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

1

Now he was old. One month shy of his eighty-fourth birthday. His daughter, Sarie, not so young herself, sixty-one, stood beside his deathbed in the shadowy, raspy confines of an isolation room in Intensive Care. Shadowy, because the blinds had been closed to ease the strain on his aching eyes. Raspy, because no matter how faint his hearing had become he couldn’t fail to register the constant hiss, wheeze, and thump of the respirator thrusting oxygen down the constricting tube in his throat. No doubt there were odors-of medication, of his own diseased body-but he’d become so accustomed to the pungent, sick-sweet, acrid smells of the hospital that he no longer detected them.

Basically, David thought, I’m all messed up.

Well, what do you expect? he told himself. You learned forty years ago-cancer’s nobody’s friend. And an old fart like you had to run out of resilience some time. Like five years ago. When your wife died.

But the true erosion of his spirit had begun much earlier, with the death of his son of fifteen years, on that night forty years ago when the cancer that now soon would kill the father had killed the son.

The circle was being completed. An agony of soul, a torture of spirit, produced by death would conclude with death. Matthew, the son for whom David had mourned all his life, would no longer be an absence beyond toleration, no longer a loss so profound that the passage of time intensified instead of mollified the pain. Grief, which smothered and swallowed, like a gathering black hole, would soon with damnable mercy end.

Death stops all hurt. Certainly David had tried to console himself with that thought in the first weeks after Matthew’s death. At least my dear unlucky son’s at rest, he’d repeatedly tried to assure himself. Matthew’s six months of suffering, of chemotherapy, nausea, and Black-and-Decker chainsaw surgery had mercifully stopped.

But if Matt hadn’t gotten the tumor, or if the chemotherapy had managed to work, if the surgery had been effective, he’d have survived. In that respect, Matt’s death wasn’t merciful at all. It was a vicious trick inflicted on a boy whose strength of character against panic and pain had made him truly already a man.

Death stops all hurt? You bet. It stops everything, including my son, David thought. And now when it’s my turn, I don’t care. Because I’ve lived my life, such as it was, and I’d have given anything to take Matt’s place, because his love for life was greater than mine. Existence made him laugh, and my wonderful doomed son should have had the chance to continue laughing.

2

So David thought during his dwindling moments in Intensive Care. In his morphine stupor, he couldn’t communicate his despair to the nurses who with stoic skill kept watch on his IV pumps, urine catheter, heartbeat and blood pressure monitors. He probably wouldn’t have told the nurses anyhow, wouldn’t have demeaned the purpose that they had managed to find in life, their solace in alleviating pain.

Nor could he have told Sarie, his sweet wonderful child of sixty-one, that she shouldn’t grieve for his pain and impending death because he didn’t grieve for himself. The pain didn’t matter. It was no more than he expected. And as far as his death was concerned, well, that would be a release that over the years he’d many times considered granting to himself, though for the sake of his loving wife and daughter, he’d rejected that assault to their sanity.

Sarie stood over him, her face contorted with exhaustion, sorrow, and fear, using cloths soaked in ice to wipe his fevered brow just as he and Donna had with equal primal stress and devotion wiped Matthew’s brow. Full circle. The daughter become the parent. The son become the father. And what did it matter? Love, in the end, was the greatest hurt. To love was to suffer loss-the more profound the devotion, the worse the grief. The noblest human emotion was fated to end in the greatest hell.

So David did his best to smile around the irritating oxygen tube crammed down his throat and to squeeze his daughter’s hand in thanks. After all, he and Donna had raised her to value loyalty and compassion, and there was no need, at this late date, to disillusion her, to signal that he’d been wrong, to warn Sarie that love in the end brought loss and pain.

In his morphine delirium, David thought of his dead wife, Donna, and how much he missed her, not because she was beautiful as the fashion world knows beauty (though for all that, she’d been beautiful to him), and not because she’d been perfectly understanding and kind and forgiving (God knows she’d had a temper and could be maddeningly impatient and obstinate), but she’d been his companion for sixty-two years, and a couple-if they had the stamina to negotiate a long marriage-learned to make adjustments, to compromise and compensate, to allow, to tolerate. What it came down to was that both of them had reached a truce based on mutual protection, sympathy, and respect. Human imperfection and dissatisfaction produced a bond of pity and support. Neither husband nor wife could persist without the other’s loving help.

But Donna had died, as all organisms must, in her case from a stroke, the fated consequence of lifelong hypertension. And how David had grieved, and how he had missed her. In his lonely bed, for the missed pleasure of merely holding her. At his solitary dinner table, for the absence of a conversation based on three-quarters of a lifetime of common memories over a mutually organized meal. But for Donna, death had been a matter of life creeping out its pace and finally reaching its unavoidable close. A monumental sorrow, but not a universe-tilting tragedy, not the wickedly untimely death of a tortured fifteen-year-old son whose talents and good nature had promised to improve the world. Death when it came to the elderly was understandable, a bitter natural order. But when a talented good-natured young man died, the cosmos showed its true malevolent identity.

3

So David thought as his daughter squeezed his listless hand, and his numbed body sank deeper toward oblivion.

“I love you,” Sarie whispered. The remaining pride of his life, she’d had an existence to be envied, devoted husband, fulfilling career, no anguish, no serious illness in her or her husband or her children. The way it should have been for me, David thought. For my wife. For my son.

There once had been a year, the last before his son had died, when everything, every element of every day, had been perfectly aligned and rewarding. In every sense. Creatively. Spiritually. Physically. Emotionally. Monetarily.

Perfection. And then an accident of the universe had struck, a cell gone berserk in the right sixth rib of Matthew’s chest, and time had been measured accordingly-before Matthew’s death and, God have mercy, after Matthew’s death. Sarie, blessed daughter, had managed to adjust and mend. But not David and Donna. Effort had become the norm, pointlessness the rule.

Even now, after so many years, David vividly remembered, as if he were reading it this very minute as he was dying, the eulogy he’d written for the son he missed so fiercely, the son whose life had ceased with cruelty at fifteen and who’d left a vacuum never to be replenished. David had written the eulogy the day after Matthew’s death. The priest hadn’t known Matt and confessed he didn’t feel qualified to make a consoling statement at the funeral.

So David, whose occupation was words, telling stories, had mustered the strength to decide that if words were the means with which he identified his place in the world, the least he could do would be to use what he did, to perform what he was, and try to make sense out of nature’s lack of reason, to let outsiders understand Matthew’s ordeal, and to strain for a moral lesson.

Alluding to a famous character he’d created (without ever mentioning the name of the character), he’d struggled to neither waver nor faint at the funeral, while he glanced dizzily toward the urn containing the ashes of his son-and the picture of his robust son in his prime.

4

“I’m a storyteller,” he’d read at ten in the morning on Tuesday, June 30, 1987. “It’s all I basically know how to do. For the first time in my life, I hate to do it, though. Nonetheless I’m going to tell you a story.

“Sometimes life kicks you in the teeth with an irony that a self-respecting fiction writer would be ashamed to invent.

“So it was that last November I began a new novel with a scene in which the main character seeks peace in a Zen Buddhist monastery in Bangkok where he meditates upon the four truths of Buddha.

“Life is suffering.

“That is the first of the Buddha’s truths. It was also my first sentence.

“Life is suffering.

“As I finished typing those words at three-forty-five on a beautiful Thursday afternoon in autumn, I turned to glance out my study window and frowned at the sight of my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, staggering across our front lawn. He was doubled over, his left hand pressed against his right chest. I rushed to meet him as he stumbled into the house.

“ ‘I can’t breathe,’ he said. ‘The pain. There’s something wrong with my chest.’

“No doubt I broke several traffic laws, speeding to our family doctor. Really, I don’t remember. A lengthy exam made it seem that Matt had pleurisy, an inflammation of the lining of the lung. Antibiotics were prescribed. The pain went away.

“But as the Buddha says, life is suffering. During Christmas vacation, the pain came back, not in his chest this time but in his back. An X ray revealed that Matt had a tumor the size of two fists.

“And so the horror began.

“Matt had bone cancer, specifically a type known as Ewing ’s sarcoma. We hadn’t detected it sooner because Ewing ’s is sneaky. The pain comes and goes. Often it isn’t at the site of the tumor but rather at various other sites responding to presssure from the tumor. For a brief time, the explanation for the pain seemed to be that Matt had hunched over too long in marathon guitar-practice sessions.

“ Ewing ’s is an uncommon form of cancer, but when it develops, it’s usually in an arm or a leg. In this case, the uncommon cancer had chosen an uncommon spot, the underside of Matt’s right sixth rib. Even so, Ewing ’s had been known to respond to chemotherapy. His chances of surviving were judged to be eighty percent.

“In January, he rapidly learned to familiarize himself with the names of arcane-sounding drugs. Vincristine. Methotrexate. Adriamycin.

“Cytoxan. The last part of that chemical’s name-not its spelling but the way it’s pronounced-says everything. Toxin. These substances were poisons intended to kill the tumor, but unavoidably they hurt healthy tissue as well.

“By early February, Matt’s long curly hair, grown in imitation of his rock music heroes, had begun to fall out in huge disturbing clumps that littered his bed and clogged the drain when he took his morning shower. It’s a measure of Matt’s spirit that he decided to cut this ugly process short by having a party in which his friends ceremonially shaved him bald. Some of them still have his locks. His eyebrows and eyelashes were less easy to deal with. He let them fall out on their own. He never tried to disguise his hairless condition. No wig for him. He displayed his baldness boldly for all the world to see and sometimes stare at and on occasion ridicule.

“It’s a further measure of Matt’s spirit that the weakness, disorientation, and vomiting produced by his medications never slackened his determination to persist at school. A straight A student soon was making grades that a few months before would have embarrassed him.

“But he hung in there.

“Chemotherapy was infused through an intravenous line, a tube surgically implanted beneath the skin of his left chest. You couldn’t see it. But you could feel it. And for sure, every day, Matt was terribly aware the tube was present. The chemicals didn’t take long to be administered, an hour for each, but their damaging side effects to the bladder required a prolonged irrigation of saline solution to flush the chemicals from his system. Thus the beginning stages of Matt’s treatment forced him to stay in the hospital for three days every three weeks and to recuperate at home for another three days. A small price to pay.

“Except that after several applications, it became frighteningly manifest that the treatment wasn’t working. The tumor had continued to grow. More aggressive chemotherapy was called for. His survival chances were now fifty percent. But as the weakness, disorientation, and vomiting worsened, he still didn’t lose his spirit. He began to think of the tumor as an alien within him, a monster whose strength, intelligence, and will were pitted against his own.

“‘But I’ll beat it,’ he would say. ‘I’ll win. I want to be a rock star when I get older.’

“Life is suffering.

“The more aggressive chemotherapy didn’t work either. His physicians moved from chemicals that under ideal circumstances gave cause for hope to agents that are called ‘investigational,’ that is they’d been used so seldom that permission from the hospital’s ethics committee was required before Matt could receive them. Nonetheless, of the twenty-two cancer patients who’d received them, eighteen had experienced dramatic results. Sounds good. But you don’t receive investigational therapy unless you’re in the twenty percent of patients predicted to die.

“Again Matt familiarized himself with arcane names. Ifosfamide. Mesna. VP-16. Now, in April, the length of his stay in the hospital while receiving chemotherapy was five days every three weeks. And the hangover from these drugs took another five days. Between treatments, he had only eleven good days, if ‘good’ is a word that applies here.

“For once, the treatment worked. The tumor shrank fifty percent. Imagine his elation.

“Imagine his equal and opposite distress when the next time he received these chemicals, the tumor-the alien-adjusted to them and began to grow again.

“Surgery was the only option. In late May, four right ribs and a third of that lung were removed, along with the tumor.

“Or rather most of it. Because the alien had spread seeds, and to kill them, the doctors had to use even more aggressive treatment. A pint of Matt’s bone marrow was extracted from his hips. A tidal wave of chemicals was infused, enough to kill all his white blood cells. His healthy bone marrow was returned to him. Eventually it would produce healthy blood. All things being equal, he would regain well-being. The cancer, viciously assaulted, would be killed.

“But all things weren’t equal. Normally harmless bacteria in and on his body bred out of control. No longer held in check by his usually vigilant white blood cells, they stunned him with a rampant infection known as septic shock. The top number of his blood pressure plummeted to forty. His heartbeat soared to a hundred and seventy. His temperature surged to one hundred and five.

“But he hung in there. Antibiotics killed the bacteria. Conscious though struggling against an oxygen tube in his throat, he used a trembling finger and an alphabet board to spell frantic words of conversation. Morphine was used to ease his struggles against the oxygen tube. He was last conscious a week ago Sunday. But even after that, he reflexively gripped the hands of sympathizers with unbelievable strength. Until last Saturday evening, when after eight days in Intensive Care and six months of unremitting ordeal, something in him wore out.

“Life is suffering.

“Only Matt knows how much he suffered. His mother and I, his sister, his relatives, his friends, his teachers, his nurses, his physicians, all of us can only guess. Because he never complained, except to ask ‘When am I going to get a break?’ And even then he’d add, ‘But I’ll beat this damned thing.’

“Maybe he did. Maybe the cancer would never have come back. In the end, not evil cells but normally innocent ones defeated him. As I said at the start, life’s ironies can sometimes kick you in the teeth.”

David had trembled at the lectern in the church. After another agonized gaze toward the urn containing Matthew’s ashes-and the photograph of Matthew in his long-haired robust prime-David had dizzily faced the mourners and struggled not to faint.

“What I’ve just described to you was hard to write and more hard to say. But I didn’t do it out of perversity, out of some horrible need to make you feel my hurt. And his mother’s hurt, and his sister’s, and that of all the rest of you who were close to him. I did it because there were many who saw only the carefree, good-natured, happy-go-lucky pose he bravely demonstrated to his associates. Many had no idea, not the faintest notion, of what he was going through. He wanted it that way. And he succeeded. He even successfully completed his ninth grade of school.

“His spirit, his bravery, his humor, his determination ought to be models to us all. Life in the last analysis indeed is suffering, but the lesson Matt gave us is that pain and disease can destroy us. But they need not defeat us. The body in the end must die, but the spirit can endure.”

David had paused again, trembling, struggling not to faint. Through tear-blurred eyes, he’d mustered strength to focus on the swirling words of the text he so fiercely wished he didn’t have cause to recite.

“When prolonged unfair disaster strikes, the obvious question is why? 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 ask 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?

“If we view the problem from a secular point of view, the unwelcome answer is simple. Disregarding religious solutions, we’re forced to conclude that there is only one cause for what happens in the world. Random chance. Accident. That’s what killed Matt. A cellular mistake. A misstep of nature. If so, we learn this as well. Given a precarious existence, we ought to follow Matt’s example and prize every instant, to make the most of the life we’ve borrowed, to be the best we can, the bravest, the kindest. For at any moment, life can be yanked away from us.

“There are those who would have lapsed into hedonism, into alcohol, drugs, and other forms of reckless self-indulgence. That was not Matt’s way, for he worshipped creativity. Strumming on his guitar, dreaming of a career in music, he knew with a wisdom far beyond his years that beauty, good nature, and usefulness were the proper values.

“But from another point of view, a religious one, we learn something else.

“Life is suffering, the great Buddha says. That was his first truth. He had three others.

“Suffering is caused by the wish for nonpermanent things. All living things die. Everything physical falls apart. That was the Buddha’s second incontrovertible truth.

“And the third? Suffering ends when nonlasting things are rejected. No person, no object, no career can finally bring happiness. In a world of eventual destruction, only eternal goals are worth pursuing.

“Which leads to the Buddha’s fourth and last great truth. Seek the eternal. Seek the forever-lasting. Seek God.

“Matt wasn’t religious in the sense that he belonged to an organized body of faith. He was baptized as a Roman Catholic. He was trained in that religion to the point of what Catholics call the sacrament of Communion. But to him every other religion had value as well. He did believe in God. He wore a small crucifix as an earring. On one of his last conscious days, he received what the Catholic Church used to call the sacrament of Extreme Unction, the final rites, what it now calls the sacrament of the sick. We know Matt’s body was sick beyond belief, but I assure you his soul was wholesome to its depths, and I’m convinced the sacrament spiritually and psychologically eased his passage.

“Poor dear Matthew, how we grieve for him. But in addition to his hopes of being a musician, he had three final wishes, which I’ll share with you.

“ ‘If I die,’ he said, ‘I want to be surrounded by a communion of my friends.’

“Today, with love, we’ve achieved that wish for him.

“His second wish?

“ ‘If I die,’ he said, ‘please remember me.’ With all the tears in my heart, son, I swear you’ll be remembered.

“And his third wish?

“ ‘I hurt so much,’ he said. ‘I want mercy.’

“My unlucky wonderful son, in a way I can barely adjust to, you received that wish also. You did gain mercy.

“Sleep well, gentle boy. Be at peace. We’ll think of you with fondness till we ourselves pass. And if there is an afterlife-I confess I’ll never be sure till I find out-I know you’ll forever be in loving tune with us.

“Say hello to Jimi Hendrix for me. John Lennon. And Janis Joplin. All the other departed music greats. Pal, I bet you’ve got a hell of a band.”

5

So David had read at his son’s memorial service. Next to him on the altar, beside the photograph of a glowing son and an urn filled with ashes, had stood Matthew’s favorite guitar, a white combination acoustic-and-electric made by Kramer, the instrument Donna had purchased for Matt the day of his extensive surgery. Waking from sedation after being monitored in Intensive Care, not yet knowing that the cancer had not been fully removed, he’d been shown the guitar and, too weak to hold it, had managed a tearful grin of joy, his weak voice breaking. “Isn’t that beautiful?” David, about to die now forty years later, still heard those heart-choking words reverberate through the morphine swirl of his mind. His son had survived to play that guitar only four muscle-weary times, discouraged because his fingers no longer retained their skill.

In the eulogy, David hadn’t included the further agonies his son had endured. After the chaotic heartbeat, respiration, temperature, and blood pressure that were part of the septic shock, Matthew’s kidneys had failed. Dialysis had been required. Not the kind in which a machine is used to filter poisons from the blood. That type of dialysis couldn’t have prevented Matt’s failed kidneys from causing excess fluid to accumulate in his body. Choosing a different method of dialysis, a surgeon had desperately slit open Matt’s abdomen and inserted a tube through which liquid was poured, its special properties establishing a correction of blood chemistry by means of a process called osmosis. The liquid sucked not only poisons but excess fluid through Matt’s abdominal lining, and every hour that poisoned fluid was drained, replaced by a fresh solution. But the poisons and excess fluid had resisted treatment, not leaving his body quickly enough.

Then Matthew’s left lung had collapsed. Then his muscles had begun to contract from lying motionless for too many days. Donna and David had put on and taken off his socks and sneakers every hour to prevent his Achilles’ tendons from tightening. Finally dead bacteria from his septic shock had collected within his heart. A chunk of this debris had broken from within the heart and plugged a main artery. Death after eight days in Intensive Care had not been from cancer, but instead from a heart attack. Ironies. How they kick you in the teeth.

6

So David thought as he came closer to death in Intensive Care. Even now, after forty years, he remembered the autopsy report that he and his wife had received.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Morrell:

On behalf of the physicians and staff at the University Hospital, I extend our sincere sympathy at the loss of your son. This letter is to inform you of the preliminary results of his autopsy.

1. History of Ewing ’s sarcoma with no gross residual tumor identified. Detailed analysis reveals no evidence of malignancy. (David’s translation: The treatment worked. The cancer was cured.)

2. Status post bone marrow transplantation: successful. Healthy blood had begun to generate. (Translation: If Matthew hadn’t succumbed to septic shock, he’d have been home within a few days, on the way to complete recovery.)

3. Endocarditis, an inflammation of the lining of the heart, with abnormal tissue deposits on the valves of the heart. (Translation: Debris from the dead bacteria.)

4. Complete blockage of the left main coronary artery. (Translation: The effects of the treatment, not the disease, were what killed him.)

5. The lungs were heavy in weight and fluid, consistent with respiratory distress syndrome. (The oxygen pumped into Matt’s lungs to keep him breathing would eventually have poisoned his lungs.)

6. The kidneys were swollen. The outer layers were pale, consistent with damage due to septic shock. (If his heart hadn’t killed him, his kidneys might have.)

7. The bladder was inflamed and hemorrhagic. (How much can a poor kid withstand?)

8. Both the stomach and the esophagus had ulcers. (Why not? Everything else had gone to hell.)

9. A cerebral aneurysm was present in one of the vessels in the brain, an abnormal dilation of the blood vessel. He also had small areas of bleeding along the lining of the brain. (Sure, the consequence of the septic shock, and if the cancer hadn’t killed him and the heart attack hadn’t, maybe with Matthew’s bad luck, he’d have had a stroke.)

10. The liver was found to be enlarged. (Might as well throw that in. The chemotherapy was extreme, all right. After the removal of four ribs and a third of a lung, he wasn’t strong enough to bear any further stress.)

If you have any questions, please call [the letter concluded]. Sincerely…

7

David did have one question. How can life be so cruel? But the question at bottom was philosophical and an inappropriate response to an autopsy that proved his point empirically. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Watch out for the boogeyman. Eat your Wheaties. Say your prayers. Walk around ladders. Brush your teeth after every meal. Stay away from the teddy bears’ picnic. And count every second without pain or disaster as a major stroke of luck.

Entropy. That was the secret. The messiness of the universe.

As Sarie held his weakening hand in Intensive Care, David heard faintly, through the wheeze of the oxygen pump and a humming in his ears, the words she’d recited at Matthew’s funeral. How proud he’d been of her that day, how filled with love. The strength and composure she’d mustered against intolerable grief had made it possible for her somehow bravely to stand before the mourners at the church and to recite that day’s gospel, a text that with bitter irony happened to be from St. Matthew.

Sarie repeated it to him now. God bless her, she’d remembered the passage all these years. She spoke it again as she had with the same trembling voice combating sorrow so long ago. If he’d had the strength, he’d have reached up and hugged her just as he had before the mourners in the church so many years ago when she’d stepped unsteadily down from the lectern. The words were beautiful.

Come to me, all you who are weary and find life burdensome, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon your shoulders and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart. Your soul will find rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden light.

Comforting thoughts. If a person believed.

But David at best had been an agnostic.

Until three incidents made him suspect there might be a spirit within the universe, a greater power than his pessimism allowed.

8

The first had occurred one night after Matthew’s death. Having somehow managed the strength to write Matthew’s eulogy, David had staggered to the master bedroom, where in a rare gesture of obeisance to a God whose existence he doubted, he’d sunk to his knees. The time was night. The room was dark. David’s eyes were raw with tears. Hands pressed to his swollen face, he’d prayed with a fervor that he swore would kill him.

Matthew, Matthew, Matthew! I want you back, son! This has to be a nightmare! Soon I’ll waken! You’ll be here!

One day before the septic shock that had ravaged Matthew’s body and eight days later killed him, David had used some brief time alone, when he and Donna weren’t sharing anxious hours together watching over Matthew in the hospital. David had driven home to change clothes. On impulse, based on a twenty-year daily habit, he’d decided to exercise, to run as was his custom, to clear his head and sweat tension from his body. After four miles, the farthest he could manage given his stress and weakness, he’d staggered into his kitchen, sipped a glass of water, and collapsed. Surely while he was passed out on the floor, this nightmare of his dear son’s death had come to him, and he hadn’t wakened yet. That was the explanation. None of this had happened. It was a nightmare.

So he’d hoped forty years ago as he’d knelt in trembling anguish beside the bed. While he squeezed his hands to his face and tears seeped through his clawlike fingers that threatened to tear his cheeks away, he’d prayed with all the desperation his soul could sustain that he would wake up from his stupor on the kitchen floor and his son would still be alive.

Oh, please! he’d prayed. Oh, Jesus, please!

But he’d known in a terrifying recess of his remaining sanity that he had indeed revived from his stupor on the floor, that he had indeed staggered back to the hospital, that his son had indeed suffered septic shock one day later and died eight unimaginably traumatic days after that.

Matthew! Matthew! Please! Come back to me!

Forty years ago, in his kneeling paroxysm beside the bed, his thoughts flashing through his mind like lasers, David had suddenly remembered yet another example of his wonderful son’s promising gifts. Not only the life-affirming pulse of music, whose throbbing chords continued to reverberate like a neverending tape through David’s head, but as well a poem, one of many, this one written during the disorientation and nausea of chemotherapy, a poem that Matthew had later submitted for an assignment at school.

Fifteen years old. With verbal gifts far superior to those of his father who defined himself by and made his living out of words. Fifteen years old, and in a panic at 4:00 A.M., the boy had wakened Donna, who slept beside him on a cot in the IV-stand-filled room, to dictate to her his sudden terrifying insights. A poem. Not linear, not rhymed and metered, not the singsong unintentional parody of a poem you’d expect from someone his age. Instead a gestalt of fear and memory. A jumbled synthesis of reaction to when life was perfect and then collapsed. A metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle, of each piece having been beautifully assembled and then perversely ripped apart; of lost hair, fading friends, and fractured hopes; of the prejudice ignorant people showed toward cancer patients whose bald heads and gaunt cheeks looked like skulls; of dreams become tears and parties about to turn into wakes. Death and a jigsaw puzzle. If the poem wasn’t perfect, it was better than the father could have written at fifteen, or maybe could have ever written, and if a perceptive reader paid it due attention, the meaning was clear; the craft matched the content.

9

JIGSAW

10

Fifteen years old. Vomiting at 4:00 A.M. Dictating a poem.

God love you, son, David had sobbed on his knees, hunching over a bed, with his fingers like claws scraping into his tear-ravaged face. You are dead. I’m not unconscious on the kitchen floor. I’m here. I’ve just written your eulogy. And my existence, never content to begin with, will be forever empty until my own death.

A remarkable occurrence took place then. Fireflies filled the dark bedroom. They seemed to blink, and yet their light was constant, like flaming balls from Roman candles; but Roman candles dwindle in brilliance and flash in a straight-line arc, whereas these lights zigged and darted, zagged and swirled. They spun at the same time they soared. The room was ablaze with them, and David thought of them as fireflies because of their random dashing radiant pattern.

Fireflies. Splendrous! Of varying colors but all of equal magnificence. Rushing with the energy of joy. Ecstatic. A swirling cluster of what David intuited beyond any question were rapturous souls.

He made allowance for his grief and stress, his weariness and shock. He wasn’t thinking clearly at the moment, he readily granted. But the brilliant colorful fireflies were spinning and zooming before him, so patently real, so vivid, that he couldn’t dismiss them, couldn’t reject their beauty by denying the exquisite vision allowed to him.

Whether they were a hallucination or a visitation, he gave in to them and embraced their rapture. Of the thousands, among their myriad flashing colors of joy, he identified one in the cluster who he knew beyond doubt was his son. How he was sure, he couldn’t tell. But that he was sure, he had absolute faith.

“Matthew, come to me.”

For no reason he could account for, the spinning specks of flying fire reminded him of children in a playground, of his son as a toddler laughing and racing among other children. And just as Matthew when a toddler had been reluctant to leave the exuberance of his friends, so the darting firefly (no different from the swirling others but who the father knew with total certainty was Matthew’s soul) refused to come to his grieving father.

“Matthew, I’m telling you! Get over here!”

But still distracted, continuing to revel in incomprehensible gaiety, the soul of the son ignored the father.

“Matthew, don’t disobey me! I want you back! Get over here!”

At that, responding to the desperate insistence of the father who loved him beyond measure and mourned to the limits of sanity for his son’s absence, the firefly that was Matthew’s soul soared away from his satisfying companions, sped to within a foot of his father’s weeping eyes, halted abruptly, and hovered for an instant, suspended in time.

“Dad, I want to play. At last, I’m having fun,” the firefly soundlessly said, the inaudible words echoing within the father’s head. “Don’t you understand? I don’t hurt anymore. I’m at peace. I’m where I belong. I’m okay. You’ve got to understand that. I’m okay. You hurt, and I’m sorry. But there’s nothing I can do. You’ll have to deal with it. I know how much you love me. If you didn’t grieve, that’d mean you didn’t love me. In that sense, grief is good. It hurts, but it’s good. It’s a tribute, and I love you for it. Grieve for yourself, for your emptiness and loss. As long as you understand I’m okay. I love you too, and I miss you. But it’s not your time to be with me. Please, if you truly love me, Dad, let me go back and play.”

With a sob that wracked David’s soul, he nodded, and the firefly that was Matthew sped back to his swirling lights of friends. And with that, the vision ended.

The fireflies disappeared. The bedroom returned to darkness.

Kneeling beside the bed, sobbing with a greater sense of loss and yet a strange kind of joyous understanding, David slumped in exhaustion, then slowly, wearily, stubbornly stood. Because there were footsteps and voices from beyond the bedroom door, friends and neighbors, acquaintances come to offer food, respects, and condolences, and their gestures of compassion couldn’t be demeaned by being ignored.

That had been the first of the three signals David received, making him suspect there was a mystical property in the universe.

11

The second experience had occurred one evening later. It hadn’t been as dramatic as the first, but for all that, it had been affecting and in its way profound. This was on Monday. Matthew had died on Saturday; the eulogy had been written and the fireflies had appeared on Sunday. But now it was Monday, the evening of what is politely called the visitation at the funeral home.

In this case, the visitation had not involved a view of Matthew’s corpse, for David and Donna had agreed that a thorough autopsy had to be performed on the frail, scarred, pain-twisted remains of their wonderful son, who wasn’t Matt anymore anyhow.

“Examine his body every way you can,” David had said through scalding tears to the physician who signed the death certificate. “Take him apart. Learn everything you can. Perhaps what you discover will save some other poor kid’s life. Do so thorough a job that there can’t possibly be a public viewing. His body’s yours.”

“Thank you,” the physician had said. “We appreciate your understanding. Sometimes commiseration for the family-and respect for their attitudes toward public viewing-prevents us from doing as complete an examination as possible and learning as much as we can.”

“Some meaning has to come from this,” David had said, so dizzy he’d feared he’d collapse. “To keep this from happening again, to crush this fucking disease. Ewing ’s sarcoma. It isn’t just cancer. It’s evil. It’s the Devil. Sometimes I think we didn’t need physicians. We needed an exorcist.”

So there hadn’t been a public viewing of Matthew’s remains. But not just because of the thorough autopsy. For the second reason wasn’t scientific but aesthetic. A corpse filled with formaldehyde and prettied-up with cosmetics to make the dear departed look lifelike, sort of, but not really? Spare me, David had thought. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Never mind formaldehyde. Matthew had already been injected to saturation with too many chemicals.

So Matthew was cremated. His fifteen-year-old ashes filled a bronze container the size of a coffee grinder. According to local law, David, Donna, and Sarie could have done virtually anything they wanted with the urn. They could have taken it home and placed it on the mantel or stored it in the stereo cabinet or opened it and sprinkled Matthew’s ashes onto a flower garden-just so long as they didn’t dispose of the ashes in a public waterway or on public grounds.

But the mantel and the stereo cabinet seemed too morbidly remindful, and the flower garden-for all its natural appeal-would have prevented David from transporting Matthew’s ashes if the family ever decided to move. No, to keep the ashes in the urn and then to place the urn in a mausoleum was the only acceptable option in a totally unacceptable force of choice. At least in that way, mother, father, and sister could be close (but not too close) to the beautiful son and brother they’d lost.

The visitation showed mourners the urn; next to it, a photograph of Matthew in his long-haired glorious prime; and next to that, on a stand, Matthew’s seldom-played Kramer combination electric-acoustic guitar. Hundreds arrived. One heartbroken well-meaning youth brought a plastic bag filled with the light brown hair-already falling out from chemotherapy-that Matthew had told his friends to shave from him. The well-wishers, the mourners, the friends and loved ones at the vigil had been appreciated but emotionally draining. At the sight of Matthew’s hair crammed within the plastic bag brought by Matthew’s friend, David had nearly fainted. But two of David’s friends had escorted him from the mortician’s and driven him to the church where the funeral next day would occur.

That was where the second mystical experience took place. Donna and Sarie had been going through their own emotional strain, sustained by relatives who helped them to the church. At nine o’clock on a beautiful dusky June night, the family had entered the church. There were arrangements to be made, a funeral to be planned. In the end the music the group selected was “Pie Jesu (Merciful Jesus),” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sad sublime Requiem, which he had written in honor of his dead father.

Stooped, barely able to maintain his balance if not for the supporting hands of his two friends, David had managed to enter the shadowy church. As he shuffled up the main aisle, his unsteady footsteps echoing off pews and rafters, his tear-reddened nostrils widening to the redolence of incense, flowers, and scented candles from that morning’s mass, an eerie change went through him. A strength of solace, of well-being and reassurance suddenly grew within him.

For a second time, he heard the echoing voice of the firefly. It rephrased its words from the night before in the bedroom. “I’m okay, Dad. I’m sorry you hurt, but your grief is the proof of your love for me. Mourn for your loss, but don’t mourn for me. Because you can’t imagine how happy I am.”

David abruptly straightened. He no longer needed his friends to hold him upright. With a strength that came from spiritual assurance, he approached the front of the church, where family and friends who watched him said afterward that he seemed different more than in manner, almost as if he had a glow.

He didn’t feel better. His grief was as agonizing as before. Nonetheless he stood straighter. He could function. For he knew beyond doubt that his son was at peace, or in the firefly’s word, “okay.”

That I can handle, David thought. I can manage to suffer. For myself. If my son sends a message he’s okay, I can strain through grief for myself.

Because I don’t matter.

That was the second experience.

12

And the third? Twelve people saw it. All were astonished. None ever forgot it. As a witness later said, “It’s getting harder to be an agnostic.”

This is what happened. When the funeral service concluded, David stood and put his arms around Donna and Sarie. Sobbing, struggling to muster dignity and not stumble or faint, they left the church, followed by several hundred mourners.

That Tuesday morning was hot and bright. Blinking after the shadows of the church, David, Donna, and Sarie sat in a limousine whose white seemed incongruous yet appropriate because innocence-though dead-did not merit black.

The mourners remained outside the church, in grieved confusion. Three relatives and two very close friends got into the limousine as well. The representative from the mortician brought Matthew’s urn, his photograph, and his guitar from the church. She set the urn on Donna’s lap, then drove the limousine from the church, followed by the priest.

After Donna held the urn for a while, she handed it to Sarie, and as the limousine neared the cemetery, Sarie handed the urn to David.

It was heavier than he had expected, not because of the ashes, which for a frail boy had to be slight, but because of the bronze-possibly fifteen pounds. It was square, a shiny deep brown, and by now someone had taped a lock of Matthew’s light brown hair to the top. On opposite sides of the urn, at the bottom, two screws secured the lid and what it contained.

Entering the curved gravel driveway of the cemetery, David noticed the groundskeeper, or what’s known as the sexton, standing at the open gate. The man (who, David later learned, had once been an economics major and had never dreamed he’d make a thirty-year career of overseeing a cemetery) got into his car and led the limousine past seemingly endless, flower-topped graves toward a mausoleum at the rear of the grounds.

The mausoleum (the only one on the property) was not at all like the dingy box-shaped structures you often see in cemeteries. Instead it was peaked, made mostly of light-colored wood and stone, and resembled a chapel. Its front door was open. As the sexton stopped his car ahead of the limousine, David, Donna, Sarie, and the others got out to join him. All told, counting the sexton and the representative from the mortician, there were ten now. Then the priest arrived, and another representative from the mortician, and there were twelve.

“I normally keep the mausoleum locked,” the sexton said, “but I wanted to ease your grief and avoid any awkwardness, opening the door and all that, so I could make this as smooth as possible for you. Later I’ll give you a key, so you can visit your son’s remains whenever you like.”

Stifled tears. A murmur of thanks.

So the procession of twelve, led by David carrying the heavier-than-expected urn, stepped into the mausoleum that resembled a chapel. Inside, on the right and left, there were niches for coffins and urns, but straight ahead were chairs like pews, and an organ and a podium. The large rear wall was glass from top to bottom, with sunlight pouring in. And David, who entered first, his tears dripping onto the urn, was the first to see…

What to call it?

A startling coincidence? A supernormal event?

What David saw was a bird. It flew around the chapel, soaring, swooping, circling, flapping in panic.

Recovering from his surprise, David turned to look past Donna and Sarie toward the priest, who followed through the open door.

David, who needed a respite from sorrow, a mitigation of grief, said with bitter irony, his humor black, “That’s all we need, Father. The Holy Ghost.”

But the priest stopped rigidly, reacting neither to irony nor to black humor. Indeed the expression on his face was a combination of shock, disbelief, and reverence. His face paled. “But, David, look closer! It really is a dove.”

That statement might not make sense to non-Catholics. In the Catholic Church, the Holy Ghost is a term that describes God’s ability to inspire as well as console, and traditionally the Holy Ghost is symbolized by a dove.

That’s what David-and the priest, and Donna, and Sarie, and the rest of the twelve-were seeing now. A dove. Not white, as in religious paintings. But gray, its name appropriate, a mourning dove, so-called because of its dirge-like “coo,” so much like a sob. It flapped and swooped and soared.

“My God,” the sexton said, not intending to sound religious. “I’m terribly sorry. I deeply apologize. I left the door open to make it easy for you to come in, but I should have thought. Sometimes a bird flies in if the door isn’t closed. I’ll try to get the dove out right now.”

David shook his head, his black irony irrepressible, and anyway the service was all that mattered.

“No, leave it,” he said, scanning the crypts to his right and left. “This place could use some life.”

The sexton narrowed his eyes. “You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

The sexton and the mortician’s representatives relaxed.

David found out later that an accidental interruption of the service, a distraction such as the dove, sometimes spurred mourners into fits of indignation, into accusations about insensitivity and incompetence.

Everybody’s different, he thought. In his own case, he welcomed the dove. In fact, in a strange way, he even loved it. For its life. Let it flap and swoop and soar. As long as it doesn’t hurt itself. When Matthew’s in his niche, we’ll take care of the dove.

The service began. As yet, there was nothing mystical, nothing supernormal about the dove. The door had for convenience been left open. The dove-as coincidence can happen-had by chance flown in. Perfectly explainable. Not usual, but nothing remarkable.

So far. But then coincidence was added to coincidence until, for David and the other eleven witnesses in the mausoleum’s chapel, the dove became very remarkable indeed.

As the dove continued flapping, David set the urn on the podium at the front of the chapel. He, his family and friends, along with the sexton and the mortician’s representatives, stepped back to the pewlike chairs. They watched the priest put on a vestment, then open a prayer book and begin the final liturgy for the dead. “Heavenly Father, accept this soul of your faithful departed servant…”

Throughout, the priest kept glancing nervously from the urn containing Matthew’s ashes toward the dove flapping overhead.

Then the next coincidence occurred. As the priest neared the end of the prayers, the dove, which till now had been in a panic, suddenly calmed and settled from the ceiling toward a low ledge on the wall of glass.

The priest held his breath, directed an even more nervous look toward the dove, and resumed his prayers.

There’s no way to verify what went through David’s mind just then. He later swore to those in the chapel that he knew what would happen next, or at least that one of three things would happen.

The dove will land on the floor beside the podium that supports Matthew’s urn, he thought. Or the dove will land on the urn itself. Or the dove will land on my shoulder.

David knew this as certainly as he’d witnessed the fireflies and heard one in particular in the bedroom two nights before, as certainly as he’d felt an unaccountable repose and heard an echo of the firefly’s voice in the church the evening earlier.

The priest opened a vial of holy water, and the first thing David had imagined occurred. The dove flew down to the floor beside the podium.

The chapel became very still. The priest’s voice fell to a whisper as he prayed and sprinkled the holy water over the urn.

The service came to an end. For several instants, no one moved. David felt strangled.

“After you leave,” the sexton said, his voice soft with respect, “I’ll put your son’s remains in his niche, and then I’ll remove the dove.”

“No, we’ll do it right now.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I want to be here when the urn’s put into the niche,” David said. “But first I’ll take care of the dove.”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s in a panic. It’ll be difficult to capture,” the sexton said.

David’s brother-in-law added, “I’ll take off my jacket. Maybe we can throw the coat over it and capture it.”

“That won’t be necessary,” David said. “No need to worry.”

The sexton frowned. “Then how are we going to-?”

“It’s very simple. I’ll pick up the dove.”

“You’ll what?”

“Oh, sure,” David said. “Just watch.”

For that had been David’s final precognition. The dove would let him pick it up.

“Impossible,” the sexton said.

“I told you, watch.”

For David was already moving, neither fast nor slow, but steadily, with calm. The dove, its feathers ruffled in panic, darted its frantic eyes right and left toward corridors of escape, but remained where it was.

David stopped, and though the dove flapped its wings with brief uncertainty, it stayed in place.

David eased his hands around the dove. It didn’t struggle.

David stood and faced his eleven witnesses.

“And now I’ll set Matthew free.”

He carried the dove past the urn, past his family and friends, and approached the mausoleum’s sunbright open door. Outside in the radiance of what otherwise would have been a splendid June morning, he smiled at the dove, though his tears made the gray bird misty to his eyes.

“Matt, I hope you meant what you told me the other night. With all my love, I want you to be okay.”

Reluctantly David opened his hands, and if the previous eight minutes had been packed with strange events, there was one more yet to come, for the dove refused to fly away. It perched on David’s open palms and, for fifteen seconds, peered at him.

David almost panicked. His thoughts could not be verified anymore than his precognitions could. Nonetheless he swore that this is what he thought.

My God, when I picked you up, I hope I didn’t hurt your wings.

At that, the bird soared away, its feathers making the distinctive whistling sound of a mourning dove in flight. It sped straight out, then up, ever higher, toward the brilliant sky, toward the blazing sun.

And was gone.

That’s it, an inner voice told David. That’s the last sign Matt’ll give you. Three will have to be enough.

David felt pain, yet joy. The significance of the dove having lingered in his open palms he took to be this: the extensive surgery that had removed Matt’s four right ribs and a third of his right lung was like picking up a dove and breaking a wing. But the dove had been all right, and as the firefly had said, so was David’s son.

Matt was at peace.

In the days, weeks, months, and years that followed, whenever David returned to that mausoleum, he scanned the grounds in hopes of seeing the dove, praying for another sign from his son.

But he never saw it. He saw robins, blue jays, and sparrows. Never any doves.

That day, the sexton unscrewed the glass pane of a two-foot square niche in a wall. David handed the urn to Donna, who handed it to Sarie, who then handed it back to David, who kissed it, placed the urn in the niche, and watched the sexton replace the glass pane.

The ritual had ended. Time was now measured differently.

Before Matt. After Matt.

As the group left the mausoleum, David turned to the priest. “At the risk of sounding… I’ve got the feeling something spooky happened in there.”

“David, to tell you the truth, I feel a little weird myself.”

The group drove back to the family home, where the several hundred mourners had been invited. Because Matthew had asked for a party if he died, the largest, most animated his parents could arrange, with music, food, soda pop, beer, and anything else that would make the kind of celebration they’d have had if he’d survived. A few months before his death, Matt had prepared a demostration tape of his guitar skills. That tape was played a lot that day. So was music by Matthew’s favorites: the Beatles; Van Halen; Bon Jovi; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. And all through the mournful party, the priest and everyone else who’d been at the mausoleum couldn’t stop talking about the dove.

13

When you lose a child (and you truly loved that child and weren’t just an indifferent caretaker or that scum of existence, a brutalizer), you search for some meaning, some justification, anything to ease your agony. You think about God and whether He exists and what kind of God would allow something so heinous as Matthew’s death. You think about ultimates, about the point of existence and whether there’s an afterlife and what it would be like. Would Matthew be waiting when his father, mother, and sister died? Would he be the same?

You question everything. You grasp at anything. To make sense of what seems to have no sense. To find meaning in what you despair might be the ultimate meaning: nothingness. You seek in all places, all cultures. You search in all philosophies and faiths.

Reincarnation? Plato believed in it. For that matter, a full half of the world’s present population believes in it. In the East. As the theory goes, we struggle through various stages of existence, not always human, sometimes animal or even plant, rising until we’ve perfected our spirit sufficiently to abandon material existence and join forever in bliss with God.

A complicated but comforting belief. Because there’s a point to life, a payoff. Certainly it’s easier to accept than the notion that God tortures us here on earth to punish us for our sins so we’ll be happy with Him in Heaven. In that case, how do we explain the death of an infant, who couldn’t possibly have sinned? Or the death of a fifteen-year-old boy, who by all accounts was remarkable and never harmed anyone?

Matthew was a child with a wisdom beyond his physical age. At school, he’d become the envy of his fellow ninth graders because he’d been adopted by those in grade twelve. He ate lunch with the older students (unheard of). He went to grade-twelve parties (unheard of). He gave them advice about the problems in their lives, and (unheard of) the older students heeded his advice.

There was something about his character, his humor, his intuition that set him apart. Uniqueness by definition is one of a kind, and Matthew by all reports was indeed a breed unto himself. At school, a type of unfashionable student known as a nerd might be victimized by cruel remarks and equally cruel antisocial jokes. But Matt would put a stop to it all.

“Give him a break. If he’s truly a nerd, if he was born that way, then let him be what he is, because you weren’t born so unlucky. And if he’s a nerd for other reasons, because of family problems maybe, all the more reason to give him a break-because he does have problems.”

Matt’s ability to grasp mathematical, philosophical, and verbal skills at school was astonishing. Instinctively. With minimal effort. Perfect grades. A Presidential scholar. In Iowa, where the test of basic skills is one of the standards of the nation, Matthew ranked within the top 1 percent of the most-gifted students.

And he never had to try. He budgeted his time for assignments at school as a necessary tedious inconvenience. His achievements seemed as effortless and natural as putting a record onto a turntable, as remembering. “Trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home,” Wordsworth says, the title of his poem appropriate: “Intimations of Immortality.”

The transmigration of souls. Passing from one existence to the next, we accumulate in wisdom so that, no matter our physical problems, our spirit and intelligence grow stronger. Maybe so. David had often thought that Matthew was a mature man at eight. Matt’s sense of fairness and justice, of virtue and honor, was astonishing at so early an age. He passed through stages more quickly than any child David had ever seen, and David had once worked as a counselor to adolescents. Before his death, Matt had-unbidden-been studying Oriental philosophy and its theory of reincarnation. Could it be that Matthew’s soul had reached its prime, and the disease of his body, his soul departing from it, was like a butterfly leaving a chrysalis? Had Matthew’s death not been a tragedy but part of the natural order? Such were the desperate thoughts that a grieving parent used to find solace.

14

Desperate thoughts. Nonetheless comforting.

But they didn’t assuage David’s loss, and after the funeral, after the party, the torture still hadn’t ended. Because he, Donna, and Sarie each day had to enter Matthew’s room, itself a black hole of absence, to stare at the clothes in his closet, the games on his shelves, the phonograph records on his bureau, the rock-star posters on his wall. The last day of school, Sarie and a friend had gone to Matt’s locker to bring home his bag of notebooks, texts, and gym shoes. Sorting through that bag, and his closet, and his bureau drawers was an agony so extreme that it had to be done in stages, a little each day for weeks and months.

What do you want to save, what to throw out? How do you dispose of the vestiges of a treasured life? Matthew’s tapes and records, collected over the years, had mostly gone out of fashion. His friends didn’t want them. The posters on his walls came from a culture changing so rapidly that even those purchased six months ago might as well have been sixty years old. Those posters and rock-star buttons and banners were valueless without the perspective of the mind that had attached significance to them. Souvenirs have no worth without nostalgia, after all. They’re meaningless if a memory isn’t linked to them.

So once each week, David carried a plastic bag of the remants of a departed life out to the street and walked far from home so he wouldn’t see the trash collectors take those bags away. Old shoes, still redolent of Matthew’s smell. Socks and underwear, too personal for anyone else to put on. Stacks of bank statements, five dollars withdrawn on one day, seven dollars another day, a lifetime of withdrawals, until the ultimate withdrawal. The useful items, Matthew’s clothes, were given to Goodwill.

At the last, what remained were three albums of photographs showing Matthew as he grew to his final year, and a pair of slippers shaped like bear’s feet complete with claws. How he’d grinned as the nurses kidded him about those slippers, when he pushed his IV stand for exercise down the hospital corridor. Those slippers-too precious to be discarded, their smell of Matthew too comforting-were tacked to a wall in his room. And that was that, the conclusion of the disposal of what once had been a life.

Except for a final gift. One of Matthew’s closest friends had moved far from town several years before. Each summer they’d taken turns flying to visit one another. Matt’s friend had lost his mother to breast cancer, and one evening when the boy, delightfully sixteen with his life ahead of him, had phoned to keep in touch and say how much he missed Matt, the boy had added that his home had been burglarized, all his rock-music records stolen. The next day, all of Matt’s tapes and records, nearly one hundred of them, were mailed to Matt’s friend. How satisfying a gift, not so much for Matt’s friend, though he surely appreciated the package, but satisfying for David, Donna, and Sarie. Because they knew how Matthew would have been delighted to please his friend.

What finally remained of Matt’s possessions was the bright white Kramer electric-acoustic guitar that Matthew had treasured more than anything else he owned. That precious guitar (polished frequently, with reverence) stayed in Matthew’s room, almost like a holy object, supported upright on a stand, and each day, mustering a face to meet the faces that he met, David entered Matthew’s room and stroked that guitar. For luck and strength.

“Help me make it through the day, son. And especially the night.”

15

Time is the greatest healer-so David had been told. Untrue. Parents who lose a valued child never get over the dear one’s absence. As David aged, he, his wife, and his daughter continued to cherish one another (a blessing, for too often the death of a child produces a split within a family: arguments, recriminations, and divorce). Except for terrifying anxiety attacks that imitated coronaries and eventually required psychiatric therapy, David’s health was perversely good. His career as a writer prospered. The famous character he’d created (sometimes reviled, sometimes revered, but never ignored) took second place to other of his characters, who because of the sorrow David had suffered from Matthew’s death spoke to readers who suffered their own sorrows.

He prospered. He persisted. But he did not flourish.

Maybe that was the final irony. David’s unwanted success could have been a boon to Matthew, could have eased Matthew’s way, through David’s contacts, into the world of influence.

16

So David thought as he lay in a stupor, dwindling toward his own death, his faithful loving daughter beside him holding his weakening hand in the shadowy raspy confines of an isolation room in Intensive Care. His exceptional wife had died five years before him, and he’d grieved for her, how much so, but never the spirit-burdening grief he’d felt for Matthew. His wife, he knew, would understand. When Matthew had died, the world had shrunk. Everything afterward had been like climbing an endless flight of stairs.

God?

Heaven?

Reincarnation?

Who knew?

But now he was near the top of that wearying flight of stairs, and he’d discover the answer or he wouldn’t, depending on whether there was an answer or merely oblivion.

“I love you,” Sarie said.

Weak, struggling against the oxygen tube in his throat, David nodded. He knew she understood that he loved her as well. He was proud to have been not just her father, but her friend.

You were a gift to me, David thought about Sarie. Just as Matthew was a gift, and it’s too bad we’re not all here together. Years ago I almost killed myself. Now I’m glad I didn’t. Because of you, dear.

But now you’ll have to go on without me. The main thing is, my death isn’t a tragedy. My dissolution is part of the natural scheme. Grieve for me, because you love me, but don’t let my death hold you back. Persist. And maybe one day, we’ll meet in rapturous reunion.

Who knows? Good-bye, sweetheart. I pray I’m about to meet Matthew. I’ve missed him so much. If death is oblivion, it won’t matter because I won’t have the consciousness to know.

But if…!

Sinking ever deeper into the ultimate sleep, David’s dwindling consciousness managed a final burst of strength. As if it were yesterday and not half a lifetime ago, he remembered another poem that Matthew had written, one that David had memorized with a persistence close to mania and could never have forgotten even on the verge of death.

The poem had been written when Matthew was fourteen. Imagine. So young. And it represented everything that Matt’s young heart had wanted.

To be a musician. To be in tune with the spheres.

17

LOWDER

VOLUME

CO.

18

Fourteen years old, and to have written a poem so promising of future achievements.

Gone. All lost and gone.

Sinking.

Dimming.

Dwindling.

And yet…

And yet…

In David’s mind, he seemed to rise above his dying body, to float above his soon-to-be corpse, to see his daughter sobbing over him and the nurses rushing toward him, raising the bottom of his bed.

David knew what raising a patient’s feet meant. He’d seen it happen to Matthew. When the nurses raised the bottom of your bed, your blood pressure was dropping, and you were, to use Matt’s words, in serious shit.

So what did it matter? David’s time had come, and he looked forward to it, hoping he’d reencounter a great love of his life, be replenished from his greatest loss.

In his mind, he floated ever higher, through the ceiling, and higher yet, away from the shadows into a brightness, drifting toward it, toward a door that somehow didn’t interfere with the beautiful brightness.

When David’s stepfather had suffered his first heart attack, the weary man had wakened to describe a dream in which he’d been floating through brightness toward a door.

“I reached the door. I knocked and knocked. But no one answered.”

Three months later, when a second heart attack had completed the job, maybe the tired man had reached the door and this time his knock had been answered.

But David didn’t need to knock. Floating to the door, he merely turned its knob. At once he heard power chords. An electric guitar strummed ecstatically.

David opened the door. The brightness increased its glare; the strumming chords became more powerful.

The brightness he saw was caused by fireflies. Millions of them. Radiant. All around him. Enveloping. Silently rejoicing.

The chords throbbed with greater intensity. David peered all around, squinting past the fireflies.

Matthew? David’s joy became frustration.

Matthew? Doubt became despair.

The radiant fireflies swarmed around him. But he recognized none of them!

Matthew?

Where was Matthew?