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

by Morrell, David

  DAVID MORRELL

  FIREFLIES

  Excerpt from “Sweeney Agonists” in Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright © 1963, 1964 by T.S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Excerpt from “Burnt Notion” in Four Quartets, copyright 1943 by T.S. Eliot, renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

  Copyright © 1988 by David Morrell

  Afterword copyright © 1999 by Morrell Enterprises, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Acknowledgments

  This book is dedicated to the staff, nurses, and physicians at the University of Iowa’s Hospitals and Clinics. One of the largest teaching and research hospitals in the United States, it exemplifies the best, in terms of both skill and humane values, that the medical profession ideally represents.

  The nurses who administered to my son are too many to mention by name. Each did her or his part with utmost sensitivity and talent. My wife, my daughter, and I remember you with gratitude and love.

  Of the physicians who cared for Matt, special thanks are due to Drs. Raymond Tannous, Janet Graeve, Kevin Pringle, Roger Giller, Brian Wicklund, Michael Trigg, Robert Soper, C. Thomas Kisker, and Pedro De Alarcon.

  Thanks are also due to Cecilia Coulas, Diane and Michael Batty, Barbara and Richard Montross, Helen and Nicholas Rossi, and Gloria and Rudolph Galask, without whose compassionate support my family and I would have felt even more lost. Fathers Henry Greiner and Greg Miller, true servants of God, provided the spiritual consolation we so desperately craved.

  But finally, crucially, this book is dedicated to Matthew.

  God love you, son. Watch over us. We did our best to watch over you.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  THE RETURN OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

  PART ONE

  TO FEAR TO GO INTO THE DARK

  PART TWO

  A POWER RAGE BEYOND COMPREHENSION

  PART THREE

  PANIC ATTACK

  PART FOUR

  DÉJÀ VU

  EPILOGUE

  THE REFRAIN OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

  AFTERWORD

  LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL

  Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak

  Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.

  —SHAKESPEARE

  Macbeth

  Prologue

  THE RETURN OF

  THE ANCIENT MARINER

  1

  A well-known novelist friend (I see him seldom but think of him fondly) once began a famous book with one of the most arresting passages I’ve ever encountered. The novel was Ghost Story, its author Peter Straub.

  And this is how he started.

  What was the worst thing you’ve ever done?

  I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me … the most dreadful thing. …

  Precisely.

  I’ve borrowed Peter’s words because they so perfectly express what I’m feeling. The worst thing I’ve ever done? I’ll leave that troubling question for a different book.

  But the worst thing that ever happened to me? The most dreadful thing? I can tell you that with absolute certainty. Indeed, with terrible compulsion, I find myself driven to describe that ordeal. My effort isn’t voluntary. It comes in torturous rushes. Distraught, I remind myself of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, in a frenzy stopping friends and strangers to tell of my woe, as if by describing it often enough, I can numb myself and blunt the words—and in so doing heal myself of the cause behind the words.

  The effort’s impossible, I suspect. Certainly, it didn’t work for the Ancient Mariner. After killing a bird of good omen and enduring a consequent nightmarish sea voyage, he managed to return to shore.

  Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched

  With a woful agony,

  Which forced me to begin my tale;

  And then it left me free.

  Left him free? Well, apparently not, for Coleridge adds a marginal note that “ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to travel from land to land.”

  Since then, at an uncertain hour,

  That agony returns:

  And till my ghastly tale is told,

  This heart within me burns.

  I’m no more free than the Ancient Mariner. To be sure, I haven’t killed a bird of good omen, though I recently saw a metaphoric version of such a bird die—and three days later I saw a literal bird, very much alive, that seemed to be a reincarnation of the departed soul of the first. A cryptic reference? You bet. Necessarily so, and soon to be explained. A mystical experience; and along with terror, sorrow, agony, guilt, compassion, God, and redemption, it’s very much a part of my tale. For like the Ancient Mariner, my heart surely burns to tell you—once and for all, to be done with my tale, to exorcise my demons, to gain and preserve my faith.

  2

  Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

  —FRANCIS BACON

  “Of Death”

  Fear. For almost twenty years as a fiction writer, I’ve focused on terror as my main subject. I’ve always believed, as Sartre in Nausea, that real life is so fundamentally boring that we need adventure fiction to help soothe our ennui, to take us out of the doldrums of actuality. The paradox, of course, is that if we ever truly experienced a “thriller,” we would find it so terrifying we would wish with all the power of our being to be returned to the safe but depressing boredom of reality.

  T. S. Eliot puts it this way in “Sweeney Agonistes”:

  “I’ll carry you off

  To a cannibal isle …

  Nothing to eat but the fruit as it grows …

  Nothing at all but three things.”

  “What things?”

  “Birth, and copulation, and death.”

  “I’d be bored.”

  Bored? I don’t think so. Not me any longer. For I have seen real life at its starkest. I’ve learned that copulation and birth have an unavoidable consequence: death. Despite what I used to think (and what Sartre thought), I know this much—that real life, whatever else it might be, isn’t boring.

  Because recently I was overwhelmed by a massive dose of my subject matter. I came face-to-face with terror, and now I have trouble writing thrillers. Having encountered death, I find that to write about it using the conventions of a thriller makes me feel I’m holding back, leaving out death’s grisly secret. And yet to include that secret would be to negate the distracting purpose of a thriller.

  So to tell my tale I’ve compromised. Most of what you’re about to read is fact. I still can’t believe it happened, but God have mercy, it did, and I feel an obligation to tell it. Since others have suffered as I and my family have, perhaps from our experience and the lessons we strained to learn, others will learn and find solace. In the aftermath of the loss we endured, we took great comfort in Harold S. Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People. But the book you’re now reading is different from Kushner’s in many respects. For one thing, his excellent volume (though prompted, as was mine, by a personal tragedy) is a wide-ranging discussion of crises of faith that he encountered among troubled members of his synagogue.

  For another, his book is totally factual.

  However, Fireflies devotes itself exclusively to one family’s tragedy, and though almost completely factual, it does have elements of fiction. Not the fireflies, the dove, and the other mystical experiences I will describe
. I assure you they did happen. Still, because I wanted to make a statement about grief, about faith and the afterlife, I imposed a frame of fiction onto fact. In an epilogue, I’ll explain where fact and fiction diverge. I’ll also explain my reasons for blending the two, and my conclusion will, I hope, be spiritually rewarding.

  Can I see another’s woe,

  And not be in sorrow too?

  Can I see another’s grief,

  And not seek for kind relief?

  —WILLIAM BLAKE

  Songs of Innocence,

  “On Another’s Sorrow”

  TO FEAR TO GO INTO

  THE DARK

  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 underst
and 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.