Fireflies (18 page)

Examples.

On Thursday, one day before Matt contracted septic shock, did I foolishly run when the temperature-humidity index was one hundred and three and subsequently collapse on my kitchen floor?

Yes. But while in the book I forced myself to go to the hospital in response to a nightmare of precognition, in reality I staggered to bed and had to stay there until the next day when I managed to get to the hospital two hours before Matt went into shock.

The initial medical explanation for my fainting spell was dehydration and an imbalance in the electrolyte components of my blood, i.e., loss of sodium and potassium. But fluids, sodium, and potassium didn’t make me feel strong again and didn’t take away my dizziness. In fact, when Matt was rushed to Intensive Care Friday evening, my disorientation worsened. On Saturday, after his kidneys failed and a hole was cut into his abdomen, a tube inserted, fluid poured in and drained out to vent his poisons, I had the unnerving sense that the floor was tilting. The flashing red numbers on his monitors made my heart rush in rhythm with them. When I leaned against a wall, it felt wobbly, as if I’d fall through it.

On Sunday morning, when Matthew’s lungs began to accumulate fluid from too many hours on the respirator, I finally collapsed. The doctors, fearing I’d suffered a heart attack, rushed me to the Emergency Ward, where a team of specialists couldn’t find anything seriously wrong with me. Stress and exhaustion, they diagnosed. But I realize now, because of subsequent medical treatment, that what I endured was a panic attack. In this book, I moved the panic attack back, from Sunday to Thursday, and made it a part of my imagined eighty-four-year-old dying vision.

The attack, I assure you, was real. Indeed, several months before, when Matt’s chemotherapy kept producing no results, my wife experienced a similar attack. In her case, vomiting was an extra symptom. Dizzy, helpless, with a terrifying headache, rising blood pressure and heartbeat, she had to be rushed from a supermarket to the Emergency Ward, where her chronic hypertension made the doctors suspect she was having a stroke. The results of tests made them reconsider their diagnosis and conclude that my wife had labyrinthitis, an inner-ear infection that upsets balance, produces nausea, and makes a victim so disoriented he or she swears that death is moments away. Valium was prescribed. For seven days, my wife had to walk with a cane. It is possible that my wife’s labyrinthitis was a panic attack; I’ll never know. But I certainly had one, and many others later.

Did Matthew’s surgeons interrupt his eight-hour operation three hours into it to tell Donna and me that his tumor might be inoperable, that we had fifteen minutes to make a life-and-death decision: whether to close him up right now, allow him a relatively painless summer, and wait for his death in the fall, or whether to take out his ribs and however much of his lung, then go for the trauma of a bone marrow transplant, and hope he survived for a long productive life?

You bet that happened. Until that time, it was the worst day of my life, though there were many more horrible days to come.

Did I see fireflies in the darkness of my bedroom the night after Matthew died? Yes.

Did I experience a sudden inexplicable sense of peace when I entered the church the night before Matt’s funeral, as if his spirit was telling me to grieve for myself but not for him because, in the firefly’s word, Matt was “okay”? You bet.

But those two—I hesitate to call them “mystical”—sensations can be accounted for on a subjective level. A skeptic would say that I saw what I wanted to see, that I felt what I needed to feel. I wouldn’t argue. Till recently, I’ve always referred to myself as an agnostic, another word for hedging my bets, for saying I’m not sure about such ultimate matters as an afterlife and God. Not sure but not
un
sure either. Straddling the fence. Let’s wait and see. God
could
exist. Maybe not.

The thing is, though, I did see the dove in the mausoleum. Reread my description of it in part one. It did behave in one of the three ways I mentally predicted. You’ll have to take my word for those predictions. But the fact is, in front of twelve witnesses, the frantic dove suddenly settled to the floor as the priest completed the final rites over Matthew’s ashes. The dove did allow me to pick it up. I did say, “And now I’ll set Matthew free.” I did carry the dove outside the mausoleum, and when I opened my hands, the dove (formerly panicked) did refuse to fly away. Until I thought, Dear God, I hope it isn’t hurt. And at that point, a voice in my head said, “Dad, I’m all right,” and the dove flew away.

You can doubt that my subjective reactions were mystical experiences. But what
isn’t
open to doubt is that the dove was there and behaved as I’ve described. A chain of coincidences? Perhaps. But how many coincidences do there need to be until you finally grant that something extraordinary, far beyond probability, took place? In my own case, I know I reached that limit. I started to slip off the fence. I began to wonder if the fireflies in my bedroom and my sudden sense of peace in the church were as subjective as a skeptic would claim. I took a step away from agnosticism toward …

Well, let’s put it this way. I’ve got this friend. He and his wife, after a yearlong lull in our relationship, showed up at the hospital the day after Matt contracted septic shock. They needed just one look at Donna, Sarie, and me to realize how helpless we felt, how much we required support.

In the worst of Matt’s illness, I used to be so preoccupied I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten or slept, and this was when I was having what I didn’t know were panic attacks. My friend and his wife would force Donna, Sarie, and me to eat food they’d brought to the hospital. They’d compel us to take turns going back to their home, to lie down and try to rest.
Compassionate
is too weak a word to describe their behavior. (I hasten to add that some so-called friends who’d stayed in close contact in the year before Matt’s illness fled from us as if we had the plague the moment they heard Matt had … dreaded word … could the disease be contagious? … we don’t want our children to get it … dare we say it? … cancer.)

Anyhow, these friends whom we hadn’t seen in a while, who suddenly showed up and exemplified the generosity of good samaritans, were with my family, my wife’s sisters, and my brother-in-law when we left the funeral and went to the mausoleum to deposit Matthew’s ashes. They were present during the incident with the dove, standing in the background, staring (I later learned) in astonishment.

Now understand, my friend is not religious.

But this is what he later told me. He turned to his wife and whispered, “Can you believe this is actually happening? Look at that dove. Look at how it waits while David picks it up. And look at how many people are seeing this. Thirteen people. It can’t be we’re all, so many, just imagining this.”

Did you catch the error? I’ve mentioned several times that there were twelve of us in the mausoleum. Donna, Sarie, myself, two of Donna’s sisters, my brother-in-law, the priest, the cemetery’s sexton, and two representatives from the mortician. Plus my friend and his wife. Count them. Twelve.

But that day in the mausoleum, my friend saw thirteen. And to this day, no matter how often I count the witnesses with him, he still says he saw thirteen. And his wife who counted with him that day in the mausoleum agreed with him. Thirteen. A shadowy figure among the crowd, but a figure who wasn’t there. Who or what? As my friends now say, “It’s getting harder to be an agnostic.”

I’m not claiming we saw a column of flame. And I’m not claiming my son was so special that if there is a God we received a sign. But something holy and unusual happened in that mausoleum. The priest who blessed Matthew’s ashes had twenty years of experience in his vocation. At our home, at the gathering after the mausoleum, this seasoned professional of the spirit couldn’t stop telling the hundreds of mourners about the dove. He based several sermons on it. Whenever I saw him afterward, he kept talking about the dove.

The mortician in charge of Matthew’s disposition—another veteran, not of the spirit but of the soulless flesh—said in all her experience she’d never seen anything like, would never forget, the dove.

Make of the dove what you will. But I’ve been through hell, so now I’m willing to believe in the opposite. “Willing,” I said. But I’ve got a good reason to grant that possibility. To be more specific, I’ve got a reason to
want
to believe. More about that later.

Why did I write this book? The truth is I didn’t have a choice. It would have been impossible for me
not
to write it. I’ve never felt more compelled to put words onto paper. I guess you could call this a form of self-psychoanalysis. Something horrible happened to my son, and by extension to my wife, my daughter, and me. The worst thing. The most dreadful thing. I’m still trying to figure it out, to come to terms with it, to vent my emotions. In the months I’ve been writing these pages, I could barely see the keyboard because of the tears that blurred my eyes.

Then why not quit? Why torture myself?

Because even though it’s torture, this book is also an act of love. In my mind, I’m still at the hospital, holding Matt’s hand, stroking his forehead, trying to assure him there’s hope. I can’t give him up. He’s been dead for months, and yet each day I study pictures of him (how I wish we’d taken more photographs). I caress his slippers. I strum his guitar. But my mental images of him are becoming cruelly less vivid. One day they’ll be a blur, like my keyboard. So while he’s still fresh in my mind, I write about him, even if the events I describe make my soul ache, because I want to make him permanent, if only on paper.

After his surgery, when Matt was told he still had a remnant of the tumor and would probably die, he murmured, “But no one will remember me.” I promised he
would
be remembered, and as long as these pages exist and someone reads them, he
is
remembered.

But isn’t that being merely sentimental?

In the first place, there’s nothing wrong with being sentimental. That emotion and others such as compassion set us apart from animals. They make us human.

But in the second place, no, I’m not being merely sentimental. There are lessons here. Truths. They tumble through my mind.

Children are a gift. Throughout these pages, I’ve maintained that Matthew was a special child. His verbal and musical skills, his intelligence, his good nature were extraordinary. Everyone liked him. Everyone recognized his unusual potential. I truly believe that if he’d lived he would have made our world a better place.

Or is that fatherly pride? I don’t want to nominate Matt for sainthood. He was special, but he wasn’t perfect. He and I had “discussions” about curfews and other household rules. But yes, I was—am—proud of him. And that’s my point.
Every
parent ought to have pride in his or her child, because
every
child is special, by virtue of being a child. From when Matthew was diagnosed in early January until he died in late June, for those six months, his mother, his sister, and I were with him almost constantly. Not always as a group, and not between treatments, when Matthew found the strength to go to school. But then his treatments lasted longer, and his sessions at school became shorter, and our family grew even tighter. For the last eight weeks of his life, Matt’s home was the hospital, and one or all of his family was with him day and night.

When you think about it, the average parent sees his or her school-age child for an hour or two at most each day. In the morning, when the family’s getting organized, and in the evening, when settling down at supper, then at bedtime. During the intervals, everyone goes a separate way. But we saw Matt
every
hour. During his final six months, and in particular, his final eight weeks, we spent more time together than an average family does over a lifetime. Maybe that closeness was a backhanded compensation for the pain and terror Matt (and by extension the rest of us) endured. Maybe Donna, Sarie, and I got to know Matt better than we ever normally would have, and to love him with greater intensity. Maybe six months or even eight weeks can be a lifetime. Maybe it’s not how long but how well.

In the eulogy I wrote for Matt, I described how “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 asked, “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?”

There’s a writer I admire. Andrew Vachss. To date, his novels are
Flood
and
Strega
. Read them.

I admire him for two reasons.

First, because his sentences are strong; his stories make me turn the pages.

But the second reason I admire him is that he became a novelist out of frustration, because he wanted a broad audience to get the message of what he considers his
true
profession. He’s an attorney who deals with child-abuse cases. Some time ago, I wrote a rave review of
Strega
for the
Washington Post
. He was kind enough to send me a letter of thanks, not for the review but for emphasizing the message of his books. “Not for my writing,” he said, “but for my
work
.” After Matt’s death, he phoned to convey his sympathy.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” he said. “Truly it breaks my heart. But for what it’s worth, if this helps … I’ve seen so many dead battered children … at least your son had this privilege. He died knowing he was loved.”

I started to cry but somehow kept talking. “Your days must be hell, dealing with …”

“These scum who treat children like sacks of garbage? No. My days are victories. I feel as if I save the lives of more children each year than most doctors do in emergency wards. Tomorrow I go to trial against a fourth-generation incest case, and man, I can’t wait to put those perverts out of society. Abused kids are POWs. Establishing them with a decent family is like ending a war.”