In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love

an enemy to the wolves at war with it . . .

I still lived and worked and socialized in the same places and with the same people after my wife’s death. And yet I felt that her death exiled me from what had been my life. Dante’s words gave me the language to understand my own profound sense of displacement. More important, they enabled me to connect my anguished state to a work of transcendent beauty.

After Katherine died, I obsessed for the first time over whether we have a soul, a part of us that outlives our body. The miracle of The Divine Comedy is not that it answers this question, but that it inspires us to explore it, with lungo studio e grande amore, long study and great love.

This journey began for me thirty years ago in a ferocious part of Italy.

I (#u2c6ef4c4-eb1e-5348-83bd-8b7d0ea57ae7)

The Underworld (#u2c6ef4c4-eb1e-5348-83bd-8b7d0ea57ae7)

. . . BOYS AND UNWED GIRLS

AND SONS LAID ON THE PYRE BEFORE THEIR PARENTS’ EYES.

CHAPTER 1 (#u2c6ef4c4-eb1e-5348-83bd-8b7d0ea57ae7)

An Hour with the Angels (#u2c6ef4c4-eb1e-5348-83bd-8b7d0ea57ae7)

La bocca sollevò dal fiero pasto.

He lifted up his mouth from the savage meal.

My uncle Giorgio recited this line to me when I was a college student visiting Italy for the first time, on my junior year abroad in Florence in 1987. A shepherd and rail worker who had never spent a day in school, Giorgio spoke neither English nor standard Italian—yet he spoke Dante. We were sitting around the table in his tiny kitchen, my ears buzzing with the dialect phrases of my childhood. Giorgio decanted glasses of his homemade wine as he welcomed me to Calabria, the region on the toe of the Italian peninsula whose la miseria—an untranslatable term meaning relentless hardship—my parents had escaped thirty years earlier when they immigrated to America.

For three days, I followed Giorgio and his son Giuseppe from one village to the next. Everyone we met—women in sackcloth, men with missing teeth—welcomed me as though I were a foreign dignitary. I never asked Giorgio how he had managed to learn some Dante by heart, and I doubt that he knew any of the actual plot of The Divine Comedy. It didn’t matter: he knew its music. Here, in the south of Italy, as far from the Renaissance splendor of Florence as you could get, he was a living and breathing trace of Dante’s presence.

Giorgio’s words stayed with me on the long train ride back to Florence, bringing me inside one of the most chilling scenes in The Divine Comedy: the one in which the traitor Ugolino lifts up his head from the man he has been condemned to cannibalize for eternity, Archbishop Ruggieri, to tell Dante how he ended up devouring his own children in the prison tower where Ruggieri had locked them. I was reading Dante for the first time, in a black Signet paperback translation by John Ciardi, while also trying to get through the original Tuscan. But nothing brought him to life like my uncle’s declaration.

Back in Florence, Dante was everywhere. Outside the Basilica of Santa Croce, a few blocks from my school, a nineteen-foot-high statue of the poet looked down sternly on the square, as though guarding the church where Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Galileo, and the nation’s founding fathers are buried. A few blocks north, the neighborhood where Dante grew up spread toward Brunelleschi’s Duomo. I had never taken a class on The Divine Comedy before my trip to Florence, but my visit to Calabria had shown me that its verses could live outside of libraries and museums and inside the huts and fields of my parents’ homeland. Dante’s simple, sober Tuscan-Italian made me feel the ground beneath me. I could smell his language.

S’ïo avessi le rime aspre e chiocce, / come si converrebbe al tristo buco . . .

“If I had verses harsh and grating enough / to describe this wretched hole,” Dante writes at the beginning of Inferno 32 to describe the depths of hell. He was as gritty and local as the Calabrian world my parents had abandoned. I plowed through the Ciardi and muddled through the Tuscan. For the first time in my life, I was inhabiting a book.

The capaciousness of The Divine Comedy—with its high poetry, dirty jokes, literary allusions, farting noises—floored me. I marveled at Dante’s universe of good and evil, love and hate, all ordered by unfaltering eleven-syllable lines in rhyming tercets. He communicated vast amounts of knowledge, medieval and ancient, without drowning out the music of his verse. He knew his Bible and his classics cold. He distilled the latest gossip about promiscuous poets, gluttonous pals, and treacherous politicians. He knew which acclaimed thirteenth-century humanist had been accused of sodomy, and he dared write about the birth of the soul and the prestige of his own Tuscan. In The Divine Comedy, I had discovered my guide, from the high culture of the Florentine cobblestones to the earthy customs of the Calabrian shepherds.

The Divine Comedy, I had come to learn, was a book of many firsts: one of the the first epic poems written in a local European language instead of Latin or Greek; the first work to speak about the Christian afterlife while paying an equal amount of attention to our life on earth; the first to elevate a woman, Beatrice, into a full-fledged guide to heaven. But these weren’t the innovations that most enthralled me—it was Dante’s groundbreaking ability to speak intimately with his readers. His twenty addresses leapt off the page and into my daydream: “O you who have sound reasoning, / consider the meaning that is hidden / beneath the veil of these strange verses,” he writes in Inferno 9. I could feel him speaking to me directly as I sat in my apartment in Piazza della Libertà, his rasping consonants and singing vowels drowning out the roar of the Vespas and the rumble of the traffic converging on the city’s nearby ring roads. I felt I could spend a lifetime exploring the mystery of his versi stani, strange verses.

Soon after my visit to Calabria, Dante’s words and his image had become, as he writes at the opening of Paradiso, a blessed kingdom stamped on my mind. I pictured him in Botticelli’s famous portrait: in regal profile, with his magnificent aquiline nose launched ahead of his piercing stare, his body swathed in a crimson cloak, and his head crowned with a black laurel, the symbol of poetic excellence given an otherworldly gravitas by the brooding color. It was a face that had been to hell and back, visited the dead and lived to tell. And it was a burning gaze that would buckle under none of life’s mysteries.

One late night in Florence I was out walking when I was arrested by a smell. I followed the scent and landed inside one of the city’s pasticcerie, pastry shops, making the next morning’s delicacies. I ordered a few brioches and took them to Santa Croce. In an empty square, I put the warm, achingly delicious pastry into my mouth as I leaned against the base of Dante’s statue. I was in Italy, I thought—not my parents’ Italy but another one, hundreds of miles from Zio Giorgio’s Calabria and light years from the mud and sorrow that my family had left behind. Dante had somehow appeared in both places.

With my mouth filled with flakes of buttery pastry, I pressed my back against Dante and stared onto the silent stones of Santa Croce.

I was falling in love.

THE DAY AFTER KATHERINE DIED, I returned to our home after spending the night in the hospital. Her morning coffee was still out by the bathroom sink, where strands of her hair lay in coils. The bed was unmade and the drawers flung open, suggesting a day open to all sorts of possibilities. She had left the apartment to attend class at a local university, where she was completing her degree after giving up on acting. We had plans to meet for dinner, and she had used my favorite coffee cup, the Deruta ceramic mug with the dragon design that I had paid too much for in Florence.

I took the sheets in my arms and breathed in her smell one last time.

My family, who had come from Rhode Island the moment they heard the news, surrounded me. Choking back sobs, my mother and sisters put on latex gloves and set out to erase Katherine’s last traces with Lysol and Formula 409.

The snow was falling outside—the first storm of the year.

Meanwhile, Isabel slept in a sterile forest of incubators in the neonatal unit of Poughkeepsie’s Vassar Brothers Hospital, its machines nourishing her after an improbable birth. They would keep her safe while I went out walking, looking for souls bunched up like fallen leaves on the shores of the dead.

The snow fell nonstop after Katherine’s accident, covering our village and announcing an early winter. The chaplain had told me I was in hell, but in my many walks around a dim, gloomy Tivoli, I felt more like I was in Virgil’s Underworld—a place of shadows, no brimstone and fire. I thought of Dante losing his “bello ovile,” “fair sheepfold.” During his lifetime, two political parties, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, dominated Florentine politics and were perpetually at war with each other. Dante was a Guelph, which was usually pro-papacy. But in the intensely factional and family-based world of Florentine politics, a split in Dante’s party emerged, and he joined the group that resisted Pope Boniface VIII’s meddling in the city’s affairs. This infuriated Boniface, who arranged to have Dante detained while he was in Rome on a diplomatic mission in 1302. Meanwhile, back in Florence, Dante’s White Guelph party lost control of the city to the pro-papacy Black Guelphs, who falsely accused Dante of selling political favors and sentenced him to exile in absentia, ordering him to pay an exorbitant fine. Dante insisted that he was innocent and refused to pay. The Black Guelphs responded with an edict condemning Dante to permanent exile. If you come back to Florence, they warned, you will be burned alive. As I walked through the winterscape pondering Dante’s fate, fire was the last element on my mind. But I could feel the edict’s heat burn inside as the reality of my own exile descended upon me with each snowflake.

Dante would spend the first thirty-four cantos of The Divine Comedy at the degree zero of humanity, Inferno. His guide Virgil had also sung of hell in The Aeneid, of the Trojan hero Aeneas who watched Troy, sacked by the Greeks, burn to the ground, and then abandoned his lover Dido, Queen of Carthage, because the gods had decreed that he must forsake all entanglements to found Rome. At the book’s end, Aeneas confronts his defenseless enemy Turnus, who had killed his friend Pallas. “Go no further down the road of hatred,” Turnus begs him, and for a moment Aeneas relaxes the grip on his sword. But then he drives his sword into Turnus’s breast, burying the hilt in his throat—ira terribilis. Terrible in his rage.

My own grief wasn’t so ferocious. I could feel myself retreating into a cocoon, just like the one my mother made each night when she went to sleep, even in the dead of summer: the door shut, the windows sealed, the blankets pulled over her head. I wondered how she managed not to suffocate. Now I too needed total darkness. I started sleeping in the fetal position like my infant daughter.

One night I dreamed that I was back in the hospital the day of Katherine’s accident, and someone was telling me that she was alive. In critical condition, but alive. I ran out of the room and shouted to my mother and four sisters, “Is it true? Is she okay?” The adrenaline surged through me, my heart nearly exploding out of my chest.

I woke up coated in sweat, a pool of vomit welling in my stomach. It had only been a dream, not a premonition.

I became so frightened of these visions that I tried to prepare for them. Katherine is gone, Katherine is gone, I repeated to myself each night before I went to sleep, just as I had on the day she died, when I slept in a hospital room adjacent to the incubating Isabel, my mother and sister beside me. Yet the reel would not stop. One dream had Katherine and me in a car, her flesh creamy to the touch, a life-breathing pink. I asked her why she had gone, how she could do such a thing, but she just sat there in impenetrable, lunar silence. In another dream we were in a crisis, on the brink of a breakup, a situation we had never remotely approached.

I know what you’re doing, I’m saying to her, you’re trying to split up with me, for my own good, but I just can’t do it. I’m not ready. Please don’t leave me . . .

I’m begging her, just as I had begged the neurosurgeon to save her when he and his team operated on Katherine’s pummeled brain after Isabel was born.

Please, I said to him, do anything. Hook her up to a machine, I don’t care, just keep her alive!

I sat waiting in a small room in Poughkeepsie’s Saint Francis Hospital while they operated. A social worker was there beside me, along with a gray unsmiling nun who muttered something about the power of prayer. I left the room and found the hospital chapel, where I got down on my knees on a yellow polyurethane pew. A jaundiced-looking Jesus hung on a suspended cross.

Please, God. I beg you. Just keep her alive . . .

Then I made the fatal mistake of allowing myself a daydream.

“You gave us quite a scare,” I’m saying, while I hold Katherine’s hand and stroke her bruised body. But she doesn’t answer. As in the dreams that would follow, she can no longer speak.

I left the chapel. The neurosurgeon appeared in tears.

ALL YE WHO ENTER ABANDON HOPE—Dante inscribed these words on the gates of hell. But after Katherine died it wasn’t the lack of hope that was crushing me. It was the memory of what I had lost.

In 2004, Katherine and I began living together in North Carolina, where I had received a one-year fellowship at the National Humanities Center, enabling me to take a leave of absence from my regular teaching duties at Bard and focus on my scholarly research. Katherine had finally said good-bye to acting and given up her life in New York to join me in the South, as I gave up my apartment in Brooklyn with plans to move to the Bard area with Katherine after the fellowship ended. I arrived in North Carolina a few weeks before she did and set up our home while she completed a Pilates training course in New York. On the day she joined me, we went for a walk on Duke’s East Campus, the struggles of living in New York with too little money dissolving in the warm air as we walked past the colonial facades and scattered gazebos. I thought, If only we could stay here forever, extend my one-year fellowship into an eternity. I had recently turned thirty-seven, nearly the same age as Dante when he found himself in the dark wood. Unlike Dante, however, I had little to show for myself—no family of my own, no relationship where I had given of myself completely, until I met Katherine.

Soon after we arrived, I came home on a warm fall afternoon to watch game three of the Red Sox’s divisional playoff against the Yankees. My team was sure to lose, I told myself as I left my car and walked toward our warehouse loft in one of Durham’s former tobacco factories, but I still savored the anticipation of the game. I grew up loving the Boston Red Sox, an experience that taught me we can’t bend the world to our will, that life is in large part learning how to manage disappointment. In 1978, as a sixth grader on my way home from school, I listened as the neighborhood rang with the news: Yaz just homered! The Red Sox took a brief lead in their one-game playoff against the Yankees, only to fritter it away on an improbable home run by the beefcake Bucky Dent in the seventh. The great Carl Yastrzemski himself would seal the inevitable disaster, popping up on the blur of a Goose Gossage fastball that I knew was unhittable even before it skimmed harmlessly off his bat. It would take another twenty-six years for the curse of the Red Sox to lift.

Sitting in our North Carolina home, I watched helplessly as, by the ninth inning and down 4–3, it looked as though fate would hand the star-crossed Red Sox another loss. But then, after a startling rally against the otherwise invincible Mariano Rivera, the Red Sox’s Big Papi Ortiz ended it all in extra innings with a mammoth game-winning home run. The Red Sox went on to win game four of seven as part of their improbable run to their first World Series title in nearly a hundred years.

Three years later, in fall 2007, Katherine and I were husband and wife and awaiting our first child, and the Red Sox were back in the playoffs. As I watched Game Six of their American League Championship against the Cleveland Indians, Katherine spoke on the phone with her mom. Our spacious apartment looked out onto Tivoli’s main street and was perched above a gallery. There was an art opening that evening, so our floor hummed with voices and the shuffling of feet. The streets were filled with people walking to bars and restaurants. With the count three balls and a strike, the Red Sox’s J. D. Drew was offered a fastball down the middle of the plate. With a graceful swing, he sent the ball sailing over the center field wall to give the Red Sox an insurmountable lead.

After Drew’s hit, I walked out onto our porch and stood against the railing with a glass of wine in my hand. It was a pleasant November night, the air moist. The scraping of chairs and scuffling of feet in the gallery below had ceased, as the artists and guests spilled onto the sidewalk below me. Across the street, a vegetarian restaurant and country hotel gave off a warm glow through their frosted windows. The world felt small and ordered. I lived in a two-room loft that stood a short drive from the garden-like campus where I taught great books and a beautiful language, and inside our well-lit home my wife held our future in the perfect dome of her expanding belly. All I needed and wanted was right here in the life my wife and I had built amid the stacks of books and stray tennis rackets. While Katherine talked and J. D. Drew circled, I thought: I have it all. Not in the grand sense—no fame, fortune, or power. But in a good, simple way that was all I could hope for. For the first time, I could feel the sawed-off halves of my life—the family-oriented immigrant warmth I had grown up with and the striving, exciting, but exhausting climb up the academic mountain—coalescing into a whole. The great is the enemy of the good, according to an old Italian proverb, warning us away from chasing an unreachable ideal. Finally, at the age of forty, I was ready to accept the good.

This was October 2007, and the Red Sox eventually took the game and went on to win another World Series—their second in three years.