Memorial Days

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and animal death.

Brooks’s memoir is a meditation on grief, memory, and the arduous process of navigating personal loss as a public person. She explores the disorienting terrain of mourning and reveals how Western culture often fails to support the bereaved, exposing systemic and societal breakdowns of empathy. Through her personal experience of sudden widowhood, Brooks critiques the discomfort, avoidance, and inadequacy with which grief is treated in contemporary society. From the moment she received the news of Tony’s death, Brooks suppressed her anguish, choosing not to scream. She later likens this suppression to emotional imprisonment, describing it as a “howl [that] has become the beast in the basement of [her] heart” (9). She says that she “need[s] to find a way to set it free” (9). This metaphor encapsulates the internalization of grief and pain in a culture that encourages repression. Rather than embracing sorrow as a shared human experience, American culture tends to rush past it, sanitize it, or push it into private, invisible corners.

Brooks interrogates the cultural impulse to “move on” rather than dwell in grief, revealing a lack of communal space for emotional healing.