Memorial Days

by Geraldine Brooks

“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.

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.

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.

“In his writing he was always at his funniest, his smartest, his most thoughtful, and his most courageous and adventurous…. Prose so good it would make you laugh until you cried. I recognize now that his books are not the shade of him. They’re the quintessence of his soul, the distillation of a great adventurer and a good man. He’s still with us through those books on our bedside tables, by the tub, in our handbags, and on our reading chairs—in our hearts, in our minds, in his words. At his best, whenever we choose to seek him out. Given the inevitability of loss, I can think of no greater consolation than that.”

“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.

Make it safe for people to talk about Tony, he said. The first time he had ventured out after losing his beloved wife, Gretchen, no one had mentioned her, and he had been hurt and angered. He realized that he needed to speak of her first, to allow others to do so. This was excellent advice, and I still follow it, bringing Tony with me into every conversation.

One thing was apparent right away: my time alone in nature restored me, as nature always does. In the novel Tom Lake, Ann Patchett’s protagonist observes: “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.”

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.

Our culture is averse to sad. We want people to be happy. We’re chagrined and slightly offended when they’re not. There is a desire to cheer them up. And then, later, there will be a glancing at the wristwatch, a tapping of the foot if they cannot be cheered, if their grief is perceived to go on too long. I wish we could resist those things.

“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.