He was strolling through Washington and just like that he vanished

Excerpted from “Memorial Days” by Geraldine Brooks, Radcliffe Fellow ’06, visiting lecturer ’21, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. 

May 27, 2019
West Tisbury

“Is this the residence of Tony Horwitz?”

  Yes

“Who am I conversing with?”

  This is his spouse

That is accurate. The remainder is a haze.

“Fell in the street… attempted to revive at the scene… transported to the hospital… couldn’t bring him back.”

And, so, now he’s in the operating room. And, therefore, we’ve admitted him for a procedure. And, now, we’re retaining him for monitoring.

Numerous things that should logically have ensued.

Yet she claims none of these matters. Instead, the irrational pronouncement: He’s gone.

No.

Not Tony. Not him. Not my husband energetically traveling to promote his latest book. My husband, with the athletic physique of a six-day-a-week gym enthusiast. The sixty-year-old who still fits in the same clothes as when we originally met in his twenties. My partner, younger than I am — witty, overflowing with energy. He’s far too engaged in living. There’s no way he can be dead.

The resident’s tone is flat, weary. She displays impatience as I request her to repeat what she just stated. It is, she informs me, the end of her shift. She hands me a contact number for the physician who will be taking over in this emergency room, 500 miles away in Washington, D.C. She seems eager to end our conversation.

But Tony — I must see him. Where will he be upon my arrival?

“We cannot retain a body in the ER. It will be transferred to the hospital morgue to be collected by the D.C. medical examiner.”

It. A body. She is referring to Tony.

So how will I view him? I’m in Massachusetts, on an island. It will require hours for me to arrive —

She interrupts me.

“The D.C. police will need to speak with you. Ensure they can contact you.”

And then she is gone.

At some point during this call, I rose from my desk. When the phone rang at 18 minutes past one, I had only just settled down to work following a morning fraught with distractions. I had enjoyed a delightful conversation with my elder son, a recent college graduate, traveling around the globe and poised to board a plane in Manila for an eight-hour journey to Sydney, where he would stay with my sister. A friend, Susanna, had come to borrow or return a book — I can’t recall which. We had gone to the paddock to feed the horses and lingered there, reclining on the split rails, talking.

I’d read a lengthy email from Tony about his visit the prior day to the Virginia village where we resided for a decade. It was mostly unpunctuated, gossipy, updating me on the happenings of our former neighbors — their struggles with dry wells and separations (“she refers to him as her was-band”). The email closed:

“didn’t wish self back there (if for no other reason, 90 degrees and 100 percent humidity, and still May) but glad to see it seems to have gently evolved while preserving its history and eccentricities. tomorrow back to the routine and I’m now 2-3 episodes behind on “Billions” so you’ll have to rewatch upon return. love and hugs”

I had pressed send on my reply and finally opened the file titled Horse, the novel I was meant to be writing.

Then, the phone.

Another distraction. I contemplated allowing it to go to voicemail.

But perhaps there was a query my elder son forgot to ask. My younger son was away at boarding school, engaged in his end-of-year examinations. Perhaps he required something. I needed to answer.

The caller ID was difficult to decipher in the bright sunlight. Only as I brought the handset closer could I discern gw hsp on the display. Please don’t tell me I answered a fundraising call. …

Now the dial tone buzzed. I stared at the phone. My legs began to tremble. But I couldn’t take a seat. I paced around the room, feeling a howl building within me. I needed to scream, cry, collapse on the floor, tear my clothes, rip my hair out.

But I couldn’t permit myself any of those actions. Because I had so many other things to attend to.

I stood there, suppressing that howl. Because I was alone, and no one could assist me. And if I let it out, if I fell, I might not be able to rise again.

In novels and films, no one receives this news alone. Someone arrives at your door. Someone ensures you’re seated, offers you water, asks who you would like them to contact.

But no one had shown me such kindness. A weary young physician had picked up my husband’s cell phone, which he had never secured with a passcode, and pressed the speed dial for home.

The first cruelty in what I would come to discover is a ruthless, fragmented system.

February 23
Essendon

The small prop plane departs from Melbourne’s Essendon Airport. Suburban rooftops, shipping terminals, the industrial opening of the Yarra River. And then we break through a flat layer of clouds and the view I had anticipated, the sparkling, island-studded Bass Strait, is obscured. All I can do is focus on the captivating blur of the propeller. A streak of concentric circles. The improbable physics of flight.

I am en route to a shack at the farthest edge of Flinders Island to undertake the unfinished business of mourning. I have come to realize that what I did that day in late May 2019 and what I was compelled to do in the ensuing days and months has exacted an unseen toll. I am going to this isolated island to settle it.

In the confined space of the small aircraft, I overhear snippets of conversation from my fellow passengers:

“I’ve got a hundred acres; it’s quite a substantial piece of land.”

“No one’s probably fished that location since we visited last year.”

“You can have the scenery, or you can have the bars, but you need to contemplate the cell tower if you’re constructing a place.”

“All the pines have disappeared.”

 “What do you mean, disappeared?”

“I mean gone, mate. Not there.”

Tony passed away on Memorial Day, the American holiday that occurs on the last Monday in May to commemorate the fallen military personnel.

When

Once I reach Flinders Island, I will commence my own days of remembrance. I am reclaiming something that our society has ceased to freely offer: the liberty to mourn. To isolate myself from the world and its expectations. To reminisce about my beloved and to experience the depth of his absence. “Grief is admiration,” states Martín Prechtel in his work “The Scent of Rain on Dust,” “because it is the instinctual manner in which love honors the things it yearns for.”

I have not sufficiently acknowledged Tony, as I have not granted myself the time and space for a grief profound enough to mirror our affection.

This will be, at last, the period when I will no longer need to put on a facade for the faces that I encounter. A place where I will not have to feign that everything is alright and that I am well. Because it has been over three years and, despite how it appears, I am far from fine. I have come to understand that my existence since Tony’s passing has been one continuous, exhausting act. I have cast myself in a role: woman appearing normal. I’ve navigated public spaces performing a series of convincing portrayals: PTO mother, conservation commissioner, author on tour. Yet nothing has truly been normal. Here, at last, the long-running performance takes a pause.

I have been ensnared in the maytzar, the confined space of the Hebrew texts. In the Psalms, the musician calls out to God from the narrow space and is responded to from the “expansion” of God. Our English term “anguish” shares its meaning with the Hebrew maytzar. It derives from Latin, signifying narrowness, strait, and limitation. I have not permitted myself the wild expanse of a rich, expressive, demonstrative grief. Instead, it has been this prolonged sensation of restriction, of keeping it in and suppressing it, not allowing it to surface.

I do not subscribe to deism. No deity will respond to my lamentations. The expansiveness I seek is found in nature, in tranquility, in time.

I have intentionally chosen this location, this island. Prior to meeting Tony, my life was guiding me here. Falling in love with him diverted that path, placing me on an entirely different trajectory. Now I might perceive what I have been lacking, traverse that yet-to-be-explored path, contemplate the individual I could have become.

By myself on this island at the world’s edge, perhaps, I will ultimately manage to escape the maytzar. But first, I must revisit that moment in my sun-drenched study when I refused to permit myself to wail.

That wail has transformed into the creature in the cellar of my heart. I must discover a method to unleash it.

Copyright © 2025 by Geraldine Brooks.