RISE ABOVE

Requiem for a young son.

Just as the world was shutting down during the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, Schnipper and his wife, Allegra, welcomed a baby boy. They named him Renzo Rollins to honor the Italian heritage on his mother’s side and a hero of his Jewish father’s: punk rock poet Henry Rollins. Schnipper’s memoir takes its name from the eponymous Black Flag song penned by Rollins—a song that spoke to Schnipper when he was an angry, alienated teen recuperating from a severe bout of ulcerative colitis that kept him in the hospital for months and ultimately cost him his colon. Nothing prepared him for the aneurysm that, out of the blue, fatally struck Renzo days before Christmas 2021, when he was not yet 2 years old. “When I began writing this book, a little more than a year after he died, it was to figure out what happened,” Schnippers explains. “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?” His first attempt, he says, was too angry. “Grief is a difficult thing for peo­ple to talk about,” he writes. “No one really knows what to say about death in general, and especially not about the death of a small child.” This pain-filled memoir is both a record of the author’s coming to terms with the unspeakable through conscious struggle and the natural effects of time. It’s also a remarkable tribute to the memory of a young child’s potent presence during the time he was alive. It’s a gift, intentional or not, to any reader who has suffered a loss of like magnitude and also to those who want to understand such loss.

Brave and illuminating.