After my 22-month-old child died, music and poetry brought catharsis and comfort<\/p>\n
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\u2019s true. To him and my wife Allegra, I said, \u201cI love our little family.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
My friends Jayson and Stacy recommended I get to know David Kessler<\/a>\u2019s work. According to Harvard Business Review, Kessler is \u201cthe world\u2019s foremost expert on grief\u201d. He\u2019d worked closely with Elisabeth K\u00fcbler-\u00adRoss, who was the reigning expert on grief before her own death in 2004. A large part of K\u00fcbler-\u00adRoss\u2019s 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\u2019s death, I\u2019d tricked myself into thinking I had jumped all the way to acceptance when really I was trying to outrun anger and depression. Bargaining hasn\u2019t been a big one for me, nor has denial. The facts have been pretty hard to ignore.<\/p>\n
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