and sinuous gum trees; my pellucid sky contains the Southern Cross.

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, to watch the moon rise, lustrous as a pearl, over Mount Killiecrankie.

Tony, who traveled the world as a foreign correspondent, covering stories from sniper pits in Sarajevo and boats under shelling in Beirut harbor, who ducked rifle fire during the Romanian revolution and reported on two wars in the Persian Gulf, who hitchhiked across the Australian outback and followed the Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook from the Arctic Circle to the edge of the Antarctic ice shelf, had come home to die. He had been pronounced dead in the hospital where he was born, after collapsing a scant few blocks from the brown-shingled Victorian house in Chevy Chase in which he grew up.

The crumpled piece of newspaper in the plastic bag must have been in his hand when he fell. It was a long article, making the case for reparations for enslavement.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, in the middle of the journey of our lives, that’s where we believed ourselves to be.

Instead, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, and in that twilight forest I find myself all alone.

(I am dismayed to learn that there is no obligation to mourn adoptive parents, only biological. It seems an unfair diminishment of parent, child, and the infinite capacity for love.)

It was a life-altering journey. For the first time I experienced a place where nature is big and we are small. I understood that wilderness was what my human brain and body had been adapted to for millennia and that the only life I’d known, in a crowded city, was a profoundly unnatural habitat for my species.

I stroked his cheek. It was cool, as if he’d just come out of the ocean after a sunset swim.

He dropped dead. That quotidian phrase so carelessly tossed off before it had a particular, personal meaning. Everybody wants to die normally, you know. But not so soon. Not so soon.

It’s not as if I’m a fearless person.

I am a nervous passenger in fast cars; I’m also scared to go far from shore when swimming in rough surf. But I am never worried about being alone—not in the city and certainly not in the bush. I put it on the same shelf of unlikely risks as being struck by lightning or swallowed by quicksand.

There is no sound but the waves and the gentle susurrus of the casuarinas. And as dark falls, the wind drops, and the white caps subside, not even that.

There was a strangeness to the event. A discordant vibration. So many joyful summer gatherings had occurred on this lawn. Two weddings, numerous book parties, parties for no reason other than Tony’s love of a party. As the crowd gathered, I kept catching almost-glimpses of him in a turn of a shoulder, the glint of late-afternoon sunlight on blond hair. I noticed Nathaniel, wrung out with jet lag, leaning for support on his girlfriend. I noticed Bizu as he greeted friends with a gracious dignity, his comportment suddenly adult. I noticed his eyes on me, anxious to see if I was doing okay, knowing I dreaded this as much as he did.

Phenocrysts are show-offs, five times bigger than surrounding crystals in the rock. I wonder if diamonds are phenocrysts. When I look it up, I learn that the answer is no. They are xenocrysts—foreign gems—carried up from the earth’s mantle, torn off the sides of the magma pipes surging up through the crust.

Myocarditis typically affects young, healthy, athletic people, males twice as often as females. Although it is classified as rare, it is the third leading cause of sudden death in children and young adults.

I didn’t know I would feel this way. I certainly hadn’t been afraid to be by myself, but I hadn’t realized how much I would embrace it. Now it is beginning to feel like an addiction. I am craving the absolute serenity of an unpeopled landscape.

Even more rare and marvelous, in this riven, aching world, to have thrived. To have found love, joy, security, fulfillment.

The great American divide—North-South, urban-rural, rich-poor—had been his subject. I figured he’d probably had a beer with at least a dozen of the guys swarming those marble halls. It was a story he was made to cover, and it made me sad that he couldn’t.

“I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true.”

At home now I make more time for the beauty. I make it a point to notice the trees, in all their various seasonal personalities. To be with the critters that share my space. A nest of baby rabbits, a coin-sized painted turtle hatchling, a fluffy mallard duckling out for its first swim—these encounters, more than almost anything else, have the power to elevate me out of sadness.