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 spe
nt 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.
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Fireflies: A Father's Classic Tale of Love and Loss Page 17