Fireflies (2 page)

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.

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.

“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.