Memorial Days, Geraldine Brooks

A quick read. Deeply personal and required reading if you have lost a loved one, which all of us have It was Memorial Day 2019 when the author received the news that her husband, author and journalist, Tony Horwitz, had collapsed and died on a sidewalk in Washington DC during his own book tour. The days and months that followed were ones of severe grief, disillusionment, but also the requirement of complex tasks when a spouse has passed from a sudden death that didn’t provide Brooks the time to properly grieve for him. Three years later, still heartbroken and suffering, she booked a flight to Flinders Island, a remote island off the coast of Tasmania. She stayed alone in a house she rented on a rugged stretch of coast, to begin the process of mourning the only way she knew how, by revisiting the 35-year marriage to her husband. She also pondered the ways other cultures deal with mourning and began to pull back her own layers of grief to try and return to herself. A loving memoir and moving testament on how we as humans handle grief and try to move on with our lives after such a horrific loss.