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

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 start, 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 this. 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.

Make of the dove what you will. But I’ve been through hell, so now I’m willing to believe in the opposite. “Willing,” I said. But I’ve got a good reason to grant that possibility. To be more specific, I’ve got a reason to want to believe. More about that later.

2

Why did I write this book? The truth is I didn’t have a choice. It would have been impossible for me not to write it. I’ve never felt more compelled to put words onto paper. I guess you could call this a form of self-psychoanalysis. Something horrible happened to my son, and by extension to my wife, my daughter, and me. The worst thing. The most dreadful thing. I’m still trying to figure it out, to come to terms with it, to vent my emotions. In the months I’ve been writing these pages, I could barely see the keyboard because of the tears that blurred my eyes.

Then why not quit? Why torture myself?

Because even though it’s torture, this book is also an act of love. In my mind, I’m still at the hospital, holding Matt’s hand, stroking his forehead, trying to assure him there’s hope. I can’t give him up. He’s been dead for months, and yet each day I study pictures of him (how I wish we’d taken more photographs). I caress his slippers. I strum his guitar. But my mental images of him are becoming cruelly less vivid. One day they’ll be a blur, like my keyboard. So while he’s still fresh in my mind, I write about him, even if the events I describe make my soul ache, because I want to make him permanent, if only on paper.

After his surgery, when Matt was told he still had a remnant of the tumor and would probably die, he murmured, “But no one will remember me.” I promised he would be remembered, and as long as these pages exist and someone reads them, he is remembered.

But isn’t that being merely sentimental?

In the first place, there’s nothing wrong with being sentimental. That emotion and others such as compassion set us apart from animals. They make us human.

But in the second place, no, I’m not being merely sentimental. There are lessons here. Truths. They tumble through my mind.

3

Children are a gift. Throughout these pages, I’ve maintained that Matthew was a special child. His verbal and musical skills, his intelligence, his good nature were extraordinary. Everyone liked him. Everyone recognized his unusual potential. I truly believe that if he’d lived he would have made our world a better place.

Or is that fatherly pride? I don’t want to nominate Matt for sainthood. He was special, but he wasn’t perfect. He and I had “discussions” about curfews and other household rules. But yes, I was-am-proud of him. And that’s my point. Every parent ought to have pride in his or her child, because every child is special, by virtue of being a child. From when Matthew was diagnosed in early January until he died in late June, for those six months, his mother, his sister, and I were with him almost constantly. Not always as a group, and not between treatments, when Matthew found the strength to go to school. But then his treatments lasted longer, and his sessions at school became shorter, and our family grew even tighter. For the last eight weeks of his life, Matt’s home was the hospital, and one or all of his family was with him day and night.

When you think about it, the average parent sees his or her school-age child for an hour or two at most each day. In the morning, when the family’s getting organized, and in the evening, when settling down at supper, then at bedtime. During the intervals, everyone goes a separate way. But we saw Matt every hour. During his final six months, and in particular, his final eight weeks, we spent more time together than an average family does over a lifetime. Maybe that closeness was a backhanded compensation for the pain and terror Matt (and by extension the rest of us) endured. Maybe Donna, Sarie, and I got to know Matt better than we ever normally would have, and to love him with greater intensity. Maybe six months or even eight weeks can be a lifetime. Maybe it’s not how long but how well.

4

In the eulogy I wrote for Matt, I described how “I read in the newspaper about mothers who strangle unwanted newborn infants, about fathers who beat their children to death, while we wanted so desperately for our own child to live.” I asked, “Why can’t evil people suffer and die? Why can’t the good and pure, for Matt truly was both, populate and inherit the earth?”

There’s a writer I admire. Andrew Vachss. To date, his novels are Flood and Strega. Read them.

I admire him for two reasons.

First, because his sentences are strong; his stories make me turn the pages.

But the second reason I admire him is that he became a novelist out of frustration, because he wanted a broad audience to get the message of what he considers his true profession. He’s an attorney who deals with child-abuse cases. Some time ago, I wrote a rave review of Strega for the Washington Post. He was kind enough to send me a letter of thanks, not for the review but for emphasizing the message of his books. “Not for my writing,” he said, “but for my work.” After Matt’s death, he phoned to convey his sympathy.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” he said. “Truly it breaks my heart. But for what it’s worth, if this helps… I’ve seen so many dead battered children… at least your son had this privilege. He died knowing he was loved.”

I started to cry but somehow kept talking. “Your days must be hell, dealing with…”

“These scum who treat children like sacks of garbage? No. My days are victories. I feel as if I save the lives of more children each year than most doctors do in emergency wards. Tomorrow I go to trial against a fourth-generation incest case, and man, I can’t wait to put those perverts out of society. Abused kids are POWs. Establishing them with a decent family is like ending a war.”

Child abuse.

Intolerable.

Unforgivable.

Children are precious, to be cherished. I always knew that. Believe me, that knowledge has been reinforced.

5

Cancer. I used to be afraid of it. Not anymore. Because it once was an unknown enemy. But now it’s horribly familiar. And what’s familiar isn’t as fearsome as the unknown.

A few days ago, one of Matt’s doctors came to visit. I told him what I was writing. I expressed my concern that someone afflicted with cancer might be advised not to read this book.

The doctor shook his head in disagreement. “Matt’s cancer was rare, and it chose a rare site-a rib instead of an arm or a leg. As near as we can tell, though, we cured it.”

“He died!”

“Because of an infection of a type that almost never happens. A biological accident.”

“Whatever, he’s still dead!”

“David, listen. Based on the autopsy results, I have to believe Matt would have survived. From the cancer. You’ll hate me for saying this. Your son was unlucky. Rare cancer. Rare site. Resistant to chemotherapy. Finally responded. Shrank, but metastasized. Surgery got most of it. Chemotherapy combined with a bone marrow transplant got the rest of it, but a biological accident killed him. What we learned from Matthew’s death takes us a step ahead in curing Ewing ’s sarcoma.”

“What’s that got to do with-!”

“Whether a cancer victim should read this book? Your son, God bless him, may have been the only victim, in this country, of that rare cancer in that rare site. And he stared it bravely in the face. He went all the way with it. Successfully. Except for the septic shock. If Matt could stare that rare cancer in the face, imagine the inspiration he can provide to victims of much more common cancers, of malignancies we usually can cure. He provides an example. If Matt could be brave, given the worsening complications he stoically accepted, maybe he’ll show others how to fight their illness. David, you know we’ve had successes, even with Ewing ’s. You’ve spent six months in the cancer ward. You’ve seen patients go home.”

“Some didn’t.”

“There are no guarantees. What I’m saying is, panic’s an enemy too! But Matt didn’t panic! So finish the book. And if civilians read it-not a doctor like me and a veteran like you-maybe they won’t be so ignorant about chemotherapy and how it’s administered and why a patient goes bald and what the chemicals do and why and how and what and…”

So today I’ll finish the book, and maybe some readers will find it frightening, but maybe other readers will learn.

6

But why did I write this book as I did, so a portion of it was fiction? In a paradoxical way, the fictional portions too are fact.

I never believed Matt would die. To his final hours in Intensive Care, I remained convinced that he’d survive. After his death, I still could not accept it. Sure, the doctors came out to the waiting room and told us he was dead. Donna and Sarie saw the body (I was on the verge of another panic attack, physically incapable of standing, of going into his room). They described how pathetically lifeless Matt’s scarred, bruised corpse looked, finally out of pain.

“There must be a soul,” Donna said, “because without it he didn’t look the same. He just looked empty.”

Donna explained how the Intensive Care staff prayed along with her and Sarie over Matthew’s corpse. Then of course there was the autopsy, the cremation, and the funeral.

But even when we deposited the urn containing Matt’s ashes into the crypt, I still did not believe Matt was dead.

This isn’t real, I thought. This can’t be happening. It’s a nightmare. I’ll wake up, and Matt’ll be fine. For days afterward, and especially the nights, I used to pray for the terrible hallucination of Matt’s death to end. The only reason I was able to sleep is that I couldn’t wait to wake up and discover Matt’s death had been only a vivid nightmare.

Each morning as my consciousness focused, I’d feel a surge of hope, then realize that the nightmare hadn’t ended, the hallucination hadn’t faded, and I’d plummet back into despair. But still I’d keep saying, “This can’t be real.”

That was one of my reactions. Another was my utter conviction that if Matt’s death impossibly was real, there had to be a way to reverse what had happened, to go back in time and save him.

I truly believed that. I thought if I concentrated hard enough I could turn the clock back. I spent many hours praying for a miracle, for a time warp, for a chance to leap into the past and somehow keep Matt alive. Throughout Matt’s treatment, the doctors had given us detailed explanations about his disease and how they were trying to fight it. After Matt’s death, the doctors gave us equally detailed explanations about what had killed him, about the staph and the strep and the septic shock. Every stage of Matt’s treatment had been based on logic.

But a biological accident destroyed him. In case he developed a fever, a wide range of antibiotics was ready to be administered, and those antibiotics were given right away, the instant his fever started to rise. The infection was killed, but the shock the infection caused had been too strong for his weakened body.

In hindsight, the only way to have tried to save him (and I emphasize “tried” because there’d have been no guarantee the effort would have worked) would have been to administer the antibiotics before the fever started, to get a head start on the infection before it developed with the devastating swiftness of a fire storm.

But as a doctor explained, “Antibiotics are toxic when they don’t have anything to fight. Bacteria can get used to them, so if an infection does occur, the antibiotics aren’t effective.” In other words, prematurely administered antibiotics might have made Matthew’s condition even worse. Still, given the fact that Matt died anyhow, those antibiotics (if given before he seemed to need them) were all that might have saved him.

If. Might. Such despair-producing qualifiers. That’s what cancer patients die from, “but ifs.” If only this had worked or that hadn’t happened. If. I believe that Matthew’s doctors did everything in their power to try to save him. I understand how unorthodox it would have been for them to administer antibiotics before his symptoms demonstrated a need for that kind of treatment.

I’m not criticizing. I want to make that clear, and I also want to make it clear that parents of cancer victims shouldn’t try to be doctors or think they know better than medical experts. It isn’t even wise to go through medical texts, because those texts are often outdated (especially in terms of cancer research, which constantly develops new techniques of treatment).

But I keep telling myself this can’t have happened, it isn’t real, Matt didn’t die. And I keep telling myself those antibiotics were his only chance. So finally I wrote this book-to tell you what happened to my son, and at the same time to dramatize my sense of unreality.

Am I still in a faint on my kitchen floor? Has all of this been a nightmare? Will I wake up to discover that Matt didn’t die and I didn’t write this book?

I pray so. Or am I dying forty years from now, recalling the greatest loss of my life, still trying to find a way to bring Matt back? Anything’s possible, because as far as I’m concerned the impossible happened to Matt.

That’s what I meant when I said that even the 10 percent of fiction in this book is paradoxically true, because my fantasy dramatizes two phenomena of grief-the sense that it’s all a nightmare, and the need to go back in time and make matters right.

My final scene, in which Matthew dies in 1987 while “David” dies forty years later and their souls as fireflies surge blazing toward each other, illustrates something else I said. I mentioned I’m falling off the fence of agnosticism. I’m starting to believe in God and an afterlife. Because I need to. Because I so desperately want to see my son again. Believing in God gives me a hope. Can faith be far behind?

7

Is there no pity sitting in the clouds

That sees into the bottom of my grief?

– SHAKESPEARE

Romeo and Juliet

I’ve been told that the loss of a child you loved is among the worst agonies a human being can suffer. A subjective statement, of course, and I certainly don’t want to get into any contests about grieving. My stepfather died eight years ago. That hurt me a lot. One of my wife’s sisters died the following year, and that hurt a lot. Those were my only experiences of powerful grief. Until now. But those two painful losses can’t compare to my present agony. I shudder at the thought that I might survive my wife. For the moment, though, let’s grant the statement. The loss of a child you loved is among the worst ordeals a human being can suffer. The promise of youth destroyed. The potential for zest and goodness torn away. The unfairness of it all, and you miss the kid so much.

There have been days when I didn’t think I could survive the pain. I contemplated suicide. What stopped me is that a month to the day after Matthew died, my daughter found the body of a friend who’d shot himself to death. He’d placed a towel beneath his head before he pulled the trigger. To minimize the blood. I couldn’t put Sarie through more torture. I couldn’t bear forcing her to attend the funeral of her father.

So I survive day by day, and the thoughts that help me are as follows.

8

The world is based on entropy, the messiness of the universe. Physicality is imperfect. Disintegration and random chance are the rule. If you have a good day, count yourself lucky. And if you wonder how God could cause something so devastating as the death of your son, you’d better rephrase the question, because God didn’t cause your son’s death. The chaotic nature of the world did. God is perfect. The world is not.

You could say that God should have done a better job when creating the world. But Perfection can’t create Itself. It can only create a lesser version. You could also say that God should have intervened to prevent the death of your child. But that would be a miracle, and no one has a right to expect a personal miracle.

I remember praying for a miracle. When Matt was close to death, I tried to make one of those bargains that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross refers to in her books about the nature of death and dying. But I couldn’t think of a reason for God to help me instead of all the other troubled souls in this world. I finally thought I’d found an argument that couldn’t be refused.

Dear God, I prayed, 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.

The prayer didn’t help. But I’m not bitter that it wasn’t answered. After all, I was trying to make a deal, and maybe that’s the wrong thing to do, to try to make a deal with God. Maybe if I’d believed in Him totally before Matt got sick, maybe if I’d had faith in Him to start with and not just now, Matt would have lived.

Well, that’s another issue. The miracle did not occur, and God neither caused nor took away my son’s cancer, because the nature of the universe He created doesn’t permit His intervention. That’s why there’s a heaven, I want to believe, because it’s a goal, a step up from the chaos of earth.

9

If you believe in Original Sin, you understand why the world’s imperfect and why God tests us instead of intervening.

But if you don’t believe in Original Sin…

Compassion.

I’ve said that Matt believed in the value of good nature. If everyone every day showed good nature to everyone else, most of society’s problems would disappear. Recently an editor acquaintance called me and paraphrased a quotation from a book whose title he no longer remembered. “From the start of human history, there’s been so much pain and suffering the stars should have stopped in their tracks.” My acquaintance ought to know. He’s suffered twice my tragedy. Two of his children have died. I don’t know how he keeps going. But my acquaintance (I keep using that word because I see him but once a year, and that’s what impressed me-he wasn’t a friend and yet he was phoning me) spoke only briefly about his own tragedies. He said he was calling because he’d heard about my son’s death, and he wanted to tell me how deeply it filled him with sorrow.

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