The Waiting Period: Mourning Tradition in Geraldine Brooks' Memorial Days

The Waiting Period: Mourning Tradition in Geraldine Brooks' Memorial Days

This article relates to Memorial Days

On the worst day of her life, author Geraldine Brooks began to shake in her lower extremities. Above her thighs, she was frozen. No tears, no screams, no falling onto the floor with anger and rage. Her shock was suddenly buried and it all felt so surreal. Tony Horwitz, her husband of thirty-four years, had died, which felt impossible, improbable, and unfair. Brooks had just read an email from him. Only minutes before the hospital called and her world changed, she had spoken with her older son. "If I let go," she writes in her memoir Memorial Days, "if I fell, I might not be able to get back up."

Losing a spouse can feel like losing an essential part of oneself. The days that follow are often filled with regret, guilt, loneliness, and replaying the last thing that was said. In many customs, death is followed by ritual, particularly traditional mourning periods. These fulfill a spiritual purpose: for the bereaved to reflect and grieve as the dead person makes their spiritual transition.

Years earlier when she was a reporter in Tehran, Brooks attended a "waiting period," a seven-day after-burial observance for a ninety-year-old matriarch. She gathered in a courtyard with the other women while the men were next door. A moving song about the virtue of mothers was piped into the courtyard, which triggered massive weeping at different decibels and pitch levels. Howling. Screaming. Sobbing. For the matriarch's death and for repressed grief. One of the women in attendance had been a political prisoner for seven years. Another woman had witnessed her son executed. Several had lost children in the Iraqi war. Their feral pain seared Brooks and yet when it was her turn to mourn Tony in a similarly guttural way, all she could do was tremble.

While her preference was to create her own waiting period and remain insular, it wasn't possible on Martha's Vineyard, where her husband was beloved. "All I craved was to be alone with the boys. But that would not be possible. Too many neighbors and friends wanted to express their sadness."

Brooks' decision to do her own version of shiva, the traditional Jewish mourning period, felt appropriate. It took place on a Sunday under the family apple tree, on the lawn, which was both familiar and strange. The lawn was where weddings and parties and joy happened, not this silent misery where everyone was subdued, unsure of how to proceed. At one point in the afternoon, Brooks thought she saw Tony in the light, his blondness, a peek of his shoulder. When a former roommate and colleague of Tony's at the Wall Street Journal arrived, she melted. His high-strung energy was an antidote to what still felt unreal.

The bough of the apple tree was the center of this webbing of friends and family who were enormously bereaved. The rabbi read several psalms and a Mary Oliver poem with verses that felt like instructions on how to grieve. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. As tradition dictated, they recited the kaddish, a hymn chanted for the dead, and naturally lamented the loveliest of all men, who was gone too soon.

Artistic rendering of hands holding paper with Mourner's Kaddish by Linnaea Mallette, via Public Domain Pictures

Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities

This article relates to Memorial Days. It first ran in the December 10, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.