Fireflies: A Father's Classic Tale of Love and Loss Read online

  But eventually, by Christmas, say, his immune system would have reestablished itself, and he could have gone out in public, resuming a normal life. In time, a brace would have been implanted in his chest to compensate for his missing ribs. Because he’d lost a third of his right lung, he’d have been short of breath on occasion but not enough to incapacitate him. A small price to pay for having survived.

  Of course, he’d always have suffered the fear that his cancer had not been cured, that one day the tumor and its excruciating pain would return, but as the autopsy of David’s nightmare indicated, no trace of malignancy was discovered. The devastating chemotherapy—possible only because of the bone marrow transplant—had been effective. The alien that Matt so loathed and wanted killed had been defeated.

  Now, because Matt’s septic shock had been averted, David’s eerie déjà vu was restricted only to the no longer ironic increase of Matt’s white blood count. Matt’s vital signs remained at a normal level. His appetite increased. His only complaint was that he couldn’t wait to go home.

  “We’d like that, too,” a doctor said, “but after what happened on Friday, we want to be cautious. It’s been a week now, Matt. You’re doing fine. I think by Sunday, if you can be patient two more days, you’ll be on your way.”

  Matthew raised his thumb in a victory signal.

  David felt so elated he didn’t care about the indignant looks a few doctors still directed toward him and the legal problems he’d be facing for having interfered with medical procedure. Yes, the hospital attorney had been called, but David didn’t object. After all, parents can’t be allowed to behave as if they’re licensed to practice medicine.

  Under normal circumstances anyhow. But since his nightmare, since David had awakened on his kitchen floor, nothing in his experience had been normal. His dizziness remained, though his heartbeat and breath rate were under control. His dizziness was more like floating, and periodically, when he closed his eyes, he still saw fireflies. At unusual moments, he’d turn toward Matthew’s radio to reduce its volume, only to realize the switch was off, and yet he heard power chords. He and Donna continued to exchange what he felt were uncanny knowing glances, as if she understood the miracle that had happened and didn’t dare break a spell by referring to it.

  A spell. Precisely. David felt he was under a spell. None of what had happened—his panic attack, his struggle to convince the doctors, his 3:00 A.M. injection of Vancomycin, Matthew’s recovery—none of it seemed real. He couldn’t believe his luck. But he kept seeing fireflies. He kept hearing power chords. The need to stay close to Matthew became an obsession.

  “Your son’s doing fine,” a doctor said. “Go home for a couple of hours. Get some rest.”

  “I’ll go home when my son does.”

  The doctor frowned at David’s haggard features.

  “Hey, I’m okay,” David said. “I’m just so glad he’s alive I want to be near him. To … it’s hard to explain … enjoy him.”

  “You explained it perfectly.”

  “Once he’s home, I’ll sleep for two days.”

  “You deserve it.”

  “So do my wife and daughter. None of us could have survived this without each other.”

  “All of us give you credit.”

  “No, Matthew deserves the credit. I don’t know how he stayed so brave.”

  Then Saturday came.

  21

  Saturday. The day, in David’s nightmare, when Matthew died in Intensive Care. David’s dizziness made him feel that his feet floated off the floor. The fireflies brightened. The power chords intensified.

  I’m losing my mind, David thought. That has to be it. I can’t imagine another explanation. I’m cracking up from relief after six months of hell. But if David was cracking up, why, despite his sense of floating, did his thoughts seem so clear?

  Something was wrong. From all appearances, not with Matthew. But logically. Something was wrong.

  Okay, let’s assume I fainted from running when I shouldn’t have, when the temperature was too high, David thought. So I fell on the kitchen floor, had a nightmare that Matt would die, and woke up with the certainty I could save him because I knew exactly when and what would kill him. Does that make sense? Do you believe in precognition?

  I’ve never believed … No, put it another way. I’ve never experienced it before.

  A phone call you felt would come, and then it did?

  On occasion. Coincidence.

  But you did save Matthew’s life. When the lab tests came back, they said his infection was due to strep and staph, and only Vancomycin—not the other two antibiotics you could have given—would have been effective against those bacteria.

  Coincidence.

  You don’t believe that.

  No, you’re right. I don’t believe that. I knew more than I could have.

  Then what’s your explanation?

  As David’s sense of floating increased, and the fireflies brightened, and the power chords nearly deafened him, he repeated, I’m going crazy! Or …

  Yes, or?

  Or I really am … !

  Think it!

  Dying forty years from now! And if I believe that, I belong in the Psychiatric Ward!

  But if you did come back?

  I won’t consider it.

  But if … ? There’s a logical problem, right?

  Yeah, a massive logical problem. I can’t be in two places at the same time. If somehow I came back to change the past, then the future has to be changed as well. And I can’t be dying forty years from now.

  Then you either had a nightmare.

  Or I’m dying in the …

  Future? You mean the present, remembering the past, wishing with all your heart you could …

  Change it?

  But the past can’t be changed. And on schedule, at 9:25 P.M. on Saturday, June 27, 1987 …

  A chunk of debris from the dead staph and strep collected in Matthew’s heart, plugged a major artery, and caused cardiac arrest.

  It happened in an instant. The monitors attached to Matthew wailed. Sudden straight lines and zero readings.

  And David’s heart succumbed to its minor imperfection, the electrical blockage that had never bothered him. Till now. In the future. Which is to say, the present.

  How long is an instant in eternity? Could it last ten earthly days?

  David, who’d been hovering in the brilliant doorway, abruptly shot forward, at last released, finally at peace, no longer tortured by the greatest grief of his life.

  His wife’s fatal stroke in late age he could understand, though he missed her fiercely.

  But his son’s death at fifteen, his dear unlucky wonderful son, who embodied optimism, who exuded good nature, who believed in being useful and could have contributed so much to a troubled world …

  That death David had never adjusted to.

  Until now. After forty years. At the instant of David’s own death. With a vague sense of his beloved daughter weeping over his corpse, David rocketed through the radiant doorway. It seemed he’d been held in suspension, not for a microsecond but for agonizing days, until whatever held him back suddenly snapped and long-accumulating thrust him toward the mystery.

  Toward fireflies and power chords.

  Toward one of the fireflies rushing to greet him.

  “Dad!”

  The word was soundless.

  Just as their loving embrace—so long postponed—was bodiless.

  But David had no doubt …

  “Son, I love you.”

  This was heaven.

  Epilogue

  THE REFRAIN OF

  THE ANCIENT MARINER

  1

  Since then, at an uncertain hour,

  That agony returns:

  And till my ghastly tale is told,

  This heart within me burns.

  Thus we end as we began, with agony and compulsion. But what exactly have we been through? What did you just read? As I said at the sta
rt, this book is fact, with a layer of fiction. But how much of each? You’ve got a right to know.

  Ninety percent of the events have been described as accurately as I can remember them. But memory, like reality (or perhaps the two are the same), can be illusory. So to verify my recollections of the mostly factual events and conversations I’ve just described, I asked several persons who were with me to read this manuscript and compare it to what they perceived, to make suggestions for alterations. Where appropriate for accuracy, those suggestions were followed. As a further test for accuracy, I referred to hospital records and a lengthy diary that my wife maintained throughout Matt’s ordeal.

  But what are the facts? Everything I described did happen—except for the obvious. I’m forty-four years old. Thus, at the age of eighty-four, I didn’t have a deathbed vision that took me back forty years to try to save my son. I didn’t anticipate the staph and strep that would give my son septic shock. I didn’t become an amateur doctor, sneak into the hospital in the middle of the night, and give my son Vancomycin. I didn’t head off the infection that sent Matt from the Bone Marrow Ward to Intensive Care, where after eight days of suffering he died from heart arrest. Everything that happens from the moment I wake up on my kitchen floor is invented. But everything in my nightmare during the fainting spell, all the specifics of the disaster I’m trying to avert, God have mercy, actually took place.

  Examples.

  On Thursday, one day before Matt contracted septic shock, did I foolishly run when the temperature-humidity index was one hundred and three and subsequently collapse on my kitchen floor?

  Yes. But while in the book I forced myself to go to the hospital in response to a nightmare of precognition, in reality I staggered to bed and had to stay there until the next day when I managed to get to the hospital two hours before Matt went into shock.

  The initial medical explanation for my fainting spell was dehydration and an imbalance in the electrolyte components of my blood, i.e., loss of sodium and potassium. But fluids, sodium, and potassium didn’t make me feel strong again and didn’t take away my dizziness. In fact, when Matt was rushed to Intensive Care Friday evening, my disorientation worsened. On Saturday, after his kidneys failed and a hole was cut into his abdomen, a tube inserted, fluid poured in and drained out to vent his poisons, I had the unnerving sense that the floor was tilting. The flashing red numbers on his monitors made my heart rush in rhythm with them. When I leaned against a wall, it felt wobbly, as if I’d fall through it.

  On Sunday morning, when Matthew’s lungs began to accumulate fluid from too many hours on the respirator, I finally collapsed. The doctors, fearing I’d suffered a heart attack, rushed me to the Emergency Ward, where a team of specialists couldn’t find anything seriously wrong with me. Stress and exhaustion, they diagnosed. But I realize now, because of subsequent medical treatment, that what I endured was a panic attack. In this book, I moved the panic attack back, from Sunday to Thursday, and made it a part of my imagined eighty-four-year-old dying vision.

  The attack, I assure you, was real. Indeed, several months before, when Matt’s chemotherapy kept producing no results, my wife experienced a similar attack. In her case, vomiting was an extra symptom. Dizzy, helpless, with a terrifying headache, rising blood pressure and heartbeat, she had to be rushed from a supermarket to the Emergency Ward, where her chronic hypertension made the doctors suspect she was having a stroke. The results of tests made them reconsider their diagnosis and conclude that my wife had labyrinthitis, an inner-ear infection that upsets balance, produces nausea, and makes a victim so disoriented he or she swears that death is moments away. Valium was prescribed. For seven days, my wife had to walk with a cane. It is possible that my wife’s labyrinthitis was a panic attack; I’ll never know. But I certainly had one, and many others later.

  Did Matthew’s surgeons interrupt his eight-hour operation three hours into it to tell Donna and me that his tumor might be inoperable, that we had fifteen minutes to make a life-and-death decision: whether to close him up right now, allow him a relatively painless summer, and wait for his death in the fall, or whether to take out his ribs and however much of his lung, then go for the trauma of a bone marrow transplant, and hope he survived for a long productive life?

  You bet that happened. Until that time, it was the worst day of my life, though there were many more horrible days to come.

  Did I see fireflies in the darkness of my bedroom the night after Matthew died? Yes.

  Did I experience a sudden inexplicable sense of peace when I entered the church the night before Matt’s funeral, as if his spirit was telling me to grieve for myself but not for him because, in the firefly’s word, Matt was “okay”? You bet.

  But those two—I hesitate to call them “mystical”—sensations can be accounted for on a subjective level. A skeptic would say that I saw what I wanted to see, that I felt what I needed to feel. I wouldn’t argue. Till recently, I’ve always referred to myself as an agnostic, another word for hedging my bets, for saying I’m not sure about such ultimate matters as an afterlife and God. Not sure but not unsure either. Straddling the fence. Let’s wait and see. God could exist. Maybe not.

  The thing is, though, I did see the dove in the mausoleum. Reread my description of it in part one. It did behave in one of the three ways I mentally predicted. You’ll have to take my word for those predictions. But the fact is, in front of twelve witnesses, the frantic dove suddenly settled to the floor as the priest completed the final rites over Matthew’s ashes. The dove did allow me to pick it up. I did say, “And now I’ll set Matthew free.” I did carry the dove outside the mausoleum, and when I opened my hands, the dove (formerly panicked) did refuse to fly away. Until I thought, Dear God, I hope it isn’t hurt. And at that point, a voice in my head said, “Dad, I’m all right,” and the dove flew away.

  You can doubt that my subjective reactions were mystical experiences. But what isn’t open to doubt is that the dove was there and behaved as I’ve described. A chain of coincidences? Perhaps. But how many coincidences do there need to be until you finally grant that something extraordinary, far beyond probability, took place? In my own case, I know I reached that limit. I started to slip off the fence. I began to wonder if the fireflies in my bedroom and my sudden sense of peace in the church were as subjective as a skeptic would claim. I took a step away from agnosticism toward …

  Well, let’s put it this way. I’ve got this friend. He and his wife, after a yearlong lull in our relationship, showed up at the hospital the day after Matt contracted septic shock. They needed just one look at Donna, Sarie, and me to realize how helpless we felt, how much we required support.

  In the worst of Matt’s illness, I used to be so preoccupied I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten or slept, and this was when I was having what I didn’t know were panic attacks. My friend and his wife would force Donna, Sarie, and me to eat food they’d brought to the hospital. They’d compel us to take turns going back to their home, to lie down and try to rest. Compassionate is too weak a word to describe their behavior. (I hasten to add that some so-called friends who’d stayed in close contact in the year before Matt’s illness fled from us as if we had the plague the moment they heard Matt had … dreaded word … could the disease be contagious? … we don’t want our children to get it … dare we say it? … cancer.)

  Anyhow, these friends whom we hadn’t seen in a while, who suddenly showed up and exemplified the generosity of good samaritans, were with my family, my wife’s sisters, and my brother-in-law when we left the funeral and went to the mausoleum to deposit Matthew’s ashes. They were present during the incident with the dove, standing in the background, staring (I later learned) in astonishment.

  Now understand, my friend is not religious.

  But this is what he later told me. He turned to his wife and whispered, “Can you believe this is actually happening? Look at that dove. Look at how it waits while David picks it up. And look at how many people are seeing th
is. Thirteen people. It can’t be we’re all, so many, just imagining this.”

  Did you catch the error? I’ve mentioned several times that there were twelve of us in the mausoleum. Donna, Sarie, myself, two of Donna’s sisters, my brother-in-law, the priest, the cemetery’s sexton, and two representatives from the mortician. Plus my friend and his wife. Count them. Twelve.

  But that day in the mausoleum, my friend saw thirteen. And to this day, no matter how often I count the witnesses with him, he still says he saw thirteen. And his wife who counted with him that day in the mausoleum agreed with him. Thirteen. A shadowy figure among the crowd, but a figure who wasn’t there. Who or what? As my friends now say, “It’s getting harder to be an agnostic.”

  I’m not claiming we saw a column of flame. And I’m not claiming my son was so special that if there is a God we received a sign. But something holy and unusual happened in that mausoleum. The priest who blessed Matthew’s ashes had twenty years of experience in his vocation. At our home, at the gathering after the mausoleum, this seasoned professional of the spirit couldn’t stop telling the hundreds of mourners about the dove. He based several sermons on it. Whenever I saw him afterward, he kept talking about the dove.

  The mortician in charge of Matthew’s disposition—another veteran, not of the spirit but of the soulless flesh—said in all her experience she’d never seen anything like, would never forget, the dove.