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

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015

First published in the United States by Harper Wave in 2015

Copyright © Joseph Luzzi 2015

Joseph Luzzi asserts his moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

In a Dark Wood is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

Cover design by Robin Bilardello

Cover photograph © Sheldon Serkin/EyeEm/Getty Images

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008100667

Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780008100643

Version: 2016-05-17

For Isabel

l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle

Every grief story is a love story.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

I: THE UNDERWORLD

CHAPTER 1 An Hour with the Angels

CHAPTER 2 Consider Your Seed

CHAPTER 3 Love–40

II: MOUNT PURGATORY

CHAPTER 4 Astrid and Anja

CHAPTER 5 The Gears of Justice

CHAPTER 6 Rough Draft

III: ONE THOUSAND AND ONE

CHAPTER 7 Posthoc7

CHAPTER 8 Fathers and Sons

CHAPTER 9 Open Hours

Epilogue

Translations and Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Joseph Luzzi

About the Publisher

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.

In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood.”

So begins one of the most celebrated and challenging poems ever written, Dante’s Divine Comedy , a fourteen-thousand-line epic about the soul’s journey through the afterlife. The tension between the pronouns says it all: although the “I” belongs to Dante, who died in 1321, his journey is also part of “our life.” We will all find ourselves in a dark wood one day, the lines suggest.

For me that day came eight years ago, on November 29, 2007, a morning just like any other. I left my home in upstate New York at eight thirty a.m. and drove to nearby Bard College, where I am a professor of Italian. It was cold and wet, the air barely creased by the gray light. After my first class ended, I walked to my office to gather materials and then made my way to a ten thirty a.m. class.

I was joking with my students as we all settled in, when I noticed something unusual out of the corner of my eye: there was a security guard standing at the door.

“Look, they’re coming to arrest me,” I said, laughing. But the beefy security guard was not smiling.

“Are you Professor Luzzi?”

I’ve done nothing wrong , was my first thought.

“Yes—why?”

“Please come with me.”

I edged outside the classroom and saw the associate dean and vice president of the college racing up the stairwell. I started running too, down the stairs and out of the building. There was a security van waiting for me.

Joe, your wife’s had a terrible accident.

The words came from somewhere close, but they sounded muffled, as though passing through dimensions. Time and space were bending around me.

I was entering the dark wood.

EARLIER THAT MORNING AT NINE fifteen, my wife, Katherine Lynne Mester, pulled out of a gas station and into oncoming traffic, just a few miles from where I sat proctoring an exam in Italian. As close as she was, I didn’t hear the crunching blow of the oncoming van into the soft aluminum pocket of her driver’s side door, nor did I see the careening skid of her jeep as it swerved across the country highway and finally came to a full stop twenty feet from impact on the other side of the road. In the monastery-like silence of my classroom, I was unaware of the surging convoy of emergency response vehicles that were barreling up Route 9G, ready to rescue my wife from the tangle of metal and speed her to Poughkeepsie’s Saint Francis Hospital a half hour away.

These emergency responders were not just carrying my wife: Katherine was eight and a half months pregnant with our first child. Soon after the security guard had appeared at my ten thirty class, a medical team performed an emergency cesarean on an unconscious Katherine, delivering our daughter Isabel, who was limp, pale, had no respiratory effort, and whose heart rate was inaudible. The doctors applied pressure ventilation by bag and mask—but one minute into her new life Isabel’s heart rate was still slow and she had to be intubated. Slowly her heart rate rallied. Within ten minutes she was taking her first voluntary, spontaneous breaths.

Forty-five minutes after Isabel was born, Katherine died.

I had left the house at eight thirty; by noon, I was a widower and a father.

A WEEK LATER, I FOUND myself standing in the cold rain in a cemetery outside of Detroit, watching as my wife’s body was returned to the earth close to where she was born. The words for the emotions I had known until then—pain, sadness, suffering—no longer made sense, as a feeling of cosmic, paralyzing sorrow washed over me. My personal loss felt almost beside the point: a young woman who had been vibrant with life was now no more. I could feel part of me going down with Katherine’s coffin. It was the last communion I would ever have with her, and I have never felt so unbearably connected to the rhythms of the universe. But I was on forbidden ground. Like all other mortals, I would have to return to the planet earth of grief. An hour with the angels is about all we can take.