Rise Above: A Memoir

I propped him up in the crook of a breastfeeding pillow, as he wasn’t yet able to sit up on his own. He was wearing a blue-and-purple tie-dyed onesie with short sleeves. His plump little body contained only curved lines; his arms and legs were still downy. His dark hair was becoming shaggy. He was about 40 percent head at that point, and it lolled around on his neck while the music played.

I was a latecomer to Morbid Angel. I’d heard some death metal when I was a teenager, but I preferred hardcore punk, metal’s looser, more feral cousin. Metal, with all its showy guitar solos, felt too put on to me. I wanted authenticity, not performance. If you wanted to be entertained, I figured, go listen to show tunes.

But as an adult, I became more open to indulging a touch of flair. There was an appeal to the music’s focus and strength. Played at warp speed with great technical proficiency, death metal was powerful. In its insistence on extremes, it could make you feel euphoric. Hardcore, with its emphasis on cathartic expulsion through yelling, was music that would make you feel not miserable, which is not the same thing as making you feel good.

In the way that you’re encouraged to introduce your child to different foods at an early age, I took it upon myself to give Renzo a wide musical palate. I know that, in addition to Morbid Angel, I played him an assortment of metal and hardcore, and so much other music, but those memories, like so many of my memories of his brief life, are gone. I happen to have the Morbid Angel moment on video, so I can revisit it. It took place in May of 2020, nineteen months before he died on Christmas Eve of 2021, after suffering an aneurysm two days earlier. He had something called an AVM, or arteriovenous malformation, in his brain. A malformed tangle of blood vessels, it burst.

Renzo was born with his AVM; his death was inevitable. It was not genetic. There was no way his mother and I could have known, nothing we could have done. One doctor said it was a surprise Renzo lived as long as he did. I don’t know if it would have been easier if what happened to him had happened for a terrible reason, rather than for what it did, which is no reason at all.

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At the time I played Renzo “Immortal Rites,” I had no idea what the lyrics were. As like most death metal songs, the vocals are wholly unintelligible. The singer sounds like a satanic dog, endlessly barking. Listening to the song on headphones at a coffee shop one day, I looked up what was actually being said: “Lords of death, I summon you / Reside within our brains.”

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As I write this now, it’s been almost four years since Renzo died. When I began writing this book, a little more than a year after he died, it was to figure out what happened. Not to Renzo, but to his mother and to me, to our friends, and to our family. His death left mostly questions. Primary among them: How could I keep on living? And why?

It took some time to arrive at answers, if I have at all. I spent a lot of time resentful, thinking about how the government should deliver me a check for a billion dollars to compensate me for my pain and suffering, as though I’d lived through a natural disaster. I’d retire early and set up a hammock in my living room, ride out the next several decades swaying in peace. That didn’t happen. I still want it to, to be honest, but it doesn’t seem to be coming. So I’ve had to figure things out on my own. Grief is a difficult thing for people to talk about. No one really knows what to say about death in general, and especially not about the death of a small child. The advice you do get is vague and overarching. Stuff about patience, resilience. Not unwanted wisdom, per se, but loose concepts that are difficult to put into action. I wondered a lot about how to be patient and resilient on the days when it felt like I was melting into the ground.

One way to read this book is simply as a record of how I spent the time after Renzo died trying not to melt. Writing it provided an unconscious catalog of how I changed over time. Early drafts had moments of wild anger, of selfrighteousness. I was so angry that I wanted to lash out at someone or something, and I used Google Docs as a place to do that. I’d write down what I thought was an innocuous memory and it would drip with venom. I didn’t realize I was doing it at the time, and months later, when I read back these bilious sentences, I was embarrassed by and sad at the way grief had caused me to be cruel. It makes sense, a subconscious pull to fight fire with fire. I don’t feel that way anymore. Or maybe sometimes I do, but I now recognize the instinct when it comes and try to accept it, even if I wish it would go away. When I look back at the landscape of the last few years of my life, I see a blackened field. It feels like I crawled through the blaze, and I’m only just on the other side of safety, watching the last embers flicker. It doesn’t mean I’m healed, but it does mean I may no longer be in danger.