The day Renzo had his aneurysm, in the afternoon before it happened, I distinctly remember telling him that it was going to be a pleasure to watch him grow up. It seems ridiculous to write that here, the foreshadowing so on the nose as to be unbelievable. But it’s true. To him and my wife Allegra, I said, “I love our little family.” After the struggles around his birth, job loss, the pandemic, it felt, finally, like we had made it to the other side. We had, I suppose, just not how I envisioned it.
My friends Jayson and Stacy recommended I get to know David Kessler’s work. According to Harvard Business Review, Kessler is “the world’s foremost expert on grief”. He’d worked closely with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who was the reigning expert on grief before her own death in 2004. A large part of Kübler-Ross’s legacy is her classification of what she calls the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, as described in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. After you experience a death, she wrote, these stages can occur in any order, with one or more possibly not occurring at all. Just weeks after Renzo’s death, I’d tricked myself into thinking I had jumped all the way to acceptance when really I was trying to outrun anger and depression. Bargaining hasn’t been a big one for me, nor has denial. The facts have been pretty hard to ignore.
In 2019, Kessler updated Kübler-Ross’s five stages with a sixth: finding meaning. He made this addition after the death of one of his two sons, who accidentally overdosed at 21 years old. On Kessler’s website you can find all kinds of useful material. There are straightforward sections, like chapters in a handbook, called A Loved One’s Belongings, Grief & Holidays, and When a Child Dies. When a Child Dies is a series of videos, all of which I dragged my feet on watching until Allegra urged me to. In the videos, Kessler has a gentle presence. He’s grandfatherly but young, in his 60s, with a healthy head of hair. His voice is squeaky, but he speaks softly. He’s wearing a dark blue vest and a turquoise button-down shirt, standing in front of a piece of abstract art and white shutters. They are closed. A green glass vase with pink flowers peeks out from the side of the screen. Very Nancy Meyers meets Mister Rogers. The presentation has the effect of making Kessler trustworthy, if anonymous. All smooth edges, no distracting elements, no sudden movements, just a nice guy, shot authoritatively in the center of the frame, talking calmly about unthinkable disaster. Welcome to the rest of your miserable life, he may as well have been saying, this nonthreatening emissary from hell broadcasting straight to my laptop.
The first video in the series is called The Loss – the Moment Everything Changed. Kessler focuses on the “moment” part of the loss as he explains the concept of “anticipatory grief”. This is the kind I did not get an opportunity to have. For your parents, your grandparents, your pets, there is a built-in expectation that they will predecease you. So you imagine their death, imagine your life without them, as that is the natural order of things. That imagining helps prepare you for the actual event, like a practice run before the big race. With a sudden death, it’s the surprise that gets you. You’re unprepared. You wouldn’t run a marathon if you’d never taken a jog.
As I watched Kessler’s videos, about a month after Renzo’s death, I found myself feeling resentful toward people who had the luxury of pregrieving their loved ones. It was strange and sad to find myself not only envying but begrudging those also in mourning, these straw men against whom I measured my own level of suffering, unfairly or otherwise. On the one hand, pain is pain is pain. On the other, it’s not.
Kessler seemed to be reading my mind as, partway through the first video, he broke the third wall. “We deal with so many unwanted surprises as a parent dealing with loss,” he says. “It’s so much more brutal. I don’t have to tell you how brutal it is. You know.” I do.
I’ve likened grieving Renzo’s death to falling off a cliff. I’ve found that others who have mourned unexpected deaths, of any kind, have felt a similar drop. Their loved one’s existence was terra firma, and then they toppled over the edge into free fall.
I’m rewatching these videos as I write this. It’s eerie to see them again after a few years. Watching for the first time, I was totally bewildered, stumbling around in the dark. Kessler was describing the death world like a store manager showing me the ropes on my first day on the job. Now I’ve been working there for a long time. I know where everything is.
Grief has rules, Kessler explains in the second video. He likens it to blindness or the loss of a limb. You have to learn to navigate this new terrain. He spends a while talking about laughter. Is laughing disloyal? No, it’s not. Social media, he says, bringing with it many photos of other people’s obliviously happy families, can be a risk; be mindful. And don’t expect your spouse to be your support system; they are as out of gas as you. This was ominous. “How can two empty tanks support each other?”
A number of times he refers to the pitfalls of conversations with strangers in the checkout line. People will disappoint you; be prepared. “People say stupid things in life, and they don’t quit saying them in grief.” He says it out the side of his mouth in a funny, conspiratorial kind of way, like a stand-up comic.
Surprisingly, he starts off the third video with a joke that seems more for the grief counselors’ group text than for the newly bereaved. “People always ask me, ‘How long will I grieve?’ I say, ‘How long will your child be dead?’”
But as the video goes on, he regains his seriousness. “The goal of grief work is to remember our child with more love than pain.” I dreaded this idea. The pain I felt mourning Renzo’s death was evidence of his existence. Missing him was the closest I could get to being with him. The worse I felt, the truer our love. The better I’d begin to feel, the further he’d fade. Time moves in only one direction: the wrong one. “No one wants to be the bereaved parent,” Kessler says. But “we’ve been given more life. So what are we going to do with the rest of our lives?”
It reminded me of two lines from Mary Oliver’s poem Poem 133: The Summer Day that have been so oft quoted as to become cliché.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
What so many saw as an invitation I now saw as a threat. Tell me.
I’d never read the entire poem, and so I sought it out. I was not surprised to find out that most of it is about Oliver traipsing through the grass, appreciating the anatomy of a grasshopper. I was, however, surprised to see that the line before those famous final two is “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?”
If Kessler was right, I had a choice to make about how to use the time I’d been given. He said I should live in a way that honored Renzo. How would I do that?
One thing I did know about myself was that I’d always wanted to be a parent. I love kids. They’re excitable, they’re weird, they love to shove food in their mouths and make big messes and not clean them up. They remind me of myself. Devoting myself to a child of my own seemed like an ideal scenario in which to disappear. And it was. Renzo’s life served to define my own in a way that felt much healthier than my relationship with work. While some of this was emotional, a lot of it was logistical. He was a baby; he had to be watched at every moment. It was exhausting but euphoric.
After his daughter’s death, Jayson had become close with Kessler, and he offered to introduce us. We took him up on it, and he connected us over email. Kessler responded quickly. He said he was willing to talk.
“My heart sank when I read about your sweet son Renzo. Would Thursday, January 13th at 6 PM EST work for you?” It would. His assistant sent us a Zoom link.
For a brief time, Allegra and I had the living room set up backward from how it is now, with the couch where the chairs are now and the chairs where the couch is. So when I remember our conversation with Kessler, the two of us on the couch together, huddled over my laptop, the memory feels inverted, wrong. We should have been facing the other way.
I had high hopes for our bespoke treatment. Once he heard our story, I imagined, Kessler would have some silver bullet to decimate our grief. Everyone grieves differently, he’d said in his videos. Now was the time for him to see how we did it. And then fix it.
Kessler was warm and patient, but most of what he said was the same as in his videos. The one addition was that he kept telling us to be resilient. That’s it? That’s the big secret? We’d climbed the mountain, seen the oracle, and he was out of ideas.
I know now it’s not anyone’s fault. Certainly not Kessler’s. He had done more than anyone to help us heal in those early days from that for which there is no cure. But if even he had nothing for us other than “resilience”, it was difficult to not feel hopeless. We made plans to check in and talk again but never did.
Despite my capriciousness in regard to accepting the wisdom and advice of others, I continued seeking it out. I’ve always looked for guides, gurus, in times of difficulty, hoping they would offer a vista into another, better way of life. I was reading whatever I could, my antennae up for transmissions of wisdom. Online, I stumbled across the audio recording of an interview Toni Morrison gave to The Paris Review in 1993. One thing she said was “I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence. It’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for. I think finding, incorporating, and then representing beauty is what humans do.” This quote, surfaced years after the original interview, when the entire unedited conversation was turned into a podcast, was not included in the original print interview; it must have been edited out. Why? Too moony? Too frivolous? Perhaps, but this was the first bit of insight that truly made me reconsider what I’d need to do in order to heal.
I’d never lived the life of an aesthete, but I was suddenly starved for beauty. Without Renzo’s pure presence, it was like I’d become beauty anemic and I needed to over-index in order to even approach neutral.
My usual sources were running dry. Music had become an albatross. Even my ears were grieving. I’d put on a record and recoil. Everything suddenly sounded sour. I was an idiot for ever having liked techno, unfeeling and inhuman. Indie rock felt whiny and immature. Jazz, an interminable screed of noisomeness. Hardcore was the music of belligerent blowhards. Bill Callahan’s was the only singing voice I could handle. He advised me well in his guttural drawl. “No matter how far wrong you’ve gone / You can always turn around.” But after weeks of nonstop Callahan, I needed to find diversity in sages.
My friend Brian had recently visited and before he left had given me a few records from his storage space, including an album of Indian santoor music. A santoor, I learned, is essentially a hammer dulcimer, a stringed instrument played with tiny mallets. Imagine someone strumming the high notes of a harp at a warp speed. Giving Callahan a break, I listened to the santoor. The songs were long and open, unstructured but soft, with no dissonance and no words. When the santoor played, it sounded like the room was glowing. Beauty, finally beheld.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to locate santoor records in America, so after dozens of plays of my sole recording, I did finally have to move on. I explored different pianists, looking for music that was close to imperceptible. I discovered an album of piano music literally called Walk in Beauty. The music was gentle, like snow falling. Then I started spending a lot of time with music by the pianist Bill Evans. His albums were often gently elegiac, as though he knew, when he recorded them more than half a century earlier, that I’d one day need them. One song I gravitated toward, a solo piece performed in 1966 at New York’s Town Hall, was dedicated to Evans’s father after his then-recent death. Long and laconic, it was not a lament, nor was it a celebration. It was a recitation of facts, of pain, of admiration, and of love, translated into music and banged out on the keys.
I started going to record stores to buy every Bill Evans record I could find. A second- floor shop in Chinatown that specialized in Japanese music for some reason contained a bounty. Undercurrent, Explorations, Conversations with Myself, Alone, You Must Believe in Spring. I played each album over and over until its songs were a part of me, and then I’d get a new one and begin the process again. As I delved deeper into the back half of Evans’s career, the portraits on the albums’ covers got increasingly haggard. He went from handsome and clean-shaven in the 50s and 60s to sallow, hunched and skinny in the 70s – his body rotting away from the effects of heroin use. In 1980, Evans, in New York to perform a series of gigs, died from a fatal hemorrhage at 51 after a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse. A tragedy. He was so young, depending on how you look at it.
Though it was recorded in 1977, You Must Believe in Spring wasn’t released until after Evans died. It’s a playful record that includes a recording of Freddie Freeloader from Miles Davis’s landmark 1959 album Kind of Blue, on which Evans was the pianist. I wonder if he recorded it again, almost 20 years later, to remind everyone, or maybe himself, of his presence in history. It’s a jaunty rendition, one loosened by time. Elsewhere on the album, Evans covers the M*A*S*H theme, also known as Suicide Is Painless. I tried not to get any ideas.
Renzo, of course, died on the wintriest day, Christmas Eve. Thinking of his cold-weather death, I liked the idea of believing in spring and not summer, the hedonist’s season. Spring is a reasonable time of year. On its face, believing in spring doesn’t promise much other than a realist’s acknowledgment of the change of season. A reckoning with the inevitable passage of time, a reckoning with which I was struggling. Spring would come, a fact; believing in its renewal was up to me.
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This is an edited extract from Rise Above by Matthew Schnipper, out now from Random House.
