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

by David Morrell

  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.

  JIGSAW

  Remembrance of the days of ecstasy.

  A natural buzz from life was created

  As every piece of the jigsaw puzzle

  Was prime and in place.

  A sledge hammer, chain saw, and a rototiller

  Shred through the jigsaw puzzle,

  Through the good memories

  Of a lot of Cokes

  And late night burgers.

  A mane of hair,

  A symbol of what you believe in.

  And so many good times gone by … Gone.

  Déjà vu rings strong in your ears

  But brings not a smile to your face,

  Instead tears to your eyes.

  Prejudice rears its ugly head.

  Social matters become shattered.

  Limits are put in place.

  The jigsaw puzzle is slowly destroyed.

  Leaving only one piece … Alone.

  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 sexto
n, 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?