Memorial Days

by Geraldine Brooks

The only end some things have is the end you give them. Tim Winton, The Riders

“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.”

That howl has become the beast in the basement of my heart. I need to find a way to set it free.

“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.

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.

After the burial, a Jewish mourner sits shiva. For seven days she stays home and essentially does nothing but accept condolence visits and reflect on the life of the lost person.

A minyan (for the Orthodox, ten men) gathers daily with the bereaved to say kaddish, the death prayer that does not mention death. It is a time of complete withdrawal from the world and its demands.

In 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. She may not enter into any agreement to marry during this time.

For Filipino Catholics the ninth day after death is significant: mourners gather once again to pray.

Hindus, after a cremation, mourn intensely for thirteen days. Mourners are considered unclean and must avoid sacred spaces and adhere to other taboos that set the mourning period apart from ordinary life.

For Buddhists, ceremonies and prayers for the dead are conducted every seven days for seven weeks. After the ceremony on the forty-ninth day, the spirit of the deceased ...

In Bali’s Hindu and animist traditions, bodies are buried for as long as it takes to gather the necessary resources for the elaborate cremation ritual needed to...

There’s one thing you must be able to do as a novelist, and that is understand how your characters explain their own actions to themselves.

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

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

May my own death be just as sudden. Spare me the crematorium. Put me straight into the soil. I want to be part of this dance.

“Our marriage still the one thing I feel is utterly mine, created out of clean cloth, no taint of all that makes me uncomfortable, my refuge. Without her, god knows…really sure of nothing but her these days, of my love for her which I wish I knew better how to express.”

“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.

“You taught me the courage of stars before you left, how light carries on endlessly, even after death.” Those lyrics are from a song titled “Saturn,” by Ryan O’Neal, who performs as Sleeping at Last. It is a song about a deathbed conversation, the imparting of wisdom from a dying person to a beloved survivor: that it is an extraordinary chance to have existed at all, a rare and marvelous happenstance to have lived and experienced consciousness. Even more rare and marvelous, in this riven, aching world, to have thrived. To have found love, joy, security, fulfillment.

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.

“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.