Arts & Culture
He was walking in Washington and just like that he was gone

Tony Horwitz and Geraldine Brooks in their Martha’s Vineyard home in 2016.

Photo by Elizabeth Cecil

March 19, 2025 8 min read

Geraldine Brooks traces painful, disorienting pendulum-swing of grief after losing Tony Horwitz, her husband of 35 years

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 home of Tony Horwitz?”

Yes

“Who am I speaking to?”

This is his wife

That is exact. The rest is a blur.

“Collapsed in the street … tried to resuscitate at the scene … brought to the hospital … couldn’t revive him.”

And, so, now he’s in the OR. And, so, now we’ve admitted him for a procedure. And, so, now we’re keeping him for observation.

So many things that logically should have followed.

But she says none of these things. Instead, the illogical thing: He’s dead.

No.

Not Tony. Not him. Not my husband out on the road energetically promoting his new book. My husband with the toned body of a six-day-a-week gym rat. The 60-year-old who still wears clothes the same size as the day I met him in his twenties. My husband, younger than I am — hilarious, bursting with vitality. He’s way too busy living. He cannot possibly be dead.

The resident’s voice is flat, exhausted. She is impatient with me as I ask her to repeat what she has just said. It is, she tells me, the end of her shift. She gives me a number for the doctor who is coming on duty in this ER, 500 miles away in Washington, D.C. She can’t get me off the phone fast enough.

But Tony — I need to see him. Where will he be when I get there?

“We can’t keep a body in the ER. It will be moved to the hospital morgue to be picked up by the DC medical examiner.”

It. A body. She means Tony.

So how will I see him? I’m in Massachusetts, on an island. It’s going to take me hours to get there —

She cuts me off.

“The DC police will need to talk to you. Make sure they can reach you.”

And then she is gone.

At some moment in this call, I stood up from my desk. When the phone rang, at 18 minutes past one, I’d only just sat down to work after a morning of distractions. I’d had a happy conversation on the phone with my older son, a recent college graduate, adventuring around the world and about to board a plane in Manila for the eight-hour flight 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’d gone down to the paddock to throw hay to the horses and hung around there, draped on the split rails, chatting.

I’d read a long email from Tony about the visit he’d made the day before to the Virginia village where we lived for 10 years. It was mostly unpunctuated, gossipy, catching me up on the doings of our former neighbors — their tribulations with dry wells and divorces (“she refers to him as her was-band”). The email concluded:

“didn’t wish self back there (if for no other reason, 90 degrees and 100 percent humidity, and still May) but heartened that it seems to have gently evolved while keeping history and quirk. tomorrow back to the grind and am now 2-3 episodes behind on “Billions” so you’ll have rewatch upon return. love and hugs”

I’d hit send on my reply and finally opened the file titled Horse, the novel I was supposed to be writing.

Then, the phone.

Another distraction. I considered letting it go to voicemail.

But maybe there was a question my older son had forgotten to ask. My younger son was away at boarding school, sitting for his end-of-year exams. Perhaps he needed something. I had to pick up.

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.

I stood there and suppressed that howl. Because I was alone, and no one could help me. And if I let go, if I fell, I might not be able to get back up.

In books and movies no one gets this news alone. Someone comes to the door. Someone makes sure you’re sitting down, offers you water, asks whom you’d like them to call.

But no one had done me this kindness. A tired young doctor had picked up my husband’s cell phone, on which he had never set up a passcode, and hit the speed dial for home.

The first brutality in what I would learn is a brutal, broken system.

February 23
Essendon

The small prop plane takes off from Melbourne’s Essendon Airport. Suburban rooftops, container terminals, the industrialized mouth of the Yarra River. And then we pierce a flat layer of cloud and the view I’d hoped for, the glittering, island-studded Bass Strait, is obscured. All I can do is watch the mesmerizing blur of the propeller. A smear of concentric circles. The unlikely physics of flight.

I am headed to a shack on the farthest end of Flinders Island to do the unfinished work of grieving. I have come to realize that what I did that day in late May 2019 and what I was obliged to do in the days and months that followed has exacted an invisible price. I am going to this remote island to pay it.

In the confines of the small plane I overhear snatches of conversation from my fellow travelers:

“I’ve got a hundred acres, it’s quite a big bit of dirt.”

“No one’s prolly fished that spot since we were there last year.”

“You can have the views, or you can have the bars, but you gotta consider the cell tower if you’re building a place.”

“All the pines are gone.”

“What d’ya mean, gone?”

“I mean gone, mate. Not there.”

Tony died on Memorial Day, the American holiday that falls on the last Monday in May and honors 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 honors what it misses.”

I haven’t honored 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 realize that my life since Tony’s death has been one endless, exhausting performance. I have cast myself in a role: woman being normal. I’ve moved around in public acting out a series of convincing scenes: PTO mum, conservation commissioner, author on tour. But nothing has been normal. Here, finally, the long-running show goes on hiatus.

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.

Alone on this island at the ends of the earth, maybe, I will finally be able to break out of the maytzar. But first I will need to get back to that moment in my sunlit study when I refused to allow myself to howl.

That howl has become the beast in the basement of my heart. I need to find a way to set it free.