Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

In the course of a week I read two memoirs by two celebrated authors about the experience they had with suddenly losing a beloved spouse. Geraldine Brooks suddenly lost her husband, fellow writer Tony Horwitz, when he collapsed on a Chevy Chase sidewalk and was then pronounced dead at a D.C. hospital Memorial Day weekend, 2019. He was 60 years old, and while he carried a myriad of risks and mitigating circumstances for heart disease, he died of something more rare, myocarditis. She lost him suddenly, she was not with him, and she struggled mightily in his absence for a myriad of reasons--many of which she shares in this slim volume. There is some sense of hope that sharing her pain might help others to avoid falling victim to what she went through. She wrote this 4 years on, still not moving forward, much less over it, and she closes with some things she wished she had done to prepare for losing her spouse. We will all be either the one left behind or the one who dies first, so in some ways it makes sense to heed the cautionary tales she tells, but what is most real about this is just how hard it is to lose someone that you still deeply love and are expected to carry on in their stead, be the parent your children need, to be the person you were going to be if they had gone on living, and just how frighteningly hard that is to accomplish.