Roger Rosenblatt is by all accounts a successful writer. As the author of 15 books and a columnist for Time magazine, PBS and the Washington Post, he has won an Emmy, a Peabody, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize and two George Polk Awards. But when his 38-year-old daughter, Amy, died suddenly of a rare heart abnormality, Rosenblatt found himself overwhelmed with grief. He also found his most important reason to write, he says. His new book exploring her death and his sorrow, “Kayak Morning,” is a follow-up to his first, “Making Toast,” and is now a best-seller. He and his wife, Ginny, live in Bethesda with Amy’s husband and three children. Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?
No. I don’t think I ever did. My mother and father were Jewish, but they were the kind of Jews who wanted to assimilate very quickly. We had a Christmas tree. There were some aspects of Judaism in my upbringing — Sunday school, I remember — but nothing that was sincerely devoted. So I didn’t grow up within a religion.
I had more faith than religion, just general faith, until our daughter died, and then my anger at God overtook any faith. The difficulty was that I did and do believe in God. I just don’t think as well of God as I used to. Woody Allen has a funny line: “God is an underachiever.” I began to see that when our daughter died. But I realized, too, that I was thinking of faith in a superstitious way. I was thinking of it as: “If I try to lead a decent life, you’ll protect me and mine.” Then you think of the millions killed in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the Holocaust, floods and tsunamis and so forth and so on, and I’m sure those people led good lives, most of them probably better than mine. So the trade-off doesn’t work.
I think you have to believe in a God who knows what he’s doing and doesn’t consult you. I’m trying to get back to that kind of sophisticated belief. The anger is still there, because I simply didn’t want my daughter gone.
Do you feel there is any hope for reconciliation with God?
Unfortunately, it all has to be on my side. God hasn’t really spoken to me lately. I guess there is. If you believe in God, there’s no point in believing in a God who’s your enemy. … I think it’s probably safest to believe in a God who set the world into motion and just let it spin, that his or her reasons and methods are just beyond our reach.
What did you believe about the afterlife before Amy died, and what do you believe now?
I don’t think I gave much thought to an afterlife before. I give a little more now, not because of me, but because of my wife, Ginny. Ginny sees Amy in a corporeal way. She sees her spirit in cardinals. She feels her presence around us and the grandchildren. It’s consoling to her, and I’m glad for her that she feels that. And I know many people feel the presence of the dead. It’s not my nature to do that. I have to work it out in a different way, as I tried to do in “Kayak Morning.” The idea of an afterlife remains to me as remote as it was before. I only think about it more because my daughter is a part of it.
You wrote in the book: “Writing requires generosity toward every point of view.” You also wrote, at the end of the book, that your love keeps Amy alive. Does writing play a role in your love for Amy, in keeping her alive?
In the long run, writing has to be an act of love, even when it creates villains, cheap and low characters, hostile ideas, furious emotions and all the things that might be antithetical to love. The good writer is the writer who loves. Dickens wrote about one scoundrel after another. So did Shakespeare. But there could be no question that their general love for living and for people overwhelms all those other lesser concerns.
At your core, what is one of your defining beliefs?
The most important thing that you can feel and exercise in life is love. It should ask nothing selfishly. It should be extended toward as many people as you can, including those who on objective evidence don’t deserve it. The quotation from Philo in “Kayak Morning” — “Be kind, for everyone you meet is carrying a great burden” — is in a way the engine of love. … When you run out of all other things, love is the thing that will sustain you. That you don’t seem to run out of.
– Liz Essley
