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

  Compassion. If you think about it, every person you know, every friend, every stranger, in every building you pass, will one day (and perhaps even now) have a devastating personal loss. My acquaintance exemplified what we have to do. Show our compassion. We have to say, “I’m filled with sorrow for what you’re suffering.”

  We have to weep for the pain of our fellow mortals. You’ve probably seen those bumper stickers that ask, “Have you hugged your kid today?” You bet. And our fellow sufferers. The letters of consolation my family received, not only from friends but sometimes from strangers, were powerfully helpful. They showed my wife, my daughter, and me that we weren’t alone, that someone cared, that shoulders were there to lean on.

  Lately I’ve found that I’ve been hugging people a lot, and until Matthew’s death, I wasn’t what you’d call a touchy person. I hug them impulsively, and it seems to help me and them feel better about the day, about persisting in this tenuous universe.

  “Life is suffering,” I said in Matt’s euology, quoting the first of the great truths of Buddha. Let’s face up to that and show the best of our human qualities—not intelligence; I think that’ll doom us, if nuclear weapons and worldwide pollution are any evidence of our stupid cleverness. Not intelligence but compassion.

  What else have we got to depend upon except each other? If someone you know has pain, tell him or her you’re sorry. Don’t keep a distance. Be human.

  10

  There’s another aspect of grief I need to talk about. Its physical effects. I’ve described my collapse while Matthew was unconscious in Intensive Care. I’ve dramatized my experience in the Emergency Ward, where cardiologists and neurosurgeons tested me and finally explained that I’d succumbed to stress and exhaustion—a frightening condition, though I hadn’t yet learned that “fear” exactly described my symptoms.

  Three weeks after Matthew’s death, at nine o’clock on a Wednesday night, I sat in a La-Z-Boy chair to watch a TV program I’d been anticipating, an episode in a brilliant thriller from Britain, called “Edge of Darkness.” I use the world “thriller” in a qualified sense. At the beginning of this episode, there was nothing “thrilling” going on. Scenes were being set, characters established. But the show was a distraction, and I was grateful for anything that might help take my mind off Matthew’s death.

  Suddenly I felt a tingle in my feet. In hot and cold rhythms, it rushed up my legs, soared through my abdomen, and reached my heart. As I’ve said, I’m a runner. Because of that physical conditioning, my normal heartbeat is sixty. At once, it beat faster. I checked my pulse. It had risen to ninety. With equal abruptness, it raced beyond my ability to check it.

  I hyperventilated. I convulsed. I felt as if I’d just run a fast five miles. My guess is my pulse was now a hundred and fifty. And then the spasms hit my head, and as Donna raced across the room to try to help me, I managed to say, “I’m having a… heart attack. I’m … going to die.”

  You can’t imagine my terror, and you can’t imagine how quickly this incident occurred. A minute ago, I’d been fine. Now I was heaving in my chair and sure I was dying.

  As quickly, the spasms dwindled. My heart rate went down. My breathing returned to normal. But I was so shaken by the experience I couldn’t function for two days.

  That’s when I decided I needed more medical advice. Through the grace of a doctor friend, I was able to interrupt a cardiologist-internist’s hectic schedule and be examined. This kind man took three hours to check me thoroughly. To be prudent, he even ordered sophisticated heart tests known as echo-and-sonograms. When he concluded, he told me I was one of the healthiest persons he’d ever examined.

  “No, there’s something wrong with me,” I insisted. “My head. I think I need a CAT scan. Maybe I’ve got a tumor. Maybe if…”

  The doctor, who knew I wouldn’t mind his sense of humor, said, “Oh, I think you’ve got something in your head all right. But a CAT scan isn’t going to find it.”

  “You think I’m nuts?”

  “I think you’ve been having classic panic attacks. You need to see a psychiatrist.”

  Now to me, a psychiatrist meant psychoanalysis, and since I’m a fiction writer, I worried that he might misinterpret my ability to imagine and suspect I was having delusions. But the result was quite the contrary. The psychiatrist listened for ninety minutes as I babbled about my supposed heart condition and my son’s death, and finally he told me with compassion that he concurred with the cardiologist’s opinion. I was suffering classic panic attacks. In lay terms, my emergency defense system—exemplified by my adrenal gland—had worked so hard before and after Matthew’s death that it wouldn’t turn off. Now for no apparent reason but with obvious subconscious prompting, it was kicking into gear when there wasn’t an emergency.

  So here I am, on four tranquilizers and a sleeping pill each day. I haven’t had further panic attacks, though I do hyperventilate on occasion; but I’m learning how to subdue that. If you’re suffering from grief and you’ve endured the symptoms I just described, don’t assume they’re panic attacks. Don’t be an amateur physician. Have a medical exam (because your heart might indeed be infirm). But if the diagnosis does turn out to be panic disorder, your condition can be controlled. You’ll still grieve. There’s no cure for that. But at least you won’t have panic to add to your terrible sorrow.

  11

  Yesterday my son’s principal physician came to see me. He brought Matt’s final autopsy report. It proves that the fantasy you just read isn’t possible. Even if I did have precognition, I couldn’t have saved my son. He was sicker than I feared. The debris from the dead bacteria that plugged his heart and killed him was only one of many things wrong with him. The debris had also plugged an artery to his brain, causing major cerebral damage. If Matt had survived the septic shock, he’d have been mindless at best. In addition, he had fungal and yeast infections throughout his body. They would have been fatal. As well, a brain aneurysm he’d had from birth could have ruptured and killed him at any time.

  But most significant of all, the final autopsy, on a microscopic level, revealed that Matt’s cancer wasn’t cured. Malignant cells lingered on his spine. At this moment, my wife, my daughter, and I would be back with him in Intensive Care. But now, in addition to suffering indescribable pain, he’d have been paralyzed, no cure possible, the only mercy death.

  My prayer was answered. Dear God, just as You’re supposed to be a father to me and to love me as Your son, so please identify with the love I feel for my son, Please help my son, because Your son is asking You.

  Matt died as best as possible. The worst, yet the best. Because at the moment what I formerly thought was the worst would be only the start of something far more horrible: a slower, more painful death.

  I grieve. How much it hurts. But I’m at peace. Because I’m convinced at last that my son was doomed. Nothing could have saved him.

  But Father …

  God …

  It hurts.

  12

  … Winter is come and gone,

  But grief returns with the revolving year.

  –PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

  “Adonais”

  Cycles. Circles. Dates. Numbers. Anniversaries.

  On November 9, 1977, when Matthew was six, in the midst of an evening birthday party, Donna suffered a miscarriage. She lost what would have been our third child. This child had not been planned, but we anticipated it lovingly. I made two urgent calls—to Donna’s doctor, who told us to rush to the hospital, and to a friend, who agreed to race to our house and allow Matt’s birthday party to continue. Ironically, this friend was also present when I picked up the dove in the mausoleum after Matt’s funeral.

  The miscarriage occurred when the fetus was three months old. We never asked what sex it was or what caused its spontaneous abortion. But thereafter, whenever Donna and I celebrated Matthew’s birthday with him, we also mourned for the unknown child who did not survive gestation.

  Now
on November 9, which is rapidly approaching, we’ll mourn twice-over, for that unknown child and for a son we knew so well and will forever miss.

  June 27, 1987. The date of Matthew’s death. Since then, on the twenty-seventh of each month, we light a candle at 9:25 P.M., the moment he left us. Christmas will be hard. So will New Year’s, and Thanksgiving will be most bitter.

  Dates and cycles. Mental tombstones.

  But this is what I most dread.

  Last winter was mild here in Iowa. It snowed almost never. But in early January, when Matthew was diagnosed and received his first chemotherapy, I remember one evening how I stared out a window of his hospital room. Outside, the arc lights reflected off glimmering snow. I turned to Matt, who’d just finished vomiting, and told him, “It’s snowing.”

  He murmured, “Yeah, I bet it’s pretty.”

  “You always liked snow. Remember how we used to walk in it and build snowmen.”

  “I wish I could build one now.”

  “You will. Next year. We’re in this together. We’ll see you through this. Next year we’ll walk in the snow.”

  “Can’t wait,”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  But Matt’s not here now, and I’m still waiting for that first snow.

  That will be the hardest time. Not November 9, or the twenty-seventh of each month, or Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or New Year’s. No, that first snow will be the worst. But as hard as I’ll have to force myself, I’ll walk in it and build a snowman.

  I’ll try to believe in God. I’ll try to have faith that I’ll see my son again. I’ll remember the sudden peace I felt in church that night before his funeral. I’ll recall the dove in the mausoleum. I’ll pretend I hear Matt’s guitar, its power chords blasting from his bedroom window. And as the snowflakes melt on my face, blending with my tears, I’ll imagine those flakes—they’ll glisten from streetlights—

  I’ll imagine those snowflakes are fireflies.

  June 28—September 4, 1987

  Afterword

  LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL

  1

  So much has happened in the twelve years since I wrote those final words. Where to begin? The dove. The memory of it continues to give me comfort, as does my discovery, after completing Fireflies, that what my family, my friends, and I experienced that morning in the mausoleum was not unique.

  My first hint of this came in a letter from Father Andrew Greeley, who responded to a manuscript of Fireflies I had sent him. In addition to being a priest and a best-selling novelist, Father Greeley taught at the University of Chicago’s Social Science Research Center. Studies there demonstrated, he wrote, that experiences of the type I described had happened to forty-two percent of the population. The figure rose to sixty percent when applied to widows and widowers. Our society is so close-minded on the subject that many who have these experiences don’t want to let others know about them for fear of being ridiculed, he pointed out, but perhaps my book would console these people, letting them know that they aren’t alone.

  He was certainly right that they aren’t alone. After Fireflies was published, I gave interviews across the country and was astonished by how many people came to me with personal stories that paralleled mine with the dove. The phone calls and letters were equally plentiful. No other book by me has received so many responses. Thousands. Yet in a way they were one and the same. Various birds, animals, and insects had behaved like the dove.

  As I tried to understand, I came across an observation by the psychologist Carl Jung, who noted that when humans are in a crisis, they sometimes experience a phenomenon called synchronicity, in which psychological states are mirrored by physical events. These events usually involve objects that have deep universal symbolic significance. Emotions and events that have no causal relationship match so directly and powerfully that to claim the parallel between the inner and the outer world happened by chance is inadequate.

  What I learned is that there is a lot of it going around. The following are some versions of synchronicity that stay vividly in my mind. A novelist friend lost his adolescent son in an accidental hanging. The boy had refused to eat what was being served for dinner. After a family disagreement, he stormed to his room and pretended to hang himself, expecting to shock his parents and receive sympathy when they came upon the staged scene. The ruse went terribly wrong. What they found instead was his corpse. When I heard, I immediately phoned my friend to tell him how sorry I was. In passing, I asked whether anything unusual had happened after the boy’s death.

  “Unusual?” he asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, not wanting to lead him. “Anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Now that you mention it …” He paused, as if unsure I would believe him. “There was something. My wife and I had our son cremated. We went up into the mountains and sprinkled his ashes over a ridge. When we walked back along the trail, a group of deer came out of the trees and stopped in front of us.”

  This wasn’t synchronicity. True, in the wilderness deer normally avoid humans, but not always. Sometimes, on a hike, I’ve come across deer, and they look at me with as much curiosity as I look at them. The event didn’t have the “meaningful coincidence” factor that Jung wrote about any more than the appearance of a rainbow would have. Rainbows appear all the time, but doves don’t normally behave in the manner I described. There has to be something outside common experience.

  My friend must have heard the hesitation with which I said, “Yes, that sounds unusual.”

  “I’m not explaining this very well,” he said. “As you know, my wife’s legally blind. She shouldn’t have been able to see those deer, but as long as they stood there, she could, and then they stepped back into the forest, and my wife stopped seeing again.”

  Yes.

  Another account that stays with me was told in a letter and involves a couple whose son Brad died when he was twenty-one. Brad liked to write poems, the best of which was about the sorrow that resulted from killing a dragonfly. The poem was read at his funeral. Afterward, a neighbor who had herself lost a child gave the family a pamphlet, “Water Bugs and Dragonflies (How to Explain Death to Children).”

  The story was beautiful, the mother wrote to me. It told of water bugs crawling along the bottom of a dark, muddy pond. Every now and then, one of them climbed the stem of a lily pad and disappeared. They eventually made a pact that the next water bug to disappear would come back and tell the others where it had gone. One day a bug crawled up, reached the pad, shed its ugly shell, sprouted wings, and became a beautiful dragonfly. It soared off, delighting in the sun’s warmth and freedom. Remembering its promise, it tried repeatedly to dive into the water, but its wings wouldn’t allow it to go through. The obvious moral is that our loved ones assume new forms and so cannot come back to tell us where they have gone after death.

  Not long after reading this parable, the mother went out to the family’s mailbox, where what she described as the most beautiful creature she had ever seen soared toward her. There was no doubt that it was a dragonfly, but it didn’t have the thin body and narrow blue-green wings that she was used to. This one had a wingspan of at least eight inches. Its body was thick, like a butterfly’s. Its color was a patchwork of deep purple and pale lilac that glistened and reflected the sun. It dove toward her, barely missing her head. It bounced off the car antenna. It bounced off the garage door. It twirled. It lunged. It did flips. The sight was so amazing that it reminded her of the Blue Angels aerial acrobatics team she had seen earlier in the summer. The experience went on for ten minutes, and what most delighted her was that the dragonfly looked like it was using its wings for the first time. It reminded her of a child’s first experience on a two-wheeler, weaving and crashing into trees. She laughed, sharing its joy, inwardly hearing the words “Look at me, Ma! I’m so happy! I’m having a ball! Don’t feel sad for me!” Eventually, the dragonfly disappeared into the trees. The mother went into the house and stared ou
t the window, hoping to see it again. Nothing happened for five minutes, until she said, “Bradley, if that’s you, please come back,” whereupon the dragonfly zoomed past the window. As the mother carefully explained, the family lived five miles from the nearest body of water. They had lived there for twenty years and had never seen a dragonfly in the area. But after Brad’s death, an identical dragonfly put on a similar demonstration for her husband, her other son, her younger daughter, and another married daughter who lived ten miles away. The mother herself never got to see that dragonfly again.

  A similar account came from a mother whose twenty-five-year-old son, Jeff, died from a brain tumor. He had told his sister that his body was only a cocoon and that soon he would be a butterfly. The symbolism was clear: Butterflies are graceful and beautiful and represent a change from one kind of life to another. But as far as the mother was concerned, the symbol soon became much more when, after Jeff’s death, her husband was washing Jeff’s car (the family couldn’t bring itself to sell the vehicle) and a large black and gold butterfly perched itself on a bush at the side of the driveway, staying there for an hour. The rest of the family approached, watched, and took photographs. All the while, the butterfly didn’t move. Its black and gold colors reminded them of the Iowa Hawkeyes, a football team to which Jeff had been fiercely loyal. Amazing everyone, the pattern on its back and outspread wings was a huge smile. Throughout the coming summer, it returned often. Sometimes it showed up at Jeff’s grave, “buzzing” the mother when her troubled thoughts brought her there to talk to her dead son.