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

IN DECEMBER OF 2007, JUST two months after J. D. Drew sent the Red Sox into the World Series, I returned to the same spot where I had sipped my wine and contemplated my happiness. Then it had been a warm and moist early fall night; now snow covered the main street. Isabel slept in my bedroom and my mother was watching Two and a Half Men in the living room. The white desert outside my window brought to mind the words of Dante’s greatest lover: “There is no greater pain / than to remember happy times / in misery.” I was awake, but there was little difference between my daydreams and the dreams I had at night. Everything I imagined was a picture from the past that carried ominous implications for the future. It was like prophecy in reverse, with my greatest sorrow hidden in the folds of what had been my happiest thoughts—in a mind now held in fixed orbit by death.

“Tu pur morrai.” You will die.

That’s what the ladies with the crazy hair said to Dante in his first book, La Vita Nuova (The New Life), an autobiography that he wrote when he was in his twenties (about 1293)—a book about daydreams too terrible for words and the overpowering enigma of first love. A mixture of poetry and prose, the Vita Nuova narrates how Dante came to discover poetry as his life’s calling, and how his love for writing was fueled by his passion for a young Florentine woman named Beatrice Portinari, who also went by her nickname, Bice. Both Dante and Beatrice belonged to Florence’s nobility—but Beatrice’s family stood on a higher ledge than Dante’s, making him jealous.

On May 1, 1274, Beatrice’s father, the wealthy banker Folco Portinari, invited the nine-year-old Dante and his family to a party celebrating the coming of spring. All it took was one look at Beatrice, Dante writes in the Vita Nuova, for him to fall headlong and hopelessly in love. The feeling wracked his body like a deadly airborne virus, nearly killing him:

At that very moment, and I speak the truth, the vital spirit, the one that dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that even the most minute veins of my body were strangely affected; and trembling, it spoke these words: Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur michi.

“Here is a god stronger than I who comes to rule over me.” With these Latin words—the ancient language meant to convey the authority of his new master, Love—Dante proclaims Beatrice’s dominion over his heart. He would not see her again for another nine years, when he was eighteen and she seventeen. When he finally does, the illness returns, reducing him to uncontrollable tears and forcing him into the shameful privacy of his bedroom.

The Vita Nuova describes how these visions of Beatrice continue to inspire a mix of ecstasy and anguish in Dante. One day he falls ill, very ill, afflicted by a painful disease that makes him languish in bed for nine days. On the ninth day, he has a vision that is even more terrifying than his illness: the wild-haired ladies appear in his delirium, announcing, “Tu pur morrai.”

One even tells him that he is already dead. Another says to him that Beatrice, his miraculous lady, has departed from this world.

The delirium breaks. He realizes it was all a dream: Beatrice still lives. But not for long. The vision was actually a premonition. They may have been wearing sumptuous robes, Dante realizes, but the women with the disheveled hair were witches.

Terrified of my own daydreams and desperate for help, I left the chilled balcony and phoned the chaplain whom I had encountered my first snowy day in the Underworld.

A FEW DAYS AFTER I called the chaplain, she and I met at a coffee shop near campus in the village of Red Hook.

An ordained minister, Georgia was a curly-haired woman in her fifties, with gentle eyes and small shoulders that sat incongruously on a large lower frame. She lived just up the road from my apartment. I often saw her out walking and would occasionally run into her at the Tivoli library. During the memorial service for Katherine at Bard she had been a calm, dignified presence, and when I saw her walking in the snow I felt as though she had been sent to help me.

I told her that I had been trying to connect with God. I had been reading the Bible, annotating the margins of the edition I had been given for my Catholic confirmation. I tried to identify with Job, but he was too old, his suffering impossibly extravagant. I tried to pray, I told Georgia, even got down on my knees on the hardwood floor of my apartment, just as I was taught to do as a child—just as I had in the yellow chapel of St. Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie as the neurosurgeons worked on Katherine’s traumatized brain. Dante believed that prayer expedited your way through Purgatory to Paradise, with hundreds of years lopped off in a single fervent supplication. Countless letters were arriving, from my friends, Katherine’s friends, our families, my colleagues, people I grew up with, long-lost connections. I even received consoling words from Leila Cooper, a playmate from my childhood and the first girl I ever had a crush on. The mother of one of my students, a woman I had never met, wrote to say that I was in her prayers. During the funeral in Detroit, hundreds of my father-in-law’s friends told me that they were praying for me. I would instinctively answer: pray for Isabel. But my own praying felt too staged to be genuine.

I confessed my guilt to Georgia. I knew it was irrational, but I somehow felt responsible for my wife’s death. I regretted that I wasn’t with her that morning. And, although I had tried to take good care of Katherine, I could not shake the feeling that I had failed to protect her.

“A better man would not have pushed Katherine so hard to succeed in school, to bring in extra money, right?” I asked.

“You’re a victim, not a culprit,” she answered.

She said that when someone God loves dies, he too feels unbearable sorrow. He watched His own son die, she said, sensing that I was neither a natural believer nor a committed atheist. She saw me for what I was: someone who hates confrontation and seeks the middle way, a person who had never professed his faith explicitly and categorically. I had always treated religion like a buffet—a little prayer here, a bit of compassion there, a sampling of cosmic love to top off the meal. But I knew that real faith meant choices, which required admitting what you did not believe in as much as what you did believe. In a realm calling for decisive feeling, I was hedging my spiritual bets. I was a diplomat even with faith.

Only the terror of my wife’s death could bring me to my knees in prayer. But that didn’t bother Georgia. She knew I needed to hear the words of a believer. By the end of our coffee, she was telling me about her favorite Italian films. We made plans to meet again soon.

But that would be our last conversation. I had revealed my darkest thoughts because she was a stranger, but this also stopped me from telling her more. For that, I would have to find someone I shared a history with, someone familiar. Like the man I had leaned against in Piazza Santa Croce. Ever since that night in Florence, I had turned to Dante with demanding questions, none more so than the ones I was now facing. Could I love Katherine now that her body was gone? I wondered. The question reminded me of a phrase that haunted me: There is no love that is not physical. I had encountered the words in a reading long ago whose source I no longer remembered, and its mysterious wisdom had remained lodged in my brain. Dante did not write it, but his poetry led me back to those words. For he had done the unthinkable: he made his most erotic lover a woman without a body.

THE VISIONS OF LOVE THAT terrified Dante in the Vita Nuova returned when he began his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, about ten years later. Unlike most artists and writers in his Christian world, Dante understood that the sinners in hell and the saints in heaven burn with an equal amount of love. The difference between these two groups was not in the intensity of love’s flames but in what kindled them. And in hell, passion’s fire found an especially dry, combustible source in the heart of Francesca da Rimini.

Before Dante’s imagination got hold of her, Francesca had been mentioned only once in a written source: a line in her father’s will. Dante crafted her story out of legend, hearsay, and gossip. He didn’t exactly make her up—but his poetry immortalized her. He did so around 1305, when he started to write The Divine Comedy after a few years wandering around Tuscany, trying to get back to Florence—living in the past and incapable of imagining a life outside of Florence. Once he finally accepted that he was never going to make it back, he embraced his own exile and the new perspective it offered. He reignited his imagination with a poetic fire that blazed with Francesca’s love for Paolo.

Francesca was born in 1255, ten years before Dante. She was the daughter of Guido da Polenta, the ruler of Ravenna, a small city on the Adriatic with close ties to the Byzantine Empire. As the daughter of her city’s first family, she enjoyed all the status and wealth a young woman could hope for. But as a thinking and feeling creature, Francesca endured nothing but obstacles. Her patriarchal society didn’t allow her to apply her talents to a career or calling. Worst of all, in matters of the heart she had to follow orders, not her heart.

The courtly love ethos of her time separated love from marriage: since most unions among the wealthy classes were based on dowries and social standing, the marital bed was the last place to look for passion. To love someone, it was understood by the educated classes, meant to worship from afar and to suffer. You could never possess your lover. But as you surrendered to the magnetic attractions of the one you loved—those virtues that actual sexual contact would only sully—your heartbroken spirit soared with the angels.

Francesca’s father, Guido, brokered a marriage between her and Giovanni Malatesta, scion of a rival family. In uniting his daughter with the enemy, the pragmatic Guido aimed to bring peace to his people. His plan worked—as long as Francesca paid the price. Giovanni and Francesca were a grinding mismatch. She was beautiful; his nickname was Gianciotto, John the Lame, a reference to his disfigured body. Worse still, Francesca was a dreamer, easily enraptured by romantic sentiments and melodious turns of phrase. The soldierly Gianciotto would have scorned such reverie.

Francesca came of age during a poetic movement called the Dolce Stil Novo (Sweet New Style). For these poets, love wasn’t an emotional state. It was an illness that crippled the body and clouded the mind. Sospiri, sighs. Sbigottito, bewildered. Dolente, suffering. Paura, fear. Francesca encountered these Sweet New Style words each time she turned the page and read of love. This language of desire filled her thoughts that fateful day in 1275 when she, a bride of twenty, first set eyes on Paolo—Gianciotto’s handsome younger brother.

One of Dante’s most astute readers, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, said that it takes a modern novel hundreds of pages to lay bare a character’s soul, but Dante needs only a few lines. Borges must have been thinking of Francesca. No character enters The Divine Comedy as magnificently. In Inferno 5, Dante sees a couple in the distance who seem to float on the air, impervious to the gale-force winds that punish the lustful. Dante begs Virgil to speak to these windswept lovers, who approach him like doves. The woman speaks, thanking Dante for his invitation, calling him an animal grazïoso. Literally: gracious animal. What could be more flattering?

She tells Dante she was born on the shores of the Po River, and asks him the line that would come to haunt me: is there anything more horrible than remembering happy times in times of misery? Meanwhile, her beautiful partner Paolo stands beside her in total silence, streaming tears. Francesca even recites a poem for Dante: Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende. Love, which is quick to claim the gentle heart. As we listen to her speak, we begin to understand that Francesca’s “love” isn’t such a lofty emotion after all. It’s a bona fide Sweet New Style sickness. She describes how one day she and Paolo were reading King Arthur’s tales, and they came across the passage where Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, gives the knight Lancelot a fateful, adulterous kiss. The scene inspires her and Paolo to do the same:

This man, who will never be parted from me,

kissed me on my mouth all trembling . . .

That day we read no further . . .

La bocca mi basciò tutto tremante, Francesca says, the quivering Paolo kisses her right on the lips. That’s as close to medieval erotica as we’re likely to get. The seemingly perfect, polite Francesca utters words that would never leave the mouth of a well-bred lady. What’s more, she is unrepentant: in Dante’s hell, the sinners would have you believe that it’s never their fault—it’s always someone else’s.

In a tour de force of showing over telling, Dante gives Francesca just enough verbal rope to hang herself.

Francesca’s plight has confounded readers for centuries. How could Dante punish her for doing only what comes naturally—for pursuing what is often best in us, the part that loses itself in love? To punish lust is one thing—but shouldn’t true love earn a divine pass? In condemning Francesca, many readers believe, Dante is attacking love. A kindred soul of the lustful in Inferno 5, the poet Byron became so obsessed with Francesca that he made a pilgrimage to Rimini looking for traces of her. “But tell me, in the season of sweet sighs, / By what and how thy love to passion rose,” he writes in his gorgeous translation of Dante’s words to Francesca. You can feel Francesca’s breath on his shoulders as he writes. Modern poetry’s love god meets Dante’s greatest lover.

Locked forever in their love, Francesca and Paolo are an indivisible pair. But their reward is damnation. Even worse, these lovers lack the one thing that makes passion possible: the body. They float through the afterlife like two weeping doves—condemned to a love that is not physical. Trying to love each other without a body.

Trattando, Dante would write, l’ombre come cosa salda.

Treating shades as solid things.

That’s a challenge of life in the Underworld: accepting that the beloved ghost you burn for is no longer flesh and blood. And accepting that your conversation with the dead is actually a monologue, a love letter never to reach its destination.

ONE WEEK AFTER ISABEL’S BIRTH, I brought her home from the hospital with my sisters, Margaret, Mary, Rose, and Tina. We drove in separate cars, a Calabrian funeral procession incongruously transporting a new life. On the way back we went to lunch at a local diner, where I ordered the Cobb salad, just as I had many times with Katherine. The day was supposed to have been the happiest of our life. Instead, I was sitting in a dingy restaurant with my four sisters, eating wilted leaves. At home waiting was not my beautiful wife, but my seventy-six-year-old Calabrian mother, Yolanda—who now kept her false teeth in an empty glass on the bathroom sink, in the spot where Katherine had left her Deruta mug.

After her eight days in the neonatal unit, Isabel now weighed four pounds and seven ounces.

“She’s ready to go now,” the chief pediatrician had told me the day before.

I stared at him speechless.

“But . . .” I finally muttered, “wouldn’t she be safer here?” I thought of all the whirring and beeping machines surrounding Isabel with antiseptic indifference and knew, in my terrified heart, the answer.

“The hospital’s no place for healthy babies,” he said smiling. “Your daughter’s fine.”

Although she was six weeks premature, Isabel had indeed faced down all the dangers posed by her extraordinary birth—first and foremost, the impact of the accident. The paramedics found Katherine hunched over her belly as if to protect her child. In the transition from the womb to the world, Isabel was denied oxygen as Katherine’s brain shut down, and the doctors were concerned that this might affect the baby’s own developing brain. But again, Isabel came through with surprising normalcy. After her revival through intubation, she was voracious, alert, breathing—everything that a newborn baby should be, although in a tiny package. Still, the idea of bringing her home frightened me. She was no bigger than a loaf of bread, and I didn’t know the first thing about caring for a baby—let alone one that weighed less than five pounds. The head nurse could sense my naked fear. She took extra time to detail all the things I would need to do while Isabel was under my care, but the cascading items on her list overwhelmed me. It was impossible for me to concentrate. I made her repeat the routines several times the morning that we left, a cold December day whose air, I imagined, would shock the hard-won equilibrium of Isabel’s vital signs. Bundling her in extra layers of heavy blanket, I said good-bye to her team of doctors and nurses and made my way to the car park abutting Vassar Brothers Hospital, which stood two miles from Saint Francis Hospital, where Isabel had been born and her mother died.

And then we went home.

Katherine and I had set up Isabel’s crib in our bedroom. We had wanted her sex to be a surprise, so there was no predominance of either blue or pink in the piles of baby clothes we had amassed. A few days before the accident, my family gave Katherine a baby shower in Rhode Island over the Thanksgiving holiday, lavishing us with boxes of linens, bottles, and bibs that were now stacked over my volumes of Petrarch and Leopardi.

Back from the diner, I laid Isabel down gently on a blue and white blanket that my aged neighbor, Carmela DeSantis, had given to my mother to celebrate my birth. My daughter lay sleeping on her mother’s side of the bed. The joy of hearing Isabel’s newborn breath struggled to break through the grief that was pulling all my emotions into a vacuum, leaving me numb and empty—beyond love. I wanted to be elated, to feel connected to my child. But a wrecking ball had smashed the beams connecting me to my natural world, crushing the bond between father and daughter into the same pile of rubble that was filled with the other remains of my life with Katherine. I took Isabel’s tiny hand in my own. Even in miniature, I could see the tapering outline of Katherine’s long elegant fingers. Isabel had my clump of dark hair and full features on the fair skin she had inherited from her mother—a chiaroscuro baby mixing shadow and light.

“They’ll probably turn brown,” a nurse in the neonatal unit had told me, pointing to Isabel’s blue eyes, and I imagined how, soon enough, all vestiges of her mother would fade from this Italianate child. But there was a fine shape to the head that was Katherine’s and not mine, and her slender, elongated body was also a miniaturized form of her mother’s. I felt a rational love for the hand I held and stroked, but nothing instinctual and visceral. I was a ghost haunting what had been my own life.

Later that day, my sisters had to return to their husbands and jobs, while my mother remained in Tivoli with Isabel and me. From that day forward my mom did the bulk of the diaper changing, bottle feeding, babysitting, and other double-barreled chores that go into child care. That left me time to walk in the snow and mark up my dog-eared edition of The Divine Comedy, which I had taken to reading aloud to myself, the poem’s soothing sounds one of the few things that could calm me. Meanwhile, my colleagues taught my classes for me while I went on leave for the final few weeks of the semester.

“Just leave Isabel with us and pick her up when she’s sixteen,” my sister Margaret joked before returning to Rhode Island. She was only partly kidding. Katherine had made it clear to me that she wanted to be a stay-at-home mother, while I would roam free to hunt my academic woolly mammoths. Now I was about to relinquish Katherine’s maternal role to a phalanx of capable Calabrian matrons: my sisters commandeered by generalissima Yolanda Luzzi. She had six children and, with Isabel, thirteen grandchildren. Now, at the age of seventy-six, she was becoming a mother once again.