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

“Honey, just aim for something steady,” my typical harangue would go, “something more than a few hours of Pilates here and there.”

Shortly after moving to North Carolina, we went shopping on a gorgeous September day. We separated for a bit and made plans to meet at the car. A half hour after our appointed time, Katherine bounced over, apologizing for being late, but happily clutching a bag full of expensive cosmetics. My worry at her lateness turned to anger and I started shouting at her, asking where she’d been and why she hadn’t answered my calls. I said that we couldn’t afford the two hundred dollars of facial creams and exfoliants, that she had to change her ways and handle money better.

“You need to make some instead of just spending it!” I cried.

She burst into tears. I had struck a nerve in Katherine much deeper than her questionable home economics. Ever since renouncing acting, she had been trying to recover from the loss of her youthful dreams. Now, in her thirties, she feared that what she imagined to be her greatest gift, her beauty, which she had relied upon her entire life, would one day fade. The cosmetics were a cry for help—a plea I mistook for vanity. Instead of intuiting her needs, I made it about my fears of not being able to provide fully for her and our family. Katherine needed a loving word, and instead I played the part of the perfect brute, ruining a beautiful sunny day just as we were starting our life together.

Katherine was a dreamer—we both were, except that, unlike mine, her dreams weren’t tethered to the icy logic of credentials and connections. She lived in the moment, a place I rarely visited. This is why I had fallen in love with her. This is also why our otherwise happy relationship could plague me with worry about our future together.

My decision that first night in the hospital to move back “home”—I still used the word to describe my hometown of Westerly, even though I hadn’t truly lived there since high school—was partly because Katherine and I had felt so comfortable there as a couple. When she spent time with my family, Katherine experienced none of the tension and insecurity that rankled her when she was with my colleagues and academic friends. Loving Katherine had enabled me to reconnect to the person that I had been when I was growing up. I had spent years trying to smother my Rhode Island accent (“How fah from the pahk ah we?”). But when I had a bit to drink, or when I woke up first thing in the morning, the R would instinctively fade into H. I was a Luzzi, after all, Westerly High class of ’85, no matter how far I traveled away from the South County coast or how many degrees I collected. To understand how far I had tried to run from Westerly before circling back, all you had to do was ask my name. For years I had been pronouncing it differently from my family, preferring the Italianized “LOO-tsie” to their staunchly American “luz-zy” (rhymes with “fuz-zy”). As they were trying to assimilate to their new American life, I insisted on reclaiming legendary Calabria, looking for an Italianate pronunciation to distinguish myself. On paper, I had the same name as my mother and sisters—but I had taken to announcing it differently to the world, to show how much distance I had placed between my point of origin and myself.

A FEW WEEKS AFTER MOVING to Westerly I idled in the parking lot of a downtown bookstore, listening to an audiobook of Homer’s Odyssey, with the gravelly voice of Ian McKellen as Odysseus. I needed stories to get me through the long days in my hometown. I drove around for hours with the CD playing, skirting the coast and avoiding my mother, my sisters, and the fortress they were building around Isabel. I parked by the beaches and stopped to look out into the surf, listening to McKellen narrate how Odysseus negotiated one obstacle after another on his way back to Ithaca from the Trojan war. A seagull landed near my car and gutted a crab; Odysseus wandered while his wife, Penelope, waited, spinning wool and fending off suitors. Katherine had only been gone a few months, and I was back in the Calabrian bosom that I had left behind as a teenager, when I was determined to leave my Italian American immigrant world and never return. I was also back to teaching at Bard, doing all I could to remain connected to the college community that had closed ranks around me, just as my family had, to help me make it through the Underworld in one piece. McKellen continued his tale of Odysseus’s winding journey, splitting the waves of the Aegean and plowing its foam as he hurried in the direction of a home that had been entirely transformed, crowded with gluttonous and conniving suitors hoping to win Penelope’s hand.

“The queenly nymph [Calypso] sought out the great Odysseus,” McKellen spoke, “and found him there on the headland, sitting, still, / weeping, his eyes never dry, his sweet life flowing away / with the tears he wept for his foiled journey home.”

Odysseus looked out to sea by Calypso’s cave, tears streaming from him like summer rain over the Aegean. Calypso was a stunning sea nymph who had taken Odysseus prisoner and fallen in love with him, fulfilling his every desire but one: the irrepressible need he felt to return to his homeland. I had made it back to Westerly, my Ithaca. But when I drove along the coast, walked through the historic downtown, and ran along the beach, I felt as invisible as one of Dante’s shades in the afterworld. I wasn’t returning or revisiting the world of my childhood; I was haunting it.

I sat in my car for another hour, waiting for Odysseus’s ship to make landfall. Meanwhile, the seagull abandoned the crab as the purple and orange dusk spread over the winter ocean, reminding me that it was time to return to Batterson Avenue, where my mother was warming bottles of Similac formula for Isabel’s dinner.

WE MEET DANTE’S ULISSE—FOR ULYSSES, the Roman form of Homer’s Greek hero Odysseus—in Malebolge, a moral black hole consisting of ten concentric ditches toward the bottom of Inferno. According to Dante, the farther you get from God’s love, the colder it gets, so the pit of Inferno is all ice. And the deeper one goes into Dante’s hell, the smarter the sinners. In Malebolge, the greatest holding pit of human evil in the universe, the sin of fraud is punished. The previous sins in hell, including the lust of Paolo and Francesca, were failures of will, as the body’s appetites overwhelmed the mind that was supposed to constrain them. But in Malebolge the sinners abuse a greater gift than the body: here the intellect has turned sour.

Throughout The Divine Comedy, Dante engages in intense conversations with his characters, from the sinners in hell to the blessed in heaven. Most everyone he meets, including the eloquent chatterbox Francesca da Rimini, talks Dante’s ear off, as they desperately recount how they had been wronged or how they had been saved. Everyone except Ulysses. He is unapproachable. Transformed into a tongue of flame, he hisses words at a starstruck Dante, who listens but doesn’t dare speak back, heeding Virgil’s words that the great Greek hero might hold him in scorn.

In Homer’s epic telling, Odysseus endured ten years of war in Troy, then ten years of wandering through the wine-dark waters separating him from his island of Ithaca and his wife, Penelope. But nothing could stop him from returning home. He ran a spike through the eye of the drunken Cyclops; he stopped his ears with wax against the song of the Sirens; he rescued his crew from the seductive drug of forgetfulness in the Land of the Lotus-eaters; he cried an Aegean Sea of protest against Calypso and her enticements. Homer’s Odysseus embodies devotion to home; Dante’s Ulysses is as restless as his flaming tongue, as he describes the overwhelming sense of displacement he felt upon returning to Ithaca:

neither fondness for my son, nor devotion

to my old father, nor the love I owed

Penelope that would have contented her,

could overcome the lust

I felt inside to become an expert

on the world’s vices and its virtues.

Nothing can calm Ulysses’ yearning soul: he burns to return to the high seas and his wanderer’s life. He convenes a meeting with his former comrades, asking them to join him in leaving Ithaca and setting sail for new adventures.

Remember, he tells them: “you were not made to live like brutes, / but to pursue virtue and knowledge.”

They succumb to his magical words and rush to join him at sea. But their joy soon turns to fright. Within a fortnight, a terrible storm strikes their vessel. No honeyed words can save them now. The sea closes over them—“com’ altrui piacque,” Dante writes, “as pleased another,” implying that the heavens were not on Ulysses’ side.

Francesca made Dante wonder: how do you love a person without a body—when you are so heartbroken that you can’t imagine her alive anymore? Ulysses’ lesson is even more bitter: once you lose your former life—to use that wooden term—you can never get it back. In a complete reversal of Homer, Dante sends Ulysses back to sea after he has returned home—because the home he finds back in Ithaca is no longer home.

AS I GAZED OUT TO the Atlantic and listened to McKellen narrate the Odyssey, I pictured Dante’s Ulysses coming home to Ithaca and created my own version of the story, just as Dante had. In my telling, Ulysses’ tale went like this:

In the twenty years since he had left his wife, Ulysses had known other women and he had wept a sea of tears. Yet he had forsaken all of them, human and divine, for this very moment. He had made it back to the home he was born in. He was standing in his bedroom—the place where he had left the things of childhood and later slept as a man. His hair stood on end. Nothing had changed: the rooms were filled with everything he had left behind. And there it was, in the center of the room, the bed on a platform of a massive oak tree trunk. He took the sheets in his arms: they smelled of sandalwood and soap.

He smelled his wife on the sheets, for the first time in twenty years. His pulse raced: they were finally together in the same house, and within hours he would smell her flesh and touch her skin. He would make love to the wife who had become a woman without a body—a perfect, remote shadow in his dreams and daydreams.

He had killed countless rivals (and was about to slaughter his wife’s suitors), had matched wits with the most brilliant, and crossed swords with the most ferocious. He had lived in Calypso’s cave for seven years, captive to a jealous lover who provided him with everything he could ever hope for, but did not want. Amid the nymphs wreathed in seaweed, the suckling pigs, and the writhing dancers, he would wander to a clump of rocks that jutted out into the sea. And he would weep, rivers of tears that soaked his tunic and splashed against the stone. All the while, he stared in the direction of the house that smelled of sandalwood and soap.

Now he had made it home.

The sandalwood and soap filled his body, first with sweetness.

Then with nausea.

Back in my own childhood home after twenty years—falling asleep on my mom’s living room sofa while Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes duked it out over gun control and health care—I could feel Ulysses’ nausea in the pit of my stomach.

Nausea: that’s the sensation Dante used to describe his exile, which he said teaches you “come sa di sale / lo pane altrui”—“how salty is the taste / of another man’s bread.” He wasn’t waxing metaphorical: they have made bread without salt in Florence from Dante’s time until today, and nothing reminds a Florentine more of home than this desalinated staple.

A FEW MONTHS INTO MY stay in Westerly, I returned to Katherine’s hometown outside Detroit to celebrate her father’s retirement from the bench. The day I arrived, her parents and I drove to the cemetery on a rainy day similar to the one when we had buried Katherine months earlier. That night, her father gave his farewell speech to hundreds of power brokers at the Oakland Hills Country Club, a site that has hosted the U.S. Open golf championships. He ended his talk by clapping for the audience, saying that the applause should be for them, not him, and many cried, partly because they were inspired by his words, partly because of the pity they felt for him, for me seated beside him, and for Isabel back in Rhode Island with her nonna. I looked around the table as he spoke. Katherine’s mother had aged beyond recognition. More than anyone else, she could not accept what happened. At first, she didn’t react to the news. At the hospital in Poughkeepsie the day after Katherine died she showed up making small talk, even cracking jokes.

“I can’t believe that kid is gone,” she kept repeating, but there were no tears, only a faraway look in her eyes. We all knew it wasn’t because she didn’t care—it was because she cared too much. A husband who loses his wife may one day have the chance to rebuild, perhaps even get a second chance at happiness. A parent gets no such reprieve. The sight of Katherine’s parents standing by their daughter’s grave brought to mind Virgil’s description of the families in the Underworld, harrowing words that Dante knew by heart:

mothers and grown men and ghosts of great-souled heroes,

their bodies stripped of life, and boys and unwed girls

and sons laid on the pyre before their parents’ eyes.

I felt no connection to the mossy patch where Katherine’s body lay in Royal Oak Cemetery. The facticity—now there’s an ugly word—of death was all I found. My tears didn’t even feel genuine. I knew I was supposed to cry and so, bravo ragazzo, clever boy, that I was, I played the part of the grieving husband to a T. Her parents—fine, broken people who would never recover, who had abandoned all hope—also wept, streaming frightening tears and groans that seemed to emanate, raw and animal-like, from the pit of their stomachs. Their daughter had been returned to her people. But this expanse of stones, flags, and flowers meant nothing to me. I was still numb from the shock of Katherine’s sudden death. She was like a phantom limb, the pain of something not there. Worse still, guilt ravaged my insides, as I felt as though I had failed my wife and this kindly couple. Their daughter died on my watch, I had said to Georgia. I said the right things to whoever would listen—and there were many caring people who paused to hear—about how I missed her, how she lived on in our daughter. But the purifying tears would not flow, as I turned inward, home only inside Dante’s verses or the long walks I took alone in my upstate village, on icy streets as bereft of life as the frozen lakes of Inferno.

I needed help—more help than any priest could give. I had no clue how to love somebody without a body, and so I reached out to another great-souled woman.

“I’M TRYING TO HOLD IT together,” I said to my grief counselor, Rosalind, at the start of our first meeting. Her office was in a nondescript development off coastal Route 1, about an hour from my mom’s house in Westerly. I had deliberately chosen someplace far enough from home to ensure that I wouldn’t be recognized. In my macho Calabrian culture, a man was expected to keep his problems locked inside, not bare them to a stranger, however qualified. For a man like my father, confession was something you did before a priest, in the privacy of the confessional, and psychoanalysis was for sissies. Other than my family, the only people who knew I was getting help of this kind were the anonymous patients I passed by in Rosalind’s waiting room before and after my appointments. But we understood the rules and never made eye contact.

Trying not to look like a broken-down soul, I wore a striped oxford shirt and wide-wale cords. After a few minutes of conversation, it was clear that, like my chaplain Georgia, Rosalind was put on earth to help others. I had never known such people until Katherine died. My family had granted me unusual kindnesses, but that was a primal, Casa Luzzi thing, decidedly intramural. Living with my tyrannical father, getting by with very little, inheriting Calabrian reservoirs of la miseria—it had all made these Batterson Avenue women tough and pragmatic. They saw life as a struggle and acted accordingly.

Like Georgia, Rosalind was schooled in the love of humanity. She had become a mother at a young age, raised well-adjusted and high-achieving children, and chosen her career for karma, not profit. That first meeting she told me it was too soon to try and get my life together and come to terms with what had happened. Too soon for everything. She was an earthy and capable Nordic woman, someone who could tend a large garden with strong hands. She was not sentimental, but she was emotional. My story got to her. I told her how and why I felt so guilty, that my not taking care of Isabel on my own was crushing me—and that I was caving under the weight of my family’s aid.

“Why can’t I do this on my own?” I asked.

“No, that’s not right,” Rosalind countered. “Isabel is getting the powerful love of a powerful family, exactly what she needs. And you are doing the best you can, under the circumstances.”

That was the refrain we kept coming back to, her most dearly held belief: people do the best they can in the place and time in which they find themselves, which is all they are capable of, even if retrospection or detached analysis tells a different story. These were Rosalind’s articles of faith: humans are essentially good and loving creatures. Sometimes that goodness and love become misdirected, but they are always there, driving the gears of the universe. Her creed, I would discover, was also Dante’s—but that would come later. Much later.

In Rosalind’s eyes, I was not who I feared I had become: a selfish careerist and calculating survivor, incapable of rising to the occasion and setting aside my own needs to raise my daughter. Instead, I was someone who was struggling to love himself again. Until I could do that, she believed, I would never love another human being—or be able to take care of one.

She sat and listened and told me that it was too soon—words that an impatient and striving nature like mine couldn’t accept. I couldn’t hurry my grief along into mourning, nor could I find that middle ground between surrendering to my family and striking out on my own with Isabel. All the while, she tapped her clogs on the cushioned footrest, looking at me with understanding blue eyes for our fifty-five minutes, while my own brown eyes passed judgment on everything in sight, especially myself.

Back in Westerly, I was using up my share of goodwill with my family. I had been the golden child indulged since birth, so deep down I expected my mother and sisters to handle the more demanding aspects of childrearing. This freed me for jaunts to the playground with Isabel, vanilla ice cream with her on the beach, and father-daughter sing-alongs at the local music program. Professionally, I may have inhabited ultraliberal turf, but I had been raised according to the gender dictates of ancient Calabria. I grew up watching my mother tend to my father like an aide-de-camp; I would never have admitted as much, but to me it was taken for granted that my mother would change Isabel’s diapers while I slept soundly.

With each midnight diaper changing that I slept through, with each afternoon nap I avoided by fleeing the house to play tennis or go work on my book, Isabel’s infancy was slipping through my fingers. My mother was devoted to Isabel, but she was old and tired, and her regimen of feeding my daughter consisted of goods that you could pick up at the gas station: Lipton soup, Nabisco crackers, Kraft mac and cheese, and Jell-O pudding, all hangovers from my nutritionally challenged childhood. I insisted on healthy and organic foods, but I let my mother and sisters do the shopping. I bought the essentials, the diapers and the formula; but, in my absence, I let the decisions for Isabel’s day-to-day care fall to them.

Isabel’s diet was not the only rein I relinquished. Most days, instead of taking Isabel with me to the park or to the library, I let my sister Margaret bundle her up along with her little cousins Michaela and Rosie and whisk her off to the Crystal Mall in Waterford, Connecticut, where Isabel would pass a spring afternoon riding a mechanical horse by a food court or putting coins into a pinball machine at nearby Chuck E. Cheese’s. To stop these trips I would have had to stop burying myself in my teaching and writing and emerge from the protective barrier of footnotes I had erected between the world and myself. Or I would have had to liquidate my puny savings and hire a child-care provider to help me raise Isabel on my terms. But I balked and took the path of least resistance.