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

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 out 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.

As autumn approached, her husband was again working in the yard when he came running into the house and told her to hurry outside. The butterfly had collapsed in midair and died at his feet. At the same time, a second black and gold butterfly flew upward into the sky. In her letter, the mother noted the further symbolism: the fallen butterfly, not alive but always with her; and the flying butterfly, soaring upward-free-to a better place. She and her husband had never seen two comparable butterflies together before. They never saw any again. Accompanying the letter was a photograph of the butterfly, a wide black and gold smile on its back spreading magnificently onto its wings.

As many accounts of this type as I received, I still wasn’t prepared for what I learned when Bill and Judy Guggenheim wrote to me in response to Fireflies. Influenced by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s seminars on death and dying, they had embarked on a seven-year study of what they called “after-death communication,” eventually collecting thousands and thousands of accounts comparable to mine. Their research and numerous examples of these incidents were eventually published in their book, Hello from Heaven! In essence, the accounts have the same tone and substance as those I just mentioned, and in every case, the message is basically the same. “I love you, and I miss you. You’re hurt, and I’m sorry. But everything’s all right with me now. I’m okay.”

Given how widespread the phenomenon is, what are we to make of it? Jung merely described it; he didn’t explain it. So we’re on our own. A skeptic would say that it’s wishful thinking, that grief prompts people to impose a hopeful message on any strange event that happens along. The viewpoint can’t be dismissed, and yet, having been on the receiving end of one of these events, I can only say that sometimes truth is a matter of having been on the spot, of having seen for oneself. Could it be that in some people, the power of grief is so extreme that it can influence exterior events and make a bird, an animal, or an insect behave in a way that gives reassurance? Emotion over matter? Or could it be that there is a universal force, a spiritual one, that underlies all things and that responds to our own spirit, behaving synchronistically with it, when our need is great? I’m referring to the overwhelming transcendental spirit that Emerson and Thoreau wrote about and that van Gogh depicted in his paintings, a sense that inside and outside, psyche and matter are one. In this regard, the greatest poem was written by Einstein. E=mc². Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Everything in the universe is identical but in a different form, connected on a primal level. There’s no way I can prove this notion, but it works for me. The dove has made me feel that the world is full of infinite possibilities if we can merely, as E. M. Forster said, “connect” with it.

2

An incident comes to mind. It happened in the spring of 1990, almost three years after Matthew’s death. In New York City. After a long period of having been unable to write, I had finally found my way back to the word processor. In Manhattan for meetings with my publisher about the publication of a new novel, The Fifth Profession, I had gone out for evening cocktails with my editor. When he went home, I decided to see a Broadway show. The musical has long since faded from memory, but what happened afterward is as clear to me as if it were occurring now.

The show ended around eleven-thirty. I emerged into the noise, glare, and chaos of Times Square. In the rush of traffic, there was no point in trying to find an empty taxi, so I started to walk to my hotel, which was one block east and ten blocks north. But I managed to get only halfway across Times Square when the mother of all panic attacks hit me. You’ll remember how they debilitated me when Matthew died. Unfortunately they didn’t stop. On no predictable schedule and for no apparent reason, they would strike at the worst of times. Dizziness, headache, chest pains, rapid breathing, racing heartbeat, sweaty palms, rubbery legs. The symptoms of a heart attack and a stroke assaulted me simultaneously, forcing me to sit on a curb that I barely reached before the traffic light changed and cars surged past me. “Stay calm,” I tried to assure myself. “You’ll soon feel good enough to get to your feet.” But the attack didn’t pass. If anything, it got worse. My heart was racing so fast I couldn’t count the beats. The pain in my chest felt as if a wrestler’s arms were around me, squeezing me into greater dizziness. Everything about me became gray. But I could see well enough to know that junkies were sitting on each side of me and that three street kids were interested in what might be in the wallet of a helpless man-me-wearing a Burberry overcoat and checking a Rolex watch, the hands of which my blurred vision showed to be at half past twelve. Good God, while I’d been sitting on the curb, trying to muster my strength, calm my heart, and catch my breath, an hour had flashed past. The junkies and the street kids took a keener interest in me. Too weak to ask passersby for help (and who would have paid attention in the din of Times Square on a Friday night?), I was suddenly in a life-threatening situation. An easy victim flanked by predators, I managed the most determined action of my life by wavering to my feet.

One step after another, I started through the crowd, my pose of confidence convincing enough that the junkies and the street kids fell behind. But the panic attack was worse than when it had started: my chest tighter, my heartbeat fiercer, my vision grayer. Fear as much as weakness now prevented me from stopping someone to ask for help. How did I know that my plea wouldn’t signal how defenseless I was to someone ready to take advantage? I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to get the words out. I had a nightmarish vision of being taken to Bellevue.

Keep walking, I told myself. Get to the hotel. That became my mantra. Get to the hotel. One step after another. In a fog, I managed to reach Sixth Avenue. Under a streetlight, I looked at my watch, dismayed to discover that another half hour had flashed past. It was now one A.M. I searched the avenue for an empty taxi. All were occupied. I had the unnerving conviction that, even if an empty taxi approached, the driver would take one look at my unsteady condition and speed onward.

Ten blocks, I told myself. That’s all I have to go. Earlier in the day, I had walked that distance in fifteen minutes. Now, as the blocks stretched ahead of me, they seemed like miles. Another group of street kids assessed me. I forced myself onward. Two blocks and thirty minutes later, I found myself aiming toward the next street-light. After hanging on to it, I wavered toward the next one. I’m sure I looked drunk. At one-thirty in the morning on what was now an almost deserted Sixth Avenue, I was so debilitated by my swirling mind and racing heart that I feared I was going to collapse. But if I did, I kept warning myself, there was a good chance that after the street predators finished with me I would never wake up.

I started to pray. But not to God. To Matt. I’m in trouble, son. I need help. As I plodded toward another streetlight, I prayed harder. Matt, this is serious. I need your help. In my desperation, I suddenly had the sense of a small figure putting an arm around my right side, supporting my unsteady weight. Years later, as I write this, I can still feel the palpable presence leaning against me, holding me up. The help being given to me was so strong that I didn’t need to grab each streetlight and try to catch my breath. I was now able to aim toward the end of the block and the end of the next one. The sense that Matt-himself frail and thin from his operation-was holding me up was uncanny. Then I turned the corner toward the hotel, and as abruptly as the sense of him had come, it left. I was on my own again, managing the last few unsteady steps to the hotel. Inside, the clock on the wall showed five to three.

I don’t offer that story as a version of synchronicity. It wasn’t. As far as I’m concerned, Matt was holding me up, helping me along, but he wasn’t visibly there. No meaningful coincidence of the inside and the outside occurred. I can’t prove anything extraordinary happened. The point is something else, the sense that I have each day (in less dramatic ways, usually) that my son is with me. I was raised a Roman Catholic. In grade school, the nuns used to talk to us about guardian angels. At the time, I thought of it as a pleasant notion. Now I think of it as much more. Often when I feel overwhelmed with cares and I can’t think of a solution, I ask Matt (or my dead mother or two writers, now deceased, who were father figures to me, Philip Young and Stirling Silliphant) to find me an answer. Almost always, I receive it. A skeptic would call this a psychological device that happens to work, without having a spiritual basis. I can’t prove anything. This is a book about candor and faith. All I know is, whenever I need help and ask for it, I’m not alone.

3

The butterfly I referred to brings to mind another source of help, one that my wife and I found extremely comforting. Because a butterfly was once one life form that became a beautiful other, it is the symbol for The Compassionate Friends, the world’s largest self-help organization for bereaved parents, siblings, and grandparents. A friend recommended that we go to a meeting. Dazed, wondering how on earth the group could help us, apart from letting us know that we weren’t alone, we nonetheless went and experienced one of the most meaningful evenings of our lives.

The meeting took place in a basement room in an Iowa City hospital. The corridors seemed so mazelike that we had trouble finding the place, a process metaphoric of our lives. Coffee and cookies awaited us, as did a group composed of about one-third kindly welcomers and two-thirds silent participants whose downward gazes and stunned, gray faces gave an idea of their psychological shock. Before the evening’s speaker was introduced, the group’s leader asked everyone to sit in a circle, then give his or her first name and say something about the child they were mourning.

Donna and I were two-thirds around the circle. I braced myself, not sure that I would be able to get my voice to work when I tried to describe what had happened to Matt. In my compartmentalized world, I assumed that nothing worse could have happened to any child, but as each person spoke, I was shocked into a greater perspective. I learned about children who had died in every way imaginable, crushed, burned, poisoned, drowned, stabbed, shot, hit by cars, falling from cliffs; seldom dying instantly, most of them suffering. Some parents had lost more than one child. Some grandparents had lost their children and their grandchildren. As the litany of anguish went around the room, I found myself thinking, Good Lord, these people are really in rough shape. I belatedly realized that after Donna and I had finished speaking, those across from us would be thinking the same about us.

The effect of the meeting was to make us realize we weren’t alone. But, far more, we were overcome with sympathy and sorrow for those around us. We were taken out of ourselves and taught to care about others, just as others in the room learned to care about us. The Compassionate Friends. A perfectly descriptive name. We went to numerous meetings after that, and the painful process by which we began to be functional again would have lasted a lot longer if it hadn’t been for the friendship we found at those sessions. To someone who has suffered the trauma of losing a child, a grandchild, or a sibling, I can’t think of a more helpful step that person can take than to get in touch with the local chapter of The Compassionate Friends. Its phone number is (877) 969-0010 and its Web site is www.compassionatefriends.org.

4

The panic attacks finally lessened, but not until nine years after Matt’s death. Meanwhile, anxiety/panic disorder has been widely reported in the media. Millions of people suffer from the disease-more each year, it seems. And yet there continues to be a wide misperception about it. As someone said to me, “Your son died a long time ago, and you’ve got a successful career as a novelist, so what on earth do you have to be anxious or panicked about?” The answer is that years of stress or a single overwhelming incident can so weaken the body’s ability to handle tension that the smallest amount can cause the brain to trigger the release of stress chemicals. The effect on the body is similar to what someone would feel if suddenly confronted with a maniac jumping out of an alley, swinging an ax. In the latter case, the rapid heartbeat and heaving chest are appropriate spontaneous defensive reactions that the mind uses to urge the body to defend itself or race out of harm’s way. But with anxiety/panic disorders, the chemicals that trigger a fight-or-flight response are in undue proportion to the minor incident that caused the stress. Or else they’re released when there isn’t any apparent stress at all. I’ve had panic attacks walking down a street, going up an escalator, eating a hamburger, watching TV-in just about any benign situation I can imagine. Sometimes it was because the defective “valve” in my brain dumped stress chemicals into me for no other reason than that it was faulty. Other times it was because an unconscious association stimulated a massive stressful flashback to Matthew’s death.

My treatment was a combination of visits to a psychiatrist and a drug called Xanax. Part of a class of drugs known as benzodiazepines, Xanax (a cousin of Valium) works by affecting the ability of neurotransmitters to relay stress messages. Put simply, the drug stops the brain from sending out panic signals. It’s an effective drug. It works. The trouble is, its side effects include foggy thinking and short term-memory loss. These inadvertent results aren’t good for anybody, but for a writer they’re disastrous. One reason I wrote little for two years after Matt’s death is that I’d get to the middle of a sentence and not be able to remember how it began or how it was supposed to end. So the task became to use as little Xanax as possible while struggling to come to terms with Matthew’s death and get the broken part of me to heal. The trouble is, Xanax is addictive. I later discovered that only about a third of the people who take it for a considerable period of time ever manage to stop. There’s a phenomenon called “rebound.” If you take enough of it, your body gets so used to it that when you reduce it with intentions of stopping altogether, you reach a point where your body says “Wait a minute, what’s going on, I need that stuff, where is it?” In other words, you’re addicted; and when you try to stop you experience withdrawal, a stress that weakens the already weakened stress valve you’ve been trying to repair. The consequence is a panic attack caused not by the original trauma but by reducing the treatment for the trauma. What a mess. I started with four milligrams of Xanax a day. I reduced it to three and a half. Waited. Reduced it to three. Waited. Two and a half. Two. One and a half. One. And bang, I had clusters of panic attacks that forced me back to taking four milligrams of Xanax a day. I went through the process six times before I finally overcame the effects of withdrawal.

Don’t misunderstand. If someone close to you has died and you’re suddenly overwhelmed by panic attacks (the two frequently go together), there’s nothing wrong with taking Xanax if a psychiatrist prescribes it. I’ll say it again: a psychiatrist, preferably one with experience in grief counseling. Anxiety/panic disorder is an emotional illness with physical/psychological causes. A family doctor can temporarily treat the physical part by prescribing what amounts to a tranquilizer. But if the psychological causes aren’t also addressed, the source of the problem will never be solved, and the risk of getting hooked on medication is high. Indeed, not everyone who needs counseling requires drug therapy. In that regard, psychotherapists (they’re not physicians) can be as helpful as psychiatrists, and if they conclude that a drug like Xanax would be helpful, they can get a psychiatrist to prescribe it.

I’ve met many people so impaired by panic attacks that they need counseling, but for various reasons they refuse to use that resource. Their motive is often fear of what people will think if word gets out that they’ve been to a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist. This attitude goes back to an intolerant time when various emotional and physical diseases (depression and cancer among them) had a social stigma. My response is this: Anybody who thinks less of someone for getting psychiatric help isn’t anybody whose opinion has any value in the first place. A further excuse for not getting help is the notion “What do shrinks know? It’s all fake. I’m as smart as they are.” There’s an old joke that an attorney who tries to represent him- or herself in a court of law has a fool for a client. The same applies to anyone with an emotional disorder who thinks that he or she can handle it without the help of an expert. I’m proud to say I spent three years going to a psychiatrist (once a week to start, then once a month). My panic attacks had so aggravated my despair that I contemplated suicide several times, and I credit the psychiatrist for saving my life. After a four-year respite, the panic attacks returned, and without a second thought I immediately sought more help. What does a good psychiatrist or psychotherapist know that the patient doesn’t? Plenty.

I still have a bottle of Xanax in my medicine cabinet, but, knowing my illness better and knowing about alternative methods of treatment (breath control and biofeedback, for example), I’ve learned to use the drug the way I would an aspirin to subdue a headache. The last time I had the prescription refilled, I was pleased to discover that thirty pills of one-milligram strength (which I break in half) had lasted me two years. In the meantime, believing that knowledge is power, I continue to educate myself about the disease. There are many good books on the subject, but for me the most useful is The Anxiety Disease, by Dr. David Sheehan, a former director of anxiety research of the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. If you know someone who has suddenly become a victim of panic attacks, get that person this book. If you yourself are the victim, do what Dr. Sheehan tells you. Sometimes, when I feel an attack coming on and I don’t know which is going to kill me first, the “coronary” or the “stroke,” I reread several well-thumbed chapters of The Anxiety Disease, and remind myself of the true nature of the attack I’m having. That’s often enough to calm my symptoms.

5

When I was a professor of American literature, one of the novels I most enjoyed teaching was Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. It’s one of the few classic American novels that isn’t pessimistic. Wolfe embraced everything in life, its tragedies as much as its triumphs, managing to find all of it ennobling. The epigraph to the novel (I’m condensing it somewhat) announces its theme.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth…

… Remembering speechlessly, we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

Judged only on its tone, this passage might not seem optimistic, but in the context of the book it is powerfully so. Wolfe says that we existed in another state before we were born. It’s not such a radical idea. Plato had several things to say about this. So do most Eastern religions. We come into exile (birth) and spend the rest of our lives trying to remember where we came from (“the lost lane-end into heaven”). Anything in this existence (“a stone, a leaf”) is worthy of study because it might be the trigger that frees our repressed memory and allows us to recall the perfect existence from which we were separated. If we’re alert, we should always be looking for the unfound door that will take us back to where we began. The “angel” of the title is our soul. The “home” it is looking for is the ideal existence above this illusory physical one. From that ideal world we once knew, something calls to us, our ghost, our spirit, to return: “by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”

I find this theme eerie and profound. It addresses the loneliness that even the most optimistic of us feel. At the same time it gives us an answer to that loneliness by urging us to grasp every aspect of life, no matter how insignificant something might seem or how painful it might be, because all experience leads to an understanding that takes us to a higher level and an even higher one after that, eventually to the perfection from which we came. That’s a hard notion-to accept the grief that comes our way. Lord, do I know. But I keep thinking of that universal spiritual force I mentioned earlier, the overwhelming transcendental spirit that Emerson and Thoreau wrote about and that van Gogh depicted in his paintings. Whitman said it well:

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led toward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it…

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed.

Whitman’s words are basically what Look Homeward, Angel is about. Life doesn’t begin and end. Like energy, it only changes its form. In the years after Matthew’s death, constantly remembering my vision of the fireflies, I have come to think of life at its ultimate as a speeding point of light and that Matthew has been translated into one of those points. Wishful thinking? Perhaps. But one of the lessons I took away from this horrid experience is that as long as I refused to accept Matthew’s death, my mind and my body rebelled. Oh, I admitted that he was dead, but I kept fixating on the past, on events before he died, telling myself how wonderful life had been before he got sick. And life indeed was wonderful back then, by virtue of being life. But my refusal to put my mind in the present was a form of denying that he was dead. Another American novel I enjoyed teaching (this one pessimistic) is John Barth’s The End of the Road. In it, a character observes that reason and logic can’t account for the world. There’s no ultimate reason for Cleveland Stadium to seat a specific number of spectators. That number could have been more or less. The number it does seat just happens to be the way things are. “There’s no reason in the long run why Italy shouldn’t be shaped like a sausage instead of a boot, but that doesn’t happen to be the case. The world is everything that is the case, and what the case is is not a matter of logic.” Why is gold yellow? Why is there one moon? Why are there two sexes? No necessary reason. Things just turned out that way. Why is Matthew dead? Same answer. But as long as I refused to accept what was the case, I was in terrible shape. One day, about four years after his death, I surrendered. I stopped dwelling on the past. I accepted the present, the after-Matt present. The day I came to terms with the fact that life would never be as it was, that it had changed and transformed-that was the day I began to heal. Because I came to believe in what Wolfe and Whitman had written about. “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,/And to die is different from what any one supposed.” E=mc².

6

But I had another reason for thinking about Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. Its hero is Eugene Gant, a version of Wolfe. The novel depicts his preadult experiences, including the death of his brother Ben (one of the most famous deaths in American fiction). In the book’s climax, Eugene is about to leave his hometown of Altamont, North Carolina (in real life, Asheville), and to embark on the continuing great adventure of his life (Wolfe’s point is that every life, its pain and glory, is an adventure). Eugene stands to the side of the town square and has a kind of mystical vision in which he sees himself in the equivalent of a filmic double exposure multiplied by thousands. Every version of himself at every age crisscrosses the square. To Eugene ’s continuing astonishment, multiple versions of his dead brother also appear, chronicling Ben’s life in the square. Eugene rushes to him and calls him a ghost, which Ben denies. “But I saw you die,” Eugene objects. Ben replies that he isn’t dead, that he isn’t a ghost. “Then what are you?” Eugene insists, adding, “You are dead… Or do men die?” It’s a Whitmanlike moment, followed by Ben’s asking Eugene what he expects to find by going away. Eugene ’s answer is, “Myself.” He says that he hopes to find himself in the larger world. But where is the world? he wonders, to which Ben replies, “Nowhere… You are your world.” A new significance of the title now presents itself. “Look homeward” now means to look inward as well as outward, that the inside and the outside reflect on each, both leading us to the ideal otherworld from which we came.

These thoughts were on my mind when, after Matthew’s death, my wife and I started having multiple-exposure visions similar to what Eugene saw in the town square. To us, Iowa City was so synonymous with Matthew that virtually every street and principal building reminded us of him, gave us images of him. The library, the record stores, the movie theaters, the ice cream shop, the pizza parlors, the grade school down the street, the junior high a few blocks away. I can still see him coming down the steps of that school, where I picked him up to drive him to the hospital for more chemotherapy. In spirit, he peopled the area, but the memories were a bittersweet refusal to accept the after-Matt present, to deal with what was the case; so finally, in 1992, Donna and I decided that we had to move on. Iowa City had been a wonderful home for twenty-two years. We had raised a family there. We had also lost a son there. The city represented a lifetime. Now, somewhere else, we were going to attempt a new one. Look homeward, angel.

But where to go? One thing was certain-the landscape would have to be different from the lush rolling hills of Iowa. Ocean or mountains were obvious alternatives. By chance, we watched a PBS show called This Old House, which depicted the distinctive adobe pueblo architecture of Santa Fe, New Mexico. I later wrote about this moment in a novel, Extreme Denial (an appropriate title, given my former psychological state). The flat-roofed, sprawling houses with their thick walls, deeply recessed windows, and rounded corners were so unusual that we felt we were looking at buildings in another country. Their clay-colored stucco blended wonderfully with the orange, red, and yellow of their high-desert surroundings. Mountain foothills were covered with junipers and piñon trees. The mountains themselves were rich with aspen.

Those mountains called to us. In April, on my forty-ninth birthday (which, symbolically, I thought of as my fiftieth), we spent a long weekend there. We found ourselves so captivated by the area’s mixture of Hispanic, Native American, and Anglo cultures that four months later, in the most impulsive decision of our lives, Donna and I moved to Santa Fe, where, as Donna described it, we began Act Three. In an amazing spiritual setting (the northern New Mexico light has long been a favorite of painters), we learned to look inward and outward while, equally important, living now. Matt is still with us. Literally. Just before leaving Iowa City, we went to the mausoleum, asked the superintendent to unscrew the glass plates that sealed Matthew’s urn in its niche (the memory of the dove was certainly with me that day), and drove home with the urn in Donna’s arms. He and three cats made the thousand-mile car trip with us. He’s on a book-shelf in a small office off the living room. Sometimes, sentimentally, I put on a Jimi Hendrix CD for him. But it’s a good kind of sentiment, not a looking back but an accepting-just as I look fondly and not painfully at the beautiful white acoustic-electric guitar we gave him shortly before he died and that he was never able to play. It’s in a corner of the TV room. I often put my hand on it as I go past, just as I touch Matt’s urn when I’m near it in the office. Having made peace with Matt’s death, feeling him with us, Donna and I move on.

There’s a lot to move toward. After working as a book publicist, Sarie eventually married. She has a daughter, age four-which, in case you miss the point, means that we’re grandparents. What a delightful child Natalie is. (But then that’s one of the themes of this book-all children are delightful; adults sometimes need to be reminded of that.) How I worry that something might happen to her. But that’s out of my control, just as Matthew’s cancer was. Everything’s an act of faith. We have to accept what is the case. Take the bad with the good, load it all aboard, and do our damnedest to move on. A hard lesson. But I’ve had a lot of years to learn it, and I learn it anew with each passing day.

Look homeward, angel.

January 1999