In a Dark Wood by Joseph Luzzi

Author:Joseph Luzzi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-04-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Rough Draft

Maybe I’ll go to law school.”

It was just hours after Katherine’s death on November 29, 2007, and I was standing in Poughkeepsie’s Vassar Brothers Hospital as I said these words to my sister Mary, both of us watching Isabel sleep amid the incubators of the neonatal unit. Mary’s eyes widened in disbelief. How, her look of incredulity said, can you be thinking of your career at a time like this? But the thought didn’t come from nowhere. For months before the accident, I had been waking up at five a.m. while Katherine slept to surf the web about part-time law programs. I loved my job as a professor of Italian—yet I felt that I should do more than spend my days teaching undergraduates how to order gelato in Rome or identify the mythological allusions in Petrarch. Perhaps it was hubris, even ungratefulness—after all, I was one of the lucky few, a tenured humanities professor in a science-obsessed world of underpaid adjuncts. I made a good living teaching and writing about Dante, and I cherished the classes I offered at Bard. Yet I sensed that my life would be incomplete if I remained in the ivory tower, no matter how sumptuous its Italianate stone.

I thought of my father who had left his family, friends, and beloved landscape in Calabria to immigrate to the United States, where he would work sixteen-hour days and die in exile. Was it all so I could have summers off and publish learned articles that used words like diegetic and chiasmus? A voice inside kept telling me, live a life of meaning. The day Katherine died, even in my shock, this was one of my first thoughts. Part of my impulse was to seek some sense of control in all of the chaos, and going to law school was something I could handle and direct, as opposed to the wild uncharted terrain of being a single father and widower. I spat out “law school” to my sister because this had always been my code for doing something in the more profitable “real world” outside of academe. But I knew the pipe dream of a law degree was just an illusory placeholder while I worked out my next career move. Katherine’s death had occasioned ambition’s perfect storm: I had always been a relentless and restless striver. Now, with Katherine gone, these old impulses were a way to numb and distract me from the day-to-day horrors of grief.

The dream of law school or something else like it was also part of another element of grief’s magical thinking: the desire for a completely new start and new life after death, one completely different from the one I had known till then. The wrecking ball of death shatters your life down to its foundations, making it tempting to leave your ruined house altogether and build a new one elsewhere. In the fight-or-flight scenario that follows the sudden loss of your beloved, the appeal of another world far from the

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