Leaving the Darkness Behind

My favorite summer read this year is not exactly sunshine and roses. But it’s a beautiful and powerful memoir nevertheless: “In a Dark Wood,” by Joseph Luzzi, a professor of Italian literature at Bard College. It transcends seasonal categories.

I was working at Bard in 2007 when a terrible tragedy occurred: Luzzi’s young wife, Katherine Mester, was struck by a van while exiting a gas station on Route 9G, just south of the Annandale campus. She was seven months pregnant. Doctors at Saint Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie were able to save the baby’s life, but not the mother’s.

“In a Dark Wood,” subtitled “What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing and the Mysteries of Love,” recounts Luzzi’s journey to, as he put it in a recent interview with me, “reconstitute” his life, which was not only shattered by tragedy, but one in which he had “fatherhood foisted on me so violently.”

The title comes from a passage in “Inferno” (Hell), the first of the three sections of Dante’s epic poem, the “Divine Comedy.” 

Luzzi effortlessly weaves into his narrative the lessons he learned — lessons we can all learn — from the poem. Much of Dante’s experience was shaped by his abrupt exile from his beloved home city of Florence, a visceral loss that Luzzi felt mirrored his own.

“What resonated for me was that Dante, who had gone through a personal crisis, went through a ‘dark wood,’ ” Luzzi said. “ ‘The Divine Comedy’ is always changing for me, taking on new forms; what I heard in this iteration was the personal voice of his exile.”

As he began his memoir, Luzzi found that the greatest hurdle was “the difficulty of becoming a father” and confronting it in the act of writing. For years after Katherine’s death, Luzzi buried himself in work and left the care of his daughter, Isabel, in the hands of his close-knit Italian family living in Rhode Island.

“What was most painful was the challenge of raising my daughter, weaning myself from my family and building a life for the two of us alone,” he told me.

“If I hadn’t written the book, if I hadn’t had to dig so deeply and unearth the mistakes I made, I wouldn’t get past them. Writing in that sense was extremely important, part of the process — that combination of catharsis and self-understanding.”

The beauty and power of “In a Dark Wood” comes from Luzzi’s own, authentic voice and his unflinching courage to face not only his demons, but also his angels. What do we lose when we lose a loved one? Luzzi asks. How important is someone’s physical presence, or desire? Is there a spiritual connection?

Luzzi’s story, you will be glad to know, has a happy ending. He has been remarried for three years and has a second child with his new wife, a Hudson Valley classical musician. What Luzzi said he discovered is that “the ultimate source and guide is other people; my daughter, Isabel, my wife, Helena, and how my Italian family really rescued the two of us.”

And then there was a certain legendary poet who wrote, “Incipit vita nova” — here begins the new life.