Memorial Days

"We were so lucky until we weren't."

Have you ever heard of a widow-maker heart attack? They are more common than you might think, as Geraldine Brooks found out one day while writing her wildly beloved book The Horse. She gets a call at their home on Martha's Vineyard that her husband, fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, has dropped dead while on a book tour in Washington, DC.

In Memorial Days, Brooks dives into the aftermath of that shock and how, when it seems you should be afforded the peace and time to shut the world out and mourn your loss, you are called to the exact opposite reality—the land of a thousand details. Brooks does just that and, three years later, decides to take a trip to a remote part of Tasmania to allow her delayed grief its moment.

Besides Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and others known to be a balm in times of grief, I can think of no other book on losing a beloved spouse that could be more compelling. It's as much a celebration of a beautiful partnership and love story as it is a memoir on loss. This book is something special.

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