Fireflies (3 page)

“But from another point of view, a religious one, we learn something else.

“Life is suffering, the great Buddha says. That was his
first
truth. He had three others.

“Suffering is caused by the wish for nonpermanent things. All living things die. Everything physical falls apart.
That was the Buddha’s second incontrovertible truth.

“And the third?
Suffering ends when nonlasting things are rejected.
No person, no object, no career can finally bring happiness. In a world of eventual destruction, only eternal goals are worth pursuing.

“Which leads to the Buddha’s fourth and last great truth.
Seek the eternal. Seek the forever-lasting. Seek God.

“Matt wasn’t religious in the sense that he belonged to an organized body of faith. He was baptized as a Roman Catholic. He was trained in that religion to the point of what Catholics call the sacrament of Communion. But to him every other religion had value as well. He did believe in God. He wore a small crucifix as an earring. On one of his last conscious days, he received what the Catholic Church used to call the sacrament of Extreme Unction, the final rites, what it now calls the sacrament of the sick. We know Matt’s body was sick beyond belief, but I assure you his soul was wholesome to its depths, and I’m convinced the sacrament spiritually and psychologically eased his passage.

“Poor dear Matthew, how we grieve for him. But in addition to his hopes of being a musician, he had three final wishes, which I’ll share with you.

“ ‘If I die,’ he said, ‘I want to be surrounded by a communion of my friends.’

“Today, with love, we’ve achieved that wish for him.

“His second wish?

“ ‘If I die,’ he said, ‘please remember me.’ With all the tears in my heart, son, I swear you’ll be remembered.

“And his third wish?

“ ‘I hurt so much,’ he said. ‘I want mercy.’

“My unlucky wonderful son, in a way I can barely adjust to, you received that wish also. You did gain mercy.

“Sleep well, gentle boy. Be at peace. We’ll think of you with fondness till we ourselves pass. And if there is an afterlife—I confess I’ll never be sure till I find out—I know you’ll forever be in loving tune with us.

“Say hello to Jimi Hendrix for me. John Lennon. And Janis Joplin. All the other departed music greats. Pal, I bet you’ve got a hell of a band.”

So David had read at his son’s memorial service. Next to him on the altar, beside the photograph of a glowing son and an urn filled with ashes, had stood Matthew’s favorite guitar, a white combination acoustic-and-electric made by Kramer, the instrument Donna had purchased for Matt the day of his extensive surgery. Waking from sedation after being monitored in Intensive Care, not yet knowing that the cancer had not been fully removed, he’d been shown the guitar and, too weak to hold it, had managed a tearful grin of joy, his weak voice breaking. “Isn’t that beautiful?” David, about to die now forty years later, still heard those heart-choking words reverberate through the morphine swirl of his mind. His son had survived to play that guitar only four muscle-weary times, discouraged because his fingers no longer retained their skill.

In the eulogy, David hadn’t included the further agonies his son had endured. After the chaotic heartbeat, respiration, temperature, and blood pressure that were part of the septic shock, Matthew’s kidneys had failed. Dialysis had been required. Not the kind in which a machine is used to filter poisons from the blood. That type of dialysis couldn’t have prevented Matt’s failed kidneys from causing excess fluid to accumulate in his body. Choosing a different method of dialysis, a surgeon had desperately slit open Matt’s abdomen and inserted a tube through which liquid was poured, its special properties establishing a correction of blood chemistry by means of a process called osmosis. The liquid sucked not only poisons but excess fluid through Matt’s abdominal lining, and every hour that poisoned fluid was drained, replaced by a fresh solution. But the poisons and excess fluid had resisted treatment, not leaving his body quickly enough.

Then Matthew’s left lung had collapsed. Then his muscles had begun to contract from lying motionless for too many days. Donna and David had put on and taken off his socks and sneakers every hour to prevent his Achilles’ tendons from tightening. Finally dead bacteria from his septic shock had collected within his heart. A chunk of this debris had broken from within the heart and plugged a main artery. Death after eight days in Intensive Care had not been from cancer, but instead from a heart attack. Ironies. How they kick you in the teeth.

So David thought as he came closer to death in Intensive Care. Even now, after forty years, he remembered the autopsy report that he and his wife had received.

David did have one question. How can life be so cruel? But the question at bottom was philosophical and an inappropriate response to an autopsy that proved his point empirically. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Watch out for the boogeyman. Eat your Wheaties. Say your prayers. Walk around ladders. Brush your teeth after every meal. Stay away from the teddy bears’ picnic. And count every second without pain or disaster as a major stroke of luck.

Entropy. That was the secret. The messiness of the universe.

As Sarie held his weakening hand in Intensive Care, David heard faintly, through the wheeze of the oxygen pump and a humming in his ears, the words she’d recited at Matthew’s funeral. How proud he’d been of her that day, how filled with love. The strength and composure she’d mustered against intolerable grief had made it possible for her somehow bravely to stand before the mourners at the church and to recite that day’s gospel, a text that with bitter irony happened to be from St. Matthew.

Sarie repeated it to him now. God bless her, she’d remembered the passage all these years. She spoke it again as she had with the same trembling voice combating sorrow so long ago. If he’d had the strength, he’d have reached up and hugged her just as he had before the mourners in the church so many years ago when she’d stepped unsteadily down from the lectern. The words were beautiful.

Comforting thoughts. If a person believed.

But David at best had been an agnostic.

Until three incidents made him suspect there might be a spirit within the universe, a greater power than his pessimism allowed.

The first had occurred one night after Matthew’s death. Having somehow managed the strength to write Matthew’s eulogy, David had staggered to the master bedroom, where in a rare gesture of obeisance to a God whose existence he doubted, he’d sunk to his knees. The time was night. The room was dark. David’s eyes were raw with tears. Hands pressed to his swollen face, he’d prayed with a fervor that he swore would kill him.

Matthew, Matthew,
Matthew!
I want you back, son! This has to be a nightmare! Soon I’ll waken! You’ll be here!

One day before the septic shock that had ravaged Matthew’s body and eight days later killed him, David had used some brief time alone, when he and Donna weren’t sharing anxious hours together watching over Matthew in the hospital. David had driven home to change clothes. On impulse, based on a twenty-year daily habit, he’d decided to exercise, to run as was his custom, to clear his head and sweat tension from his body. After four miles, the farthest he could manage given his stress and weakness, he’d staggered into his kitchen, sipped a glass of water, and collapsed. Surely while he was passed out on the floor, this nightmare of his dear son’s death had come to him, and he hadn’t wakened yet. That was the explanation. None of this had happened. It was a nightmare.

So he’d hoped forty years ago as he’d knelt in trembling anguish beside the bed. While he squeezed his hands to his face and tears seeped through his clawlike fingers that threatened to tear his cheeks away, he’d prayed with all the desperation his soul could sustain that he would wake up from his stupor on the kitchen floor and his son would still be alive.

Oh, please! he’d prayed. Oh, Jesus, please!

But he’d known in a terrifying recess of his remaining sanity that he had indeed revived from his stupor on the floor, that he had indeed staggered back to the hospital, that his son had indeed suffered septic shock one day later and died eight unimaginably traumatic days after that.

Matthew! Matthew! Please! Come back to me!

Forty years ago, in his kneeling paroxysm beside the bed, his thoughts flashing through his mind like lasers, David had suddenly remembered yet another example of his wonderful son’s promising gifts. Not only the life-affirming pulse of music, whose throbbing chords continued to reverberate like a neverending tape through David’s head, but as well a poem, one of many, this one written during the disorientation and nausea of chemotherapy, a poem that Matthew had later submitted for an assignment at school.

Fifteen years old. With verbal gifts far superior to those of his father who defined himself by and made his living out of words. Fifteen years old, and in a panic at 4:00 A.M., the boy had wakened Donna, who slept beside him on a cot in the IV-stand-filled room, to dictate to her his sudden terrifying insights. A poem. Not linear, not rhymed and metered, not the singsong unintentional parody of a poem you’d expect from someone his age. Instead a gestalt of fear and memory. A jumbled synthesis of reaction to when life was perfect and then collapsed. A metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle, of each piece having been beautifully assembled and then perversely ripped apart; of lost hair, fading friends, and fractured hopes; of the prejudice ignorant people showed toward cancer patients whose bald heads and gaunt cheeks looked like skulls; of dreams become tears and parties about to turn into wakes. Death and a jigsaw puzzle. If the poem wasn’t perfect, it was better than the father could have written at fifteen, or maybe could have ever written, and if a perceptive reader paid it due attention, the meaning was clear; the craft matched the content.

Fifteen years old. Vomiting at 4:00 A.M. Dictating a poem.

God love you, son, David had sobbed on his knees, hunching over a bed, with his fingers like claws scraping into his tear-ravaged face. You
are
dead. I’m not unconscious on the kitchen floor. I’m here. I’ve just written your eulogy. And my existence, never content to begin with, will be forever empty until my own death.