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’s true. To him and my wife Allegra, I said, “I love our little family.” 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.My friends Jayson and Stacy recommended I get to know David Kessler’s work. According to Harvard Business Review, Kessler is “the world’s foremost expert on grief”. He’d worked closely with Elisabeth Kübler-­Ross, who was the reigning expert on grief before her own death in 2004. A large part of Kübler-­Ross’s 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’s death, I’d tricked myself into thinking I had jumped all the way to acceptance when really I was trying to outrun anger and depression. Bargaining hasn’t been a big one for me, nor has denial. The facts have been pretty hard to ignore.In 2019, Kessler updated Kübler-Ross’s five stages with a sixth: finding meaning. He made this addition after the death of one of his two sons, who accidentally overdosed at 21 years old. On Kessler’s website you can find all kinds of useful material. There are straightforward sections, like chapters in a handbook, called A Loved One’s Belongings, Grief & Holidays, and When a Child Dies. When a Child Dies is a series of videos, all of which I dragged my feet on watching until Allegra urged me to. In the videos, Kessler has a gentle presence. He’s grandfatherly but young, in his 60s, with a healthy head of hair. His voice is squeaky, but he speaks softly. He’s wearing a dark blue vest and a turquoise button-­down shirt, standing in front of a piece of abstract art and white shutters. They are closed. A green glass vase with pink flowers peeks out from the side of the screen. Very Nancy Meyers meets Mister Rogers. The presentation has the effect of making Kessler trustworthy, if anonymous. All smooth edges, no distracting elements, no sudden movements, just a nice guy, shot authoritatively in the center of the frame, talking calmly about unthinkable disaster. Welcome to the rest of your miserable life, he may as well have been saying, this non-threatening emissary from hell broadcasting straight to my laptop.The first video in the series is called The Loss –­ the Moment Everything Changed. Kessler focuses on the “moment” part of the loss as he explains the concept of “anticipatory grief”. This is the kind I did not get an opportunity to have. For your parents, your grandparents, your pets, there is a built-­in expectation that they will predecease you. So you imagine their death, imagine your life without them, as that is the natural order of things. That imagining helps prepare you for the actual event, like a practice run before the big race. With a sudden death, it’s the surprise that gets you. You’re unprepared. You wouldn’t run a marathon if you’d never taken a jog.As I watched Kessler’s videos, about a month after Renzo’s death, I found myself feeling resentful toward people who had the luxury of pregrieving their loved ones. It was strange and sad to find myself not only envying but begrudging those also in mourning, these straw men against whom I measured my own level of suffering, unfairly or otherwise. On the one hand, pain is pain is pain. On the other, it’s not.Kessler seemed to be reading my mind as, partway through the first video, he broke the third wall. “We deal with so many unwanted surprises as a parent dealing with loss,” he says. “It’s so much more brutal. I don’t have to tell you how brutal it is. You know.” I do.I’ve likened grieving Renzo’s death to falling off a cliff. I’ve found that others who have mourned unexpected deaths, of any kind, have felt a similar drop. Their loved one’s existence was terra firma, and then they toppled over the edge into freefall.I’m rewatching these videos as I write this. It’s eerie to see them again after a few years. Watching for the first time, I was totally bewildered, stumbling around in the dark. Kessler was describing the death world like a store manager showing me the ropes on my first day on the job. Now I’ve been working there for a long time. I know where everything is.Rise Above by Matthew Schnipper. Photograph: Random HouseGrief has rules, Kessler explains in the second video. He likens it to blindness or the loss of a limb. You have to learn to navigate this new terrain. He spends a while talking about laughter. Is laughing disloyal? No, it’s not. Social media, he says, bringing with it many photos of other people’s obliviously happy families, can be a risk; be mindful. And don’t expect your spouse to be your support system; they are as out of gas as you. This was ominous. “How can two empty tanks support each other?”A number of times he refers to the pitfalls of conversations with strangers in the checkout line. People will disappoint you; be prepared. “People say stupid things in life, and they don’t quit saying them in grief.” He says it out the side of his mouth in a funny, conspiratorial kind of way, like a stand­up comic.Surprisingly, he starts off the third video with a joke that seems more for the grief counselors’ group text than for the newly bereaved. “People always ask me, ‘How long will I grieve?’ I say, ‘How long will your child be dead?’”But as the video goes on, he regains his seriousness. “The goal of grief work is to remember our child with more love than pain.” I dreaded this idea. The pain I felt mourning Renzo’s death was evidence of his existence. Missing him was the closest I could get to being with him. The worse I felt, the truer our love. The better I’d begin to feel, the further he’d fade. Time moves in only one direction: the wrong one. “No one wants to be the bereaved parent,” Kessler says. But “we’ve been given more life. So what are we going to do with the rest of our lives?”It reminded me of two lines from Mary Oliver’s poem Poem 133: The Summer Day that have been so oft quoted as to become cliche.