Fireflies

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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”:

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.

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.

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.