Memorial Days

by Geraldine Brooks

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.

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.

The next spring, exactly a year after his death, just as I became aware that I had lived through all four seasons without him, a mass of tulips appeared in my own garden. Lipstick red, chrome yellow; others with glossy petals of variegated red and yellow. I hadn’t planted them: I never plant tulips since squirrels too often eat the bulbs.

Her empathy was vast, her activism relentless. You did everything you could about what you could change. You didn’t sit around crying over what you could not.

I have this in common with every single one of all the thousands of people down there, living their varied, vivid lives. We might have not one other single thing in common, but we’ve got this. We will all die. We will all grieve. Women lose their husbands. Widows, widows everywhere.

Everybody wants to die normally, you know. But not so soon. Not so soon.

I do know this: My job is to carry his light. To keep him vibrantly illuminated for my sons, and for their children—his grandchildren—whenever they get here.

The sound, loud and raw in this world of silence, is shocking. I let myself sink again, come up and face the blazing colors of the sky. The going down of the sun seems to mark a more final ending than simply a day. This day, any day, could be the last day. We all know that. Now I feel it.

I have a proposal that is an individual practice, something anyone can do—a simple habit for people in a long partnership. Jot down all the tasks you don’t bother to mention that keep the household afloat, the set of torches that only you have learned to juggle. All the little things your partner didn’t expect to need to know, until the day they never expected to happen.

I suggest that everyone make a document. Call it Your Life: How It Works and periodically update it. If I’d had such a document, it would have freed me from time-consuming material tasks and allowed more space to do the necessary work of grieving.

When he was still in hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, Salman Rushdie surfaced to make a speech at Columbia University. “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.

Write the truest thing you know, said old man Hemingway.