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

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.

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.