Compiled by Bruce Rickard
The author, Thomas Newkirk, writes about ‘owning the passages that speak to us.’ He says,
“We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words…and own passages that speak to us.”
Thomas Newkirk ‘The Art of Slow Reading’
My Book Notes are just that, ‘owning the passages that speak to me.’ By recording the words and sentences that capture my attention I am ensuring that they are not lost to me and will continue to challenge and inspire.
My Book Notes are not a summary of the text. I am not attempting to condense what the writer is wanting to communicate, nor am I providing an outline.
My Book Notes are not a review of the text. I am not analysing what has been written, nor am I making a comment.
I’m pleased to share with you My Book Notes and hope you might be motivated to consider reading the books for yourself. All the books listed have contributed to my thinking and enjoyment so come with my tick of approval.
Featured:
Memorial Days
Geraldine Brooks
ISBN: 0733651070
Category: Non-Fiction, Biography, Personal Memoir
Themes: Grief, Sorrow, Loss, Death, Family, Bereavement, Mourning, Memories, Rituals, Beauty, Isolation
Date: June 2025
Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
My Book Notes:
It was Memorial Day, 2019, when Geraldine Brooks received news that her husband Tony Horwitz had collapsed and died, far from home, in the middle of his own book tour. The complex tasks required in the face of such a sudden death left her no time to properly grieve for him.
Three years later, still feeling broken and bereft, she booked a flight to Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania. There, she pondered the ways other cultures deal with mourning and finally seized the time and space she needed for her own grief. Alone on a rugged stretch of coast, she revisited a thirty-five-year marriage filled with risk, adventure, humour, and love.
* * * * * * *
The caller ID was hard to read in the bright sunlight. Only as I brought the handset close could I make out Gw HSP on the display. Don’t tell me I picked up a darn fundraising call…
Now the dial tone burred. I stared at the handset. My legs started to shake. But I couldn’t sit down. I paced across the room, feeling the howl forming in my chest. I needed to scream, weep, throw myself on the floor, rend my garments, tear my hair.
But I couldn’t allow myself to do any of those things.
Because I had to do so many other things.
* * * * * * *
Tony died on Memorial Day, the American holiday that falls on the last Monday in May and honours the war dead.
When I get to Flinders Island, I will begin my own memorial days. I am taking something that our culture has stopped freely giving: the right to grieve. To shut out the world and its demands. To remember my love and to feel the immensity of his loss. ‘Grief is praise,’ writes Martín Prechtel in his book The Smell of Rain on Dust, ‘because it is the natural way love honours what it misses.’
* * * * * * *
I haven’t honoured Tony enough, because I have not permitted myself the time and space for a grief deep enough to reflect our love.
This will be, finally, the time when I will not have to prepare a face for the faces that I meet. The place where I will not have to pretend that things are normal and that I am okay. Because it has been more than three years and, contrary to appearances, I am not at all okay. I have come to realise that my life since Tony’s death has been one endless, exhausting performance. I have cast myself in a role: woman being normal.
* * * * * * *
I have been trapped in the maytzar, the narrow place of the Hebrew scriptures. In the Psalms, the singer cries out to God from the narrow place and is answered from the wideness” of God. Our English word “anguish” means the same thing as the Hebrew maytzar. It is from the Latin for narrowness, strait, restriction. I have not allowed myself the wild wideness of an elaborate, florid, demonstrative grief. Instead, it has been this long feeling of constriction, of holding it in and tamping it down and not letting it show.
* * * * * * *
I am not a deist. No god will answer my cries. The wideness I seek is in nature, in quiet, in time.
And I have chosen this place, this island, deliberately. Before I met Tony, my life had begun directing me here. Falling in love with him derailed that life, set me on an entirely different course. Now I might glimpse what I have been missing, walk that untraveled road, consider the person I might have become.
* * * * * * *
Then the home phone rang. Detective Evelyn from the DC police. He was gentle, considerate. I was thankful for this unexpected kindness after the brusque doctor. He was able to tell me exactly where Tony had been walking when he collapsed, and that the first to see him lying on the ground was a former Vietnam medic who yelled for someone to call 911 as he checked for vital signs. The detective described how women from the yoga studio across the road ran out with a defibrillator and in minutes two ambulances from DC and one from Chevy Chase, because Tony had collapsed right on the line between the District of Columbia and the Maryland suburbs. Both teams of EMTS had worked on him – the detective was not sure for how long before they rushed him to the downtown emergency room.
* * * * * * *
I couldn’t make him into an Australian. As much as I expected, then hoped, then longed for him to see things differently, he never came to appreciate the country as I do. In his journal in 1994, ten years into our marriage, he wrote: ‘A stunningly civilised land next to America but at the same time smug and sun-struck… not a place I want to live, something I can’t even discuss with G. without her becoming tearful or angry.’
* * * * * * *
It was one of the few things we argued about, and it was an argument I lost. Marriage is constant compromise. On many important matters Tony was the one who gave way. For years he shaped his career around mine, following me first to Cleveland, then to Sydney, then to Cairo. But on this most fundamental issue, he prevailed. I never fully reconciled to it.
* * * * * * *
It is more than landscape for me. It is also a national personality. An informal, self-deprecating style of moving through the world with a grin on your face and a hand ready to be chucked back to help the mate who might be lagging. A national consensus that tends to value the good of the many over the desires of the individual.
* * * * * * *
We each loved our own country, but he relied on his. It was his muse. It fed the work that was his passion. That work was relating the American past to its present, something he did with extraordinary prescience, insight, and wit. My work is mostly in my own head and can be done anywhere. So, I accepted an expatriation I did not want and raised my sons in a country whose values and choices often felt incomprehensible. If I had never met Tony, never loved him with passionate commitment, I think there is a very good chance that I would have ended up on Flinders Island, instead of Martha’s Vineyard, where we had finally put down our roots after years of vagabonding around the world as foreign correspondents.
* * * * * * *
Martha’s Vineyard, eight miles off the coast of Massachusetts, was the island where we finally settled and raised our kids. More than half our married life was spent there.
* * * * * * *
One reason I have chosen to come to Flinders for these memorial days, and not some other isolated place, is to interrogate the cost of my compromise. If this lovely island was, in fact, the destination of my road not taken, what would that life have looked like, as I raised Australian kids and wrote Australian books? What would have been gained, and what would have been lost? It is not really possible to answer these questions, but they nag me. Returning here is the necessary, if not the sufficient, condition for thinking about this more clearly than my gauzy old memories of the place allow.
* * * * * * *
The houses are similar in some ways, modest beach cottages and farmsteads, though in recent years many of the Vineyard’s unpretentious homes have been demolished in favour of lavish summer compounds out of scale with island tradition.
* * * * * * *
The most striking difference is the geology. The Vineyard is a terminal moraine-low hills of clay soils and boulders pushed out into the ocean by an ancient glacier. Flinders is part of an island chain that is the remnant of a drowned land bridge that once connected Tasmania to the Australian mainland. It has a rocky mountain spine slung between two soaring peaks-one north, one south-thrusting into the sky at either end of the island like exclamations.
* * * * * * *
In the years we had come to the Vineyard as summer visitors, Tony and I had loved this crossing, looked forward to it. Going to the island, the boat trip marked the beginning of vacation in a tangible way, putting a stretch of ocean between stress and relaxation. Standing out on the foredeck, hugging each other, hair tousled in the salt wind, we would breathe deep and let go of work anxiety, the tensions of the real world. On the journey back it was a period of contentment, a moment for savouring the experiences we had had together, the pleasant coda to good times.
* * * * * * *
I sprinted down the gangway to the waiting car. I barely had my seat belt fastened when my friend Susanna called me. The Vineyard is a small place. Its grapevine had done its work. Someone at the airport had mentioned something to someone. Now Tony’s death had been reported in the online edition of the local paper.
* * * * * * *
Detective Evelyn called me back. Mr. Ryan, the former medic who had been the first to reach Tony, had agreed to speak to me. He was waiting for my call. I found the quietest, most private place I could, a corner wedged behind a pillar and turned my face to the wall as I entered the number.
* * * * * * *
‘When I caught sight of him, he was lying prone on the sidewalk, and at first, I thought he was looking for something under his car. Then I saw his glasses. They were a foot and a half away from him. I knew something must be wrong.’
* * * * * * *
Mr. Ryan recounted how he had rushed over and taken Tony’s pulse – faint and intermittent – and noted laboured, convulsive breaths. He called out to a woman at the nearby yoga studio to dial 911. There was no sign of any trauma – the fall must have been gentle, maybe Tony had dropped to his knees and then crumpled slowly forward. His arms were at his sides, indicating he hadn’t attempted to break his fall or even been aware of falling.
* * * * * * *
‘The paramedics worked hard and well at the scene for a good half hour. But he wasn’t conscious and there was no pulse.’ He paused. ‘The women from the yoga place were stroking his head. They were very affectionate. Careful and caring.’
* * * * * * *
I was too choked up to respond to this, so I garbled some thanks to him for trying to help Tony, and for taking my call.
‘He had a sister,’ he said. ‘She died alone in her apartment. It’s been terrible, not knowing what her last moments were like. I am glad I can tell you this.’
* * * * * * *
I can’t sleep, despite the absolute quiet of this place. I have intentionally put myself back where I was on the worst day of my life. It is what I came here to do; to uncover every memory of that time and experience the full measure of the grief I had denied myself.
* * * * * * *
I have brought some books with me. Books gifted by well-meaning people that recount the grim aftermath of losing a spouse: The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander, A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates. We already had a copy of Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. It is a tattered galley – the cheaply bound, uncorrected proofs of forthcoming books that publishers send out to critics before the hardcover is published.
* * * * * * *
Didion’s experience so closely chimes with my own. The long marriage, the intertwined careers, the sudden disorienting loss… The bed lamp isn’t strong, so I can’t read for very long. But I know I will return to this book.
* * * * * * *
I would no sooner write in a book than deliberately gouge a scratch in an antique table or scribble on a painting. Tony was the opposite. He read with pen in hand, scrawling his thoughts all over the place. I am glad of this now. If I pick up one of his books that I haven’t yet read, I can know what he thought of it.
* * * * * * *
I have only a loose notion of how I will spend my time here. I will walk and reflect, taking whatever solace nature cares to offer me. I will write down everything l can recall about Tony’s death and its aftermath. I will allow myself time and space to think about our marriage and to experience the emotions I have suppressed.
* * * * * * *
Tony was born in George Washington University Medical Centre on June 9, 1958. He was pronounced dead there at 12:38 p.m. on May 27, 2019. His father, Norman Horwitz, practiced and taught neurosurgery at that hospital. His grandfather Alec was a general surgeon there.
Tony, who travelled the world as a foreign correspondent, covering stories from sniper pits in Sarajevo and boats under shelling in Beirut harbour, who ducked rifle fire during the Romanian revolution and reported on two wars in the Persian Gulf, who hitchhiked across the Australian outback and followed the Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook from the Arctic Circle to the edge of the Antarctic ice shelf, had come home to die. He had been pronounced dead in the hospital where he was born, after collapsing a scant few blocks from the brown-shingled Victorian house in Chevy Chase in which he grew up.
* * * * * * *
Of all the things I miss about Tony – his lilting speaking voice, his gentle hands – it is this most of all: He made me laugh every single day. He could see absurdity, puncture pomposity, pull off practical jokes of maddening plausibility.
* * * * * * *
While writing, he could be intense: perfectionist, woe betide anyone who disturbed him. The best you would get was a cranky grunt. He worked in a bright book-lined space we had carved out in what was once a cow barn. I wrote in a study upstairs in our old house. I would hear him clatter into the kitchen several times a day, quickly grabbing coffee to fuel his effort. I did not try to interact with him during these missions: I knew from experience it would be an unrewarding encounter, the only time this hypersocial being was antisocial.
* * * * * * *
A violent night. Lashing rain, winds loud as a train. The little wooden shack-banged together with recycled doors, salvaged timbers, and repurposed metalwork groans with the power of the storm.
Rain is precious here. It is the sole supplier of drinking water, and as I imagine this deluge sluicing down the tin roof and filling the tank with that essential commodity, I fall back to sleep.
* * * * * * *
This morning, I start to do the work that I have come here to do. I open my laptop and drag the cursor back through my sent emails to the dreadful date, May 27, 2019. All the normal stuff, and then the email I sent to Sally in Georgetown.
Header: Terrible news.
Tony died. The hospital just called. Apparently, a massive heart attack. I will be in touch when I know more.
I keep reading. How quickly the ripples of loss widened. How swift the first brokenhearted reactions of friends.
From Frankie:
There is so much I want to say to you, but for now, just this: I will always think of Tony as I saw him last, golden and electric, backlit by the sunset at Lambert’s Cove.
* * * * * * *
I read this and I want to stop. But I make myself keep going, accepting the tightness in my chest, the radiating pain from my gut.
And as I read on, I see how quickly I fell into what would become my rote response to condolences.
We were so lucky.
There it was. My defensive shield already deployed, and Tony not three hours dead. I have vaulted right over denial, anger, bargaining, and depression and landed in the soft sands of acceptance.
* * * * * * *
I now know that even as I wrote those words, I was in denial. I didn’t believe he was dead. I expected him to come bursting through the door, throwing clothes out of his bag, loudly regaling me with funny tales from the road.
That vault I had attempted was impossible. Those sands were quicksand.
* * * * * * *
I fretted for Bizu (adopted son), alone in his tiny dorm room. I hoped he wasn’t regretting his choice to stay at school. It was hard to think about him holding on to this enormity until his aunt could get there the next morning.
And Nathaniel, who would soon be landing in Sydney. I hadn’t been able to reach my sister there; I had left messages for her to call me. Australia was going to be Nathaniel’s last stop on the six-month, post college adventure he was having with his girlfriend before he started work mid-June as a biotech entrepreneur in Boston. He was going to get home in just a couple more weeks, in time for Tony’s sixty-first birthday on June 9. It was the longest that father and son had gone without seeing each other. Now they would never see each other again.
* * * * * * *
Tony’s older sister was always the mature presence around her baby brothers, an idealistic public defender, a tender mother, a sensitive soul. And my rabbi agreed with her on this. She gently suggested that our community at home yearned to express their grief, extend their condolences.
But how could I possibly think about venues, accommodations, catering platters? I couldn’t. Not yet.
* * * * * * *
I kept forgetting things. That Tony had recently been president of the Society of American Historians, a role he had relished. Then one of the newspapers he had worked for. I had to keep calling back, emailing, correcting my errors.
* * * * * * *
Bizu fell into my arms, weeping. We left the house and walked, hand in hand, to find the spot where Tony had collapsed. Josh’s neighbourhood is a long-settled place of mature trees, comfortable houses, and gardens riotous with spring bloom. We walked through dappled shade to Northampton Street. It wasn’t far. We stood and stared at the commonplace squares of white concrete pavement. It was hard to fathom how something so shattering and consequential could have happened in such an ordinary spot.
* * * * * * *
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.
* * * * * * *
The woman handed me a clipboard with a passport-sized photo, face down.
‘When you’re ready,’ she said, ‘you can turn it over and make the identification.’
I would never be ready.
He looked terrible. He looked as if he had been through an ordeal. Which, of course, he had. But he was still Tony. I touched my hand to his face.
* * * * * * *
I am sorry. Sorry I didn’t take better care of you. Sorry I wasn’t with you. Sorry I can’t be with you now.
I could have been with him that Monday. Could have flown down to DC for the long weekend, gone with him to see the old friends in Waterford, walked with him to breakfast, held him in my arms as he died.
* * * * * * *
Tony was a Jew, and I became one just before we married because I didn’t want to be the end of an ancient lineage that had survived pogroms and the Shoah. Our kids went to Hebrew school, we observed Passover, High Holidays, Sukkot, Hanukkah, and sometimes a special meal and candles on Friday nights. But we weren’t religious people, and our connection with the traditions was about culture and family. Had we been observant Jews, I would have had a road map through my grief, telling me exactly what to do and when to do it.
* * * * * * *
Orthodox Judaism divides mourning into phases. The most intense, aninut, is the time between the death and the burial. During aninut, grief is understood to be ‘stupefyingly intense.’ The mourner is not even to be offered condolences since she is not in any state to be consoled. Bystanders are supposed to quietly help in the practical matter of burial rites. During my animut I was scrambling to get on boats and planes. I was arguing with hospital staff about seeing my husband’s body, calling his publicist. My instinct to do these things, my conviction as to their necessity, had overridden any possibility of allowing my grief to be ‘stupefyingly intense.’
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. On the morning of the seventh day, one ‘gets up’ from shiva and enters again into the routines of normal life. Traditionally friends accompany the mourner on a first walk outside the house. But 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. At the end of that thirty days, a spouse’s mourning observance is considered to be over. Children are the only bereaved who are required to continue a full year of mourning rituals, for parents, on the basis that one may have multiple spouses, children, or siblings, but the bond with a parent is unique. (I am dismayed to learn that there is no obligation to mourn adoptive parents, only biological. It seems an unfair diminishment of parent, child, and the infinite capacity for love.)
Jews are expected to meticulously observe these requirements but not to exceed them. The idea is to provide an outlet for grief but also a framework to integrate the loss and move on with living.
* * * * * * *
Tony didn’t believe in an afterlife, and certainly not in reincarnation. He believed that death was the end. I believe that, too.
* * * * * * *
Tony would probably disapprove of this urge I have, here on Flinders, to make up my own mourning ritual. At least he would find something mocking to say about it.
* * * * * * *
TONY HORWITZ (I958-2019)
‘Tonight, we remember author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz,’ said Judy Woodruff. ‘He died suddenly yesterday of an apparent cardiac arrest. Horwitz was best known as the author of Confederates in the Attic, a look at modern-day Southern attitudes about the Civil War and the people who reenact it. The book was a bestseller. As a journalist he covered conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans for The Wall Street Journal. He won the Pulitzer in 1995 for a series on income inequality and low-wage jobs, including working in chicken-processing plants in the South. A number of Horwitz’s books are told through the narrative of first-person account. That is true of his latest book, Spying on the South.’
* * * * * * *
During the writing and reporting of his last book, his drinking habits changed. He lost the off switch with his drinking. He would go until the bottle stood empty. I started watching him at social events, making sure we left the party before he overdid it.
He knew this was unsustainable. He would bring it to a halt, he said, tor sure. After the book tour. No more booze, pills, Nicorette. He would detox, reset his system. He realised he might need help, so he sought advice from friends who had gone on the wagon…
* * * * * * *
In our years as foreign correspondents, based in Cairo and London, we had often reported together, no matter whose byline wound up on the final article. We were each other’s second pair of eyes and ears, as symbiotic in our working life as that fungus and algae together making the vivid orange Caloplaca.
* * * * * * *
We maintained this symbiosis as book writers, bouncing ideas off each other, reading each other’s drafts, trading skills. I benefitted from Tony’s knack for archive diving and his ruthless editing. He would find my favourite words and kill them off with a pen slash. He had it in, especially, for two adjectives I overused: ‘desiccated’ and ‘gnarled.’ They kept creeping into my prose; he kept tossing them out.
* * * * * * *
There is one thing you must be able to do as a novelist, and that is understand how your characters explain their own actions to themselves. No amount of thinking could provide me with the story Jane Franklin had told herself to justify abandoning Mathinna at the same orphanage in Hobart where her older sister had perished. And because I could not access her thoughts, I eventually concluded that I couldn’t write a novel about her.
* * * * * * *
Dr. Norman Horwitz removed brain tumours and extracted bullets from spines until he was seventy. He survived a dissected aorta and continued consulting on difficult cases at Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre till the very last months of his life. How dismayed Norman would be to know his youngest child had twenty-seven years less life than he did.
* * * * * * *
I stroked his cheek. It was cool, as if he had just come out of the ocean after a sunset swim. His hair was still faintly damp from the washing of his body. He no longer looked thrashed and haggard, as he had in the morgue photo. He looked exactly like himself, a handsome and contented man in the prime of middle age. And that, now, was what he would remain.
‘My love,’ I kept repeating. ‘My love.’ I needed to hold his hand, but when I reached for the edge of the white blanket, the woman stopped me. ‘Just let me get him ready for that,’ she said. Josh and I stepped out for a moment. In truth, I would have been glad to see it all – the autopsy incisions, everything – but I was not in any condition to resist her kind intentions.
I held his hand. I didn’t want to ever let it go.
* * * * * * *
That day my body demanded its release.
I haven’t cried like that for Tony. I should have; the moment I received the news of his death. But I was afraid to give way to it. Remembering that day in Hebron, that complete lack of self-control, I knew that if I started, I might not be able to stop. So, I shut it down. And for the past two years, I haven’t been able to cry at all.
* * * * * * *
Looking out the airplane window I thought, 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. Two of my close friends had lost husbands to cancer, and another, suddenly, to stroke.
* * * * * * *
Even sitting there at the airport, wrapped in sadness, I knew to be thankful for these obituaries. They reminded me how much life Tony had packed into his sixty years, and how easily it could have ended sooner if any one of the crazy risks we took in our reporting years had gone the wrong way. I also felt anguish for all the people who had suffered losses on this day whose beloved’s quirks and jokes and accomplishments would never be publicly noted. Whose sons would not be able to read about their father and know how he was appreciated and loved, even by strangers.
I resolved to remember this as we face what is coming. I resolved to be grateful.
* * * * * * *
I have erected a facade that I have hidden behind., a fugitive from my own feelings. It’s heavy and elaborate and it’s taken a lot of energy to haul it around with me every time I leave the house. Especially this past year, when I have been so much in the world, on a book tour myself. (Don’t die, Mum,” said Nathaniel, as I left for the airport on the day before my novel’s publication, heading to Tennessee for my first event.)
It was the tour for Horse, the novel that Tony believed in more than I did. The book he didn’t let me give up on even when I was ready abandon it, overwhelmed by the unique challenges it posed. The book I dragged myself back to my desk to finish.
* * * * * * *
The fury I feel toward him is so intense it wakes me up.
Throughout the day the dream hangs around me like a dark mist. Where has this come from, these cruel thoughts, those hate words? I am as spent as if the dream argument were real.
Something is surfacing here. I don’t yet see what it is. I walk the beach, head down against the wind. The salt air does not scour the bitterness from my spirit.
* * * * * * *
Denial, then anger, says Kübler-Ross.
I am not angry with Tony.
I am furious with death.
* * * * * * *
For so many the death of a spouse is also the death of the breadwinner. I was not going to be cast into penury, and I was immensely grateful for that. But it didn’t stop me from being enraged when my applications for new credit cards in my own name were rejected. I hadn’t had an independent credit history since 1984. I had to start all over again. The one card I did eventually qualify for had a credit limit a tenth of the canceled ones.
In thirty-five years, Tony and I had settled into an amicable division of labor within the marriage, taking responsibility for the tasks for which each of us had aptitude. I handled the things you could see – home maintenance, the garden, the cooking. He handled everything you couldn’t see – finances, taxes, insurance. And he did it so skilfully that I had had the luxury of not ever having to consider those things at all.
* * * * * * *
All I craved was to be alone with the boys. But that would not be possible. Too many neighbours and friends wanted to express their sadness and could not wait till memorials that we had decided would happen in August on the Vineyard and October in DC. If we didn’t see these kind friends jointly, we would have to deal with them severally. I would not be able to go to the supermarket without being run over by people expressing their sorrow in the vegetable aisle.
* * * * * * *
I valued these letters, especially the ones that recounted an anecdote about Tony that I had known. I was also overwhelmed by them. As they kept coming, and coming, I felt reproached by the stack, rising unanswered on my desk as I dealt instead with each legal and financial exigency. I hoped friends would forgive my failure, finally, to respond to them. I would drag myself into my study to face the latest pile of documents and wonder if I would ever do anything creative again.
* * * * * * *
However, there were binding decisions to be made, even if l was in a poor condition to make them. I needed to gather affidavits for the motion to waive the guardian appointment, mortified by asking people to testify to my ability to care for my child.
* * * * * * *
The one thing he had stated was that he wanted his ashes to be buried in his baseball mitt in the unkempt Chilmark field where he played softball on summer Sunday mornings. This may have been a flippant remark, but the boys and I decided that since they were the only instructions we had, we would carry them out.
He loved that softball game and the odd array of island characters who showed up for it. Every Sunday he would bring me coffee and The New York Times, then rush off to be there for ‘mitts in,’ the ritual where players threw their gloves into a pile and the league’s ‘commissioners’ took turns picking them up, filling team rosters at random. It was a game with a long tradition and its own lighthearted rules.
* * * * * * *
l also hired a financial adviser. He looked over the edifice of investments that Tony had chosen to secure our future, frowned at the crypto, squinted at the China stocks (“China’s too opaque”), and recommended I divest those positions and buy bonds instead. I could almost hear Tony yawning at the thought of low-risk munis and boring AAAS.
‘As long as you can keep writing and don’t conceive a sudden desire to buy a private jet, I think you’re going to be okay,’ the adviser declared.
* * * * * * *
Keep writing. There was the catch. There would be no paycheck for me until I handed in a finished manuscript of Horse.
I didn’t see how I would ever get it finished. I was only about halfway into the story and hadn’t added a word since Tony had died. Hadn’t even opened the file on my computer since the day I had picked up the phone and learned that he was gone. It was not a doable thing.
Writing fiction requires a wombat-hole immersion. You go down into that dark, narrow place where there is nothing else but you and the unspooling story. There was no space down there for court motions and tax filings, for memorial planning and condolence-note replies.
And there was certainly no place for the beast of grief clinging to me, claws intractable as fishhooks.
* * * * * * *
These journals, in general, are not happy reading. My sunny, funny lover is rarely found in these pages. I begin to see that he turned to his journals when he was not that guy -that guy didn’t need them. “Happiness writes white,” said the French author Henry de Montherlant; it is not easily inscribed on the page. Dark thoughts, fears, the insecure ramblings of insomniac nights – these are more easily prodded with the pen, the ink more easily spilled, more legible. So it comes as a relief and a joy when I also find this: ‘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.’
* * * * * * *
Myocarditis typically affects young, healthy, athletic people, males twice as often as females. Although it is classified as rare, it is the third leading cause of sudden death in children and young adults.
According to the Myocarditis Foundation, symptoms if there are any may include shortness of breath and fatigue. ‘Avoiding sustained and strenuous exercise can prevent further heart damage… rigorous exercise and competitive sports should be avoided… Alcohol, particularly in excess, can increase the risk of arrhythmias and weaken an already weakened heart. Caffeinated products should be avoided.’
Everything Tony had been doing-even the supposedly good things like vigorous daily exercise-had been wreaking havoc on his poor sick heart.
* * * * * * *
I drive to the trailhead at Trousers Point, the beach at the western base of the mountain range.
It is indeed magnificent. Probably the loveliest beach I have ever seen; wide swoop of sand, pristine dunes, crystalline waters, a dramatic, craggy mountain backdrop. It is a juxtaposition of earth and water even more marvellous than Big Sur.
Yet I find myself unreasonably bothered by the nice barbecue facilities, the steps cut into the stone to give access to the beach, the fact that two other people show up while I am there.
I have been all alone in Eden. I want to be back there. I didn’t know I would feel this way. I certainly hadn’t been afraid to be by myself, but I hadn’t realised how much I would embrace it. Now it is beginning to feel like an addiction. I am craving the absolute serenity of an unpeopled landscape.
* * * * * * *
And then I understand that I have not been alone. I am revelling in this time because I am with Tony. In this solitude, finally, I can think about him undistracted. I can read his journals and commune with his thoughts. I can even do what I believed his death had denied me: learn new things about him.
There are no kids, no animals, no editors, publicists, neighbours, or friends. No one, no matter how beloved, is barging in on us here. I can be beside him all my conscious day and even beyond, into my unconscious nights.
Solitude has made this space for him.
* * * * * * *
We hadn’t talked about what he (Nathaniel) would say in his eulogy. He walked to the podium, downed a glass of water, and took a long moment to scan the crowd. Then he spoke from the heart, without notes, without hesitation. He spoke about the consolation he took in the manner of Tony’s death – that it was sudden and unforeseen. He spoke of his gratitude that each of us – he, Bizu, me – had a memory of a warm final interaction with Tony. And then he recalled that immediately after Tony’s death, he found it difficult to see his father’s books around the house or on the shelves at a bookstore, thinking of them as a pale shade of the father he’d lost. Then, as the weeks had passed, that changed:
‘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 recognise now that his books are not the shade of him. They are the quintessence of his soul, the distillation of a great adventurer and a good man. He is 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.’
* * * * * * *
This shack has two wooden daybeds on the porch, side by side, facing out to sea. On warm afternoons, I lie here with my straw hat covering my face and imagine Tony on the one next to me, engrossed in a book or catching a nap. I pretend that the silence is just the two of us sharing wordless companionship.
* * * * * * *
Night is an even better time to be out here. If the island’s rocks put me in my place, its stars do, too. Nature is a remorseless reminder of human insignificance. Daytime, nighttime – there is no escape from the realisation 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 marvellous happenstance to have lived and experienced consciousness.
Even more rare and marvellous, in this riven, aching world, to have thrived. To have found love, joy, security, fulfilment.
* * * * * * *
On January 6, 2021, we watched live coverage of men with rebel flags storming the Capitol. Part of me expected to see Tony there, notebook in hand…
I was glad to have my boys at home, glad to have unexpected extra innings of mothering. Glad of the quiet. And I was glad of the end of the need to pretend that things were normal. Nothing was normal for anyone. Grief was everywhere.
* * * * * * *
All the noise, the pain, the nonsense of that time. I let the tug of the waves carry it all away. I come up and face this immensity of ocean.
I let the sound form; I let it uncurl like a fern. I howl, emptying my lungs.
The sound, loud and raw in this world of silence, is shocking, I let myself sink again, come up and face the blazing colours 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.
* * * * * * *
When I turn back toward the shack, there is nothing left. I am spent, at last. All that remains is a long exhalation, a sustained sigh.
* * * * * * *
When I started to write fiction, I came across a piece of advice on the craft of novel writing. Your task, as novelist, is to keep pushing your protagonist’s head under water throughout the narrative. But when you get to the end, you must decide: Will you sink them, or let them swim?
I put my face in the clear, briny water. I stretch out my body.
I swim.
* * * * * * *
I have written this because I needed to do it. Part of the treatment for ‘complicated grief’ is to relive the trauma of the death, returning to the moments again and again, striving each time to recall more detail. That is what I have tried to do.
‘The predicament when writing about a sudden, untimely death: the more you remember, the more elusive that death becomes,’ writes the novelist Yiyun Li. I have not found that to be true. I have brought Tony’s death with me to the place where I could relive it, slowing it down and taking it in, suffering it in the way I needed to suffer.
* * * * * * *
There are memories that remain elusive, moments that resist recall. I can’t remember the words I used to tell Bizu that his dad had died. The blackness that descended as I listened to his sobs has expunged that memory. My first conversation with Nathaniel also is a blur. All I remember of it is the shock of realising that he already knew – that someone else’s words had flown around the world to him faster than my own.
* * * * * * *
Now, back in the press of people, the loud routines of my real, often public life, I can begin to assess how this self-administered therapy has worked. 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.’
* * * * * * *
At home now I make more time for the beauty. I make it a point to notice the trees, in all their various seasonal personalities. To be with the critters that share my space. A nest of baby rabbits, a coin-sized painted turtle hatchling, a fluffy mallard duckling out for its first swim – these encounters, more than almost anything else, have the power to elevate me out of sadness.
* * * * * * *
And another thing I have noticed. The time on Flinders Island allowed me to set down one of the bundles in the baggage of my grief. It is the grief I had been carrying for the life I would have had, the life I had counted on having. It was the life with the sunset-facing rocking chairs, growing old with Tony beside me, laughing, arguing over the news, revisiting shared memories, and taking pride as our sons moved confidently into manhood. That life is gone; nothing will get it back. I have accepted that. I have embarked on making the life I have as vivid and consequential as I can. Do your work, said Bader Ginsburg. So, that is what I do.
* * * * * * *
Our culture is averse to sad. We want people to be happy. We are chagrined and slightly offended when they’re not. There isa 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.
* * * * * * *
And finally, in whatever way works for you, tell your story.
Write it down, speak it to a therapist, share it with your friends. Take control of this essential moment in the narrative of your life. 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.
* * * * * * *
Hope For Tomorrow 