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

After a month of this new routine, classes ended for the holiday break. I made a second fateful decision that followed the grief-struck logic of my earlier decision to enlist my family in raising Isabel: I would move back to Rhode Island with my mom and Isabel and make our base there, while coming to Bard and Tivoli only on the few days each week I needed to teach, Tuesday to Thursday, a commute of roughly 175 miles each way. When I told my college president my plan, he had one word for it: harebrained. I also asked him that day if he believed in the eternal life of the soul. I was now anguishing over this question to which I had never given a second thought before.

The idea that Katherine was utterly and completely no more, in spirit as well as in flesh, tormented me after I saw her body for the last time at her funeral in Detroit, when I was shown her open casket before the mass in her parents’ church. I stood in the room with her mother and father as well as her siblings, all of us there to say our final good-byes. My sleek wife was now puffy and embalmed, all the definition gone from her features. I tried desperately to find her somewhere in there, to feel some communion as I held her hand and caressed her skin for the last time. But her forehead was as cold as marble when I kissed it, and I swore to her that I would protect and nurture our daughter, and that she, Katherine, would be a living presence for our little girl. But there was nothing left of the person I had loved in that body—that corpse in a red dress. If Katherine was anywhere in this universe, it had to be in some other form.

The fog of grief had descended on me, and I couldn’t see the sense of my college president’s words when he called my plan harebrained. I needed only to feel comforted by my family’s love for me and our collective love for my new daughter. So, on December 23, 2007, I packed up my Tivoli apartment and drove with Isabel and my mother back to my hometown.

“You will leave behind everything you love.” During Dante’s exile, a scholar from Bologna offered him the title of poet laureate, but he respectfully declined. Only if one day Florence asks me back as its honored poet, he said, then I’ll accept and return victorious to my sheepfold, my bello ovile.

I had returned to the sheepfold of my childhood, but the soft L sounds of Dante’s twin words could not calm my racing heart, no matter how many times I read aloud the passage about his exile.

THERE IS NO LOVE THAT IS NOT PHYSICAL.

You learn this when you’re faced with the sudden death of your beloved.

From the time that the nine-year-old Dante first laid eyes on an eight-year-old Florentine girl named Beatrice Portinari in 1274, you can just imagine him holding the syllables of her nickname on his tongue: BEE-chay. When he saw her again, nine years later, Bice had become a woman. In all likelihood, he had seen her in the interim, but the book he wrote about their unusual love story, the Vita Nuova, needed something more symbolic to drive the narrative. So Beatrice became her full name, the “thrice-blessed one”—just like the Trinity, the holy number three that, when squared, gave Dante the magical number nine.

When Dante was eighteen, he had a Francesca da Rimini moment: Beatrice came to him in a dream, naked except for a crimson and white cloth draped around her. She was sleeping, carried in the arms of the God of Love. The imposing figure, who went by his Latin name Amor, was brandishing something in flames. He announced to Dante: Vide cor tuum. Behold your heart. Then Amor woke up the sleeping Beatrice, who proceeded to eat the burning heart. It was Dante’s.

This vision of the burning heart incited Dante to write a sonnet. He circulated it among the leading poets of Florence, none of whom could understand it (one, a doctor, told Dante to wash his testicles in cold water to calm himself). There was one who got it, however: Guido Cavalcanti, like Beatrice a richer and better-connected Florentine whom Dante regarded with a mixture of adoration and jealousy. Guido was the unofficial leader of the Sweet New Style, the poetic movement that spoke of love as a lacerating illness that elevated the soul but destroyed the body. Guido immediately responded with a sonnet of his own to Dante: “I think that you beheld all goodness,” he wrote of Dante’s terrifying vision.

Guido’s poem made it official: Dante was now accepted into the Sweet New Style, beginning his career as a Florentine poet.

But Dante’s Beatrice, unlike other Sweet New Style muses, actually had a personality. She was no mere object of worship—someone lovely to look at but impossible to know. When Beatrice saw Dante paying too much attention to his donna-schermo, the “screen lady” whom he pretended to love so as to hide his feelings for Beatrice, she refused to greet him in the street. No other Sweet New Style woman would have shamed her poet like this. Dante was different from his fellow poets in other ways. He addressed a poem about Beatrice to Donne ch’avete intelletto di amore, “Ladies who have knowledge of love,” choosing female readers over the typical male audience. He saw women as more than just beautiful bodies.

Then, at the center of the Vita Nuova, the beautiful witch-ladies with the crazy hair tell Dante that he too will die, and that Beatrice has gone to the other side. He woke up to find it was all a dream. Or was it? Soon after his vision, Dante writes, Beatrice dies. Florence is now a widower; Dante is a widower—to a woman who was never his wife. And indeed, the real-life Beatrice Portinari died on June 8, 1290, at age twenty-four.

The strangest thing in the Vita Nuova, perhaps in all of Dante’s career, happens next. Instead of expressing his grief, he writes that when Beatrice died, the heavens aligned in a symbol of perfect holiness. In his sadness, he tried to transform Beatrice into one of those angelic, interchangeable, and ultimately forgettable, Sweet New Style muses. After all, had his fellow poets faced her death, they would have moved on quickly to another muse and found another body to love once Beatrice’s was gone.

Or maybe idealizing her was a survival mechanism for Dante, a reflexive turn to some familiar and reassuring way of explaining Beatrice’s devastating loss.

Either way, the plan breaks down. Dante’s grief is unrelenting, and he mopes around the city of Florence, too distracted to write poetry, too heartbroken to hide his sorrow. His fellow poets, especially Cavalcanti, tell him basta, enough is enough: excessive mourning is unnatural; even worse, it’s vulgar. Volgare. Time to move on. Write about another woman, they tell him. Find another body to love.

We read in the Vita Nuova that, a year after Beatrice’s death, Dante finds himself in the center of Florence among the city’s leading citizens. I picture him sitting with a paintbrush, drawing an angel, oblivious to the commotion in the piazza.

“Someone was with me just now,” he tells a passerby who stops to look at his picture, “that’s why I was so deep in thought.”

Then I see him pick up his brush and walk away—an hour with the angels is all he can take.

Soon afterward, in the midst of his drawing and despair, he sees a pretty face and all the promise it holds. She takes pity on Dante, he reads it in her eyes and wonders: maybe she can replace Beatrice. His poetry takes aim at her, his verses bursting with grateful tears. This donna gentile, gentle lady, was looking at Dante from a window above him, beckoning him to fall in love again. Dante understood that the logical, even natural thing to do would be to give himself over to this gentle lady and leave Beatrice to her early, unfortunate grave. Let her die in peace. Then he has a vision, a miraculous vision. Beatrice appears to him dressed in that same crimson and white cloth that draped her figure when she devoured Dante’s burning heart. Suddenly, Dante is riven with shame. How could he have even considered taking up with the beautiful lady in the window? No, he would devote his feelings—and his poetry—to the blessed Beatrice. The Vita Nuova ends with Dante promising silence: he will only write again when he is capable of describing Beatrice in a fitting way. First, he says, he must study.

Long study and great love—the same words that would bring Dante to Virgil in the dark wood, and that would bring me to Dante in my time of greatest woe.

JUST BEFORE I RETURNED TO Rhode Island, my editor at the university press that was about to publish my first book asked me if I could handle editing the final proofs of my manuscript. The book, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, was a study of the myth of Italy and its pull on foreign exiles such as Byron, that worshiper of Francesca da Rimini. It had taken me ten years to write the book, ever since I began my dissertation in the cement and steel of a library carrel filled with hundreds of books on Dante when I was a graduate student. I said yes to my editor. I would let nothing derail my career—that was the gauntlet I threw in the face of tragedy.

Back in Westerly, Rhode Island, with Isabel and my mother, I spent hours alone each day with the page proofs in an apartment I had rented a few minutes’ drive from my mom’s, checking citations, eliminating adverbs, and shortening footnotes. The mechanical work gave me the thing I desperately needed: solitude. Grinding away on my manuscript with pencil and eraser, vetting my words so meticulously that it must have shocked even my editor, I squirreled myself away for hours at a stretch. Meanwhile, I had outsourced the one job that could have given me a new home: being a father to Isabel.

In her new Westerly home, Isabel would sleep with her arms flung backward and her lips slightly open, a pose of absolute surrender to an unknown world. Like all babies, she was helpless, and yet she did not look like other babies, with that girlish fineness to her features and searching gaze. I don’t know what, if anything, she was looking for, and I couldn’t help but trace her sight line out toward Katherine, the natural mother she had been separated from forever. My daughter’s baby smell, its mix of powder, formula, and new skin, would melt me, and I was astonished by her newborn beauty. But my thoughts were too busy following Isabel’s gaze into Katherine’s absence for any of these sights, smells, and sounds to break grief’s hermetic seal.

No matter how many diapers I changed, or how much baby spittle fell on my collar, I didn’t feel like a real dad. Part of me was elsewhere. Obsessed with my work. Dreaming of a new home. Speaking with the dead. Kicking at the sandy beaches of my Rhode Island exile. And sounding Dante’s rhyming tercets over and over, as if they were a charm to ward off evil spirits.

After editing all day, I would return to my mother’s house and play with Isabel for a while before my mom fed her and got her ready for bed. Then, after reading or watching television, I would go to sleep in my high school bed across the hall from my daughter’s room. Katherine’s death had sent me into the dark wood, a new dimension of life that I had never imagined existed. And now, having fallen into that other life, I had splintered off into the most bizarre realm of all: my childhood, which I was reinhabiting as a forty-year-old. I knew that divorce and depression could send grown men back in broken heaps to the homes they had grown up in. I did not expect as much from death. But there I was, watching Hannity and Colmes on Fox, in my pajamas and on my mother’s rust-colored sofa, my feet on her red shag carpeting, the stillness of her dead-end street as impenetrable as the fog that had descended upon me. I was supposed to be taking care of a baby, but now I needed to be taken care of, and I had returned to the safest place I knew.

At around three a.m. Isabel’s cries would often echo throughout the hallway. I would awake to them, prop my head against the pillow for a moment, and then pad across the hallway to where my mother would already be holding Isabel in her arms.

“Lassa jera, ci penzo io,” she would say as I loitered by the crib. “Leave her be, I’ll take care of it.” Usually I would demur, sliding past my mother and Isabel and retreating to my bed and fetal sleep.

But one night, for no reason other than the faint call of that same instinct that had otherwise abandoned me, I awoke with a start as Isabel’s sobs sent me running to the crib.

“Dai, lascia stare, ci penso io,” I answered in standard Italian to her Calabrian dialect. “Let go please, I’ve got her.”

My mother scurried off, half in worry that I would drop or mishandle or fail to quiet Isabel, half that I was losing precious sleep when I needed to get my strength back. Ours was not a house where grown men held crying babies at night.

As I held the chaos of my hysterical baby in the dead of that winter night, I imagined the impact between Katherine’s jeep and the oncoming van, the crunching of metal and explosion of debris along the narrow country road. Isabel’s actual screams merged with Katherine’s imaginary ones, signaling to me that the world was fundamentally a place of disorder and violence. It was a constant reminder that I hadn’t been able to save my wife, that I might not be able to protect my daughter. The ill-fated turns, the undertows, the black ice, the live wires—they were everywhere.

Seven hundred years earlier, in the throes of his doomed youthful love for Beatrice, Dante too sensed the fragility of life when he dreamed of the ladies with wild hair and their menacing words. Dante intuited his vision as an omen, a sign that his love for Beatrice was star-crossed. Now that the heavens had indeed misaligned in my own life I could not get Dante’s fateful syllables with their rolling R’s out of my head. Tu pur morrai.

Isabel wasn’t crying out of fear or for her mother at three a.m. But I heard them as fear or longing. My rational mind understood that she blessedly knew nothing of these sentiments, yet her cries gave voice to my own anguish. I was in charge of protecting her, but it was my mother who spent her days holding my daughter in her arms. Grief had compromised my sense of other people’s needs, even my daughter’s—the bundle of life I was now cradling and comforting, our two hearts pounding as we clung to each other, both of us desperate for the human touch as we rode the arrow shot by exile’s bow, neither of us knowing if and where it would ever land.

CHAPTER 2 (#u2c6ef4c4-eb1e-5348-83bd-8b7d0ea57ae7)

Consider Your Seed (#u2c6ef4c4-eb1e-5348-83bd-8b7d0ea57ae7)

I wasn’t the only one eviscerated by Katherine’s death. She was unlike the other women I had brought home to meet my family. She did not have a fancy college degree or silver nose ring; she knew not a single band of alternative music or misunderstood, avant-garde foreign filmmaker, as Katherine’s tastes ran toward the all-American and wholesome, from Top-40 pop to Ellen DeGeneres stand-up comedy. The coeds from the Rhode Island School of Design and Oberlin and fissured nuclear families had rankled my mother and sisters with their arch comments and indifferent hygiene. They regarded my family as loveable Martians, quaintly inscrutable creatures beholden to passé virtues like marital fidelity and the severest home economics. In Katherine, my family finally had someone who did not disdain big-box retailers and suburban raised ranch houses. She was a woman without irony, the slightest tinge of snark.

“Joe, I really hope you don’t screw this one up,” my younger sister, Tina, had said to me the first time she met Katherine. Her look was as grave as her tone of voice: this could be a grown-up relationship, her eyes suggested, you’ve had your fun; now get real.

Mogli e buoi dei paesi tuoi, the Italian expression goes—wife and oxen from your hometown. Katherine was from my metaphysical village.

A few years before I met Katherine, I had been engaged in graduate school to a brilliant woman who promised me a life I had dreamed of, a world of affluence and high culture, everything I had lacked growing up. The night after passing my oral PhD exams, I met Amanda for the first time in an Ethiopian restaurant just off campus. Her graceful gentleness and guileless blue eyes, framed by wire glasses, arrested me. The next morning, in rough shape from a night of celebrating, I made a point of waking up early to hear her eight thirty a.m. paper on Brazilian history; within a few months we were basically living together, editing each other’s papers, planning trips on graduate student stipends to her parents’ properties in London, Saint Croix, and Princeton. One night, her father, a vigorous bon vivant who had built a thriving law practice, took us to a restaurant near his home in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

“Try the python,” he prodded, “or the kangaroo.”

The exotic menu was filled with the wildest game, and as I stared across the table at Amanda the world felt like an endless banquet of all the foods I could never have imagined or afforded. She was taking me to a new village, one far from the one where I had grown up in Rhode Island, and it was filled with kindness, respect, and love. I ordered the kangaroo.

In 2000, two months after receiving my doctorate and three years into our time together, I asked Amanda to marry me on the beaches of Watch Hill, the wooden carousel cresting on the horizon behind her. In tears, she said yes. I didn’t tell her that I had only bought the ring the day before, and that I had been wracked with doubt on the walk to the jeweler, a trip I had taken after months of wavering. Something deep inside me was saying, Stop, don’t do this. I tried nonetheless to love Amanda the way that she deserved, and I felt like a fool for even thinking of giving up the magical possibilities that life with her held. But my admiration and affection for her refused to blossom into true love. As the wedding approached, my misgivings began to manifest themselves in petty remarks and outbursts, as though I were goading her into fights that she knew neither of us believed in. Perhaps she could sense my ambivalence, and it made her usually low-key self become tetchy and irritable. Soon enough we were fighting nonstop. I became annoyed at how, in the manner of academic liberals, she found so many things “offensive” or “unjust,” even though she had benefited from American capitalism in every conceivable way. She began to lose patience with the company I kept: guys like me, laddish and uncouth boys who had not spent their lives in the polished worldly institutions that had been the air she breathed. The day we went to pick out our wedding invitations—a tasteful but outrageously expensive medley of sylvan designs on heavily bonded paper—we had a blowout fight over nothing in particular.

“What’s happening to us?” she asked.

“Are we making a mistake?” I replied.

That April, six weeks before our wedding and with the invitations already mailed out, we called things off.

A thought flashed across my mind that first night in the hospital after Katherine’s death. I would go home, back to my metaphysical village, to the place where more than any other I could be myself, with no need to impress—a longing Katherine understood viscerally. Katherine and I were both a bit lost in the new lives we’d chosen and the comfort of familiarity we’d left behind. I missed my home state, its beaches and weather-beaten shingles, the old-world wealth and new-world eccentricity. “Welcome to Rhode Island,” I recall our longtime cartoonist Don Bosquet writing, “where we can pronounce ‘Quonochontaug’ and ‘Misquamicut’ but can’t say ‘chow-duh’ [chowder].” I had left the state at eighteen, one of the few from my high school to venture out of South County, as most of my classmates landed at the nearby University of Rhode Island (URI, or Ewe-Ah-Eye in the local accent). Part of me was envious. The frat houses and keg stands of URI, the house parties in Bonnet Shores, the surfers with ropey bracelets and suntanned athletic girls with long limbs—I would know none of this in my bookish world. The turf farms and ocean breezes surrounding the local college seemed to promise a simpler life.

Katherine had been suffering from a similar homesickness. She was never fully at ease in our college town and missed her family in Michigan, the Midwestern sincerity, the strong Republican values of her father and his political circles. I could feel the tension radiate from her at dinner parties as friends of ours, over couscous and ciabatta, excoriated Cheney and Rumsfeld. She knew that she could not speak her mind in these circles. And she knew that I disagreed with her on almost all political matters. But I had learned to live with our opposing viewpoints and even found it exhilarating to hear her tell me, in private, why she rejected the principles governing my world. The part of me that had grown up in a blue-collar family light-years from the liberal chatter of the ivory tower also relished her unabashed embrace of the family values and enterprising spirit that had helped my own family climb out of centuries of Calabrian squalor and make it into the American middle class.

The morning of her accident, she had been driving to the State University of New York at New Paltz for a final exam in one of her humanities courses. She had a 3.75 grade point average and was majoring in history, after having been accepted into the college’s honors program the year before. But she was struggling to balance her pregnancy, her work as a Pilates instructor, and her life in a world far from her family in Michigan and actor friends in New York. At the end of the day, there were term papers to write and oral reports to prepare for, but there was no clear sense of where it was all heading, as she had not decided what—if any—career she wanted for her post-acting life. And then there were all those brainiacs to deal with. Once in North Carolina she told one of the fellows at the Humanities Center, a well-known Slavic poet, that she hated the film Pulp Fiction because it was, in her words, “immoral.” She certainly could have chosen a more politic term, but that was just how she was: transparent, emotional, direct, not given to abstractions and open-ended arguments. The poet gave her a vacant, confused look. My wife was breaking a sacred rule of the chattering classes: never make an unsubtle point about a major cultural phenomenon. And never hold art to the same standards as life. I wonder how he would have reacted if he found out her dirtiest secret of all: this lithe, artsy Midwestern girl was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican.

Unlike Katherine’s, my own career path had been a clearly defined one, even when I briefly stepped off it for some fun as a bartender or backpacker in Europe. Her return to college seemed logical enough to me: she was smart, would do well, and would get a decent job for her efforts. I wanted to have my domestic cake, with Katherine as stay-at-home mom, and eat it too, with her also going out and earning some money in a job that wouldn’t overly tax or distract her. Please, God, just let her earn $50,000 a year, I prayed, sometimes loud enough for Katherine to hear. I never imagined a life of financial hardship for us, not after all those years of study and sacrifice. Faced with the reality of our one-income household and my modest professorial salary, I began to increase the pressure on Katherine.