“Where our days had been brim-filled, now they were empty. We tended to each other as a way to tend to ourselves.” In a new Personal History, Matthew Schnipper reflects on losing his son, Renzo, when he was 22 months old.
One day in the spring of 2020, when my son Renzo was a few months old, I decided that it would be a good idea to play him some death metal. You’re encouraged to read to your children, to introduce them to a wide array of foods, and I thought exposing him to different kinds of music was probably a good idea, too. Death metal can be an acquired taste.
Pain and music have always shaped my own life. When I was a teen-ager, in the mid-nineties, living in Connecticut, I found myself in a lot of physical pain, having been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and soon having my colon removed. My body became a sunken vessel housing my mind. I did my best to sublimate the pain. That involved taping shows off the Wesleyan radio station and buying books about punk rock and hardcore music at Barnes & Noble.
Renzo was a good sleeper, but occasionally he’d cry out in the night, as he did when he had an aneurysm. Allegra went to him in the next room, lifted him out of the crib, not yet knowing what had happened. We figured that he was cranky from teething. But he was unable to be woken. I yelled in his ear, “Renzo!” Allegra said that I should be quiet; she didn’t want to scare him. We put frozen vegetables on his body. Nothing. I called 911. “This might be stupid, but my son won’t wake up.
I found myself on the phone with a rabbi once we settled into the Airbnb. My own religious experience kind of trailed off at thirteen, after my bar mitzvah, but at that point I would have talked to an outer-space sun god if I thought that they could help.
To choose my beats, Sara sent me a link to a Web page that looked untouched since 1995. It had a simple drop-down menu with different types of sounds to choose from, and two sliding bars, one to raise or lower the volume and one to speed up or slow down the pace of the beats. I played around with a few options. I liked “Snap,” which sounded like a drummer counting off the tempo on his sticks.
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