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

That was one of my reactions. Another was my utter conviction that if Matt’s death impossibly was real, there had to be a way to reverse what had happened, to go back in time and save him.

I truly believed that. I thought if I concentrated hard enough I could turn the clock back. I spent many hours praying for a miracle, for a time warp, for a chance to leap into the past and somehow keep Matt alive. Throughout Matt’s treatment, the doctors had given us detailed explanations about his disease and how they were trying to fight it. After Matt’s death, the doctors gave us equally detailed explanations about what had killed him, about the staph and the strep and the septic shock. Every stage of Matt’s treatment had been based on logic.

But a biological accident destroyed him. In case he developed a fever, a wide range of antibiotics was ready to be administered, and those antibiotics were given right away, the instant his fever started to rise. The infection was killed, but the shock the infection caused had been too strong for his weakened body.

In hindsight, the only way to have tried to save him (and I emphasize “tried” because there’d have been no guarantee the effort would have worked) would have been to administer the antibiotics before the fever started, to get a head start on the infection before it developed with the devastating swiftness of a fire storm.

But as a doctor explained, “Antibiotics are toxic when they don’t have anything to fight. Bacteria can get used to them, so if an infection does occur, the antibiotics aren’t effective.” In other words, prematurely administered antibiotics might have made Matthew’s condition even worse. Still, given the fact that Matt died anyhow, those antibiotics (if given before he seemed to need them) were all that might have saved him.

If. Might. Such despair-producing qualifiers. That’s what cancer patients die from, “but ifs.” If only this had worked or that hadn’t happened. If. I believe that Matthew’s doctors did everything in their power to try to save him. I understand how unorthodox it would have been for them to administer antibiotics before his symptoms demonstrated a need for that kind of treatment.

I’m not criticizing. I want to make that clear, and I also want to make it clear that parents of cancer victims shouldn’t try to be doctors or think they know better than medical experts. It isn’t even wise to go through medical texts, because those texts are often outdated (especially in terms of cancer research, which constantly develops new techniques of treatment).

But I keep telling myself this can’t have happened, it isn’t real, Matt didn’t die. And I keep telling myself those antibiotics were his only chance. So finally I wrote this book-to tell you what happened to my son, and at the same time to dramatize my sense of unreality.

Am I still in a faint on my kitchen floor? Has all of this been a nightmare? Will I wake up to discover that Matt didn’t die and I didn’t write this book?

I pray so. Or am I dying forty years from now, recalling the greatest loss of my life, still trying to find a way to bring Matt back? Anything’s possible, because as far as I’m concerned the impossible happened to Matt.

That’s what I meant when I said that even the 10 percent of fiction in this book is paradoxically true, because my fantasy dramatizes two phenomena of grief-the sense that it’s all a nightmare, and the need to go back in time and make matters right.

My final scene, in which Matthew dies in 1987 while “David” dies forty years later and their souls as fireflies surge blazing toward each other, illustrates something else I said. I mentioned I’m falling off the fence of agnosticism. I’m starting to believe in God and an afterlife. Because I need to. Because I so desperately want to see my son again. Believing in God gives me a hope. Can faith be far behind?

Is there no pity sitting in the clouds

That sees into the bottom of my grief?

– SHAKESPEARE

Romeo and Juliet

I’ve been told that the loss of a child you loved is among the worst agonies a human being can suffer. A subjective statement, of course, and I certainly don’t want to get into any contests about grieving. My stepfather died eight years ago. That hurt me a lot. One of my wife’s sisters died the following year, and that hurt a lot. Those were my only experiences of powerful grief. Until now. But those two painful losses can’t compare to my present agony. I shudder at the thought that I might survive my wife. For the moment, though, let’s grant the statement. The loss of a child you loved is among the worst ordeals a human being can suffer. The promise of youth destroyed. The potential for zest and goodness torn away. The unfairness of it all, and you miss the kid so much.

There have been days when I didn’t think I could survive the pain. I contemplated suicide. What stopped me is that a month to the day after Matthew died, my daughter found the body of a friend who’d shot himself to death. He’d placed a towel beneath his head before he pulled the trigger. To minimize the blood. I couldn’t put Sarie through more torture. I couldn’t bear forcing her to attend the funeral of her father.

So I survive day by day, and the thoughts that help me are as follows.

The world is based on entropy, the messiness of the universe. Physicality is imperfect. Disintegration and random chance are the rule. If you have a good day, count yourself lucky. And if you wonder how God could cause something so devastating as the death of your son, you’d better rephrase the question, because God didn’t cause your son’s death. The chaotic nature of the world did. God is perfect. The world is not.

You could say that God should have done a better job when creating the world. But Perfection can’t create Itself. It can only create a lesser version. You could also say that God should have intervened to prevent the death of your child. But that would be a miracle, and no one has a right to expect a personal miracle.

I remember praying for a miracle. When Matt was close to death, I tried to make one of those bargains that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross refers to in her books about the nature of death and dying. But I couldn’t think of a reason for God to help me instead of all the other troubled souls in this world. I finally thought I’d found an argument that couldn’t be refused.

Dear God, I prayed, just as you’re supposed to be a father to me and to love me as your son, so please identify with the love I feel for my son. Please help my son, because Your son is asking You.

The prayer didn’t help. But I’m not bitter that it wasn’t answered. After all, I was trying to make a deal, and maybe that’s the wrong thing to do, to try to make a deal with God. Maybe if I’d believed in Him totally before Matt got sick, maybe if I’d had faith in Him to start with and not just now, Matt would have lived.

Well, that’s another issue. The miracle did not occur, and God neither caused nor took away my son’s cancer, because the nature of the universe He created doesn’t permit His intervention. That’s why there’s a heaven, I want to believe, because it’s a goal, a step up from the chaos of earth.

If you believe in Original Sin, you understand why the world’s imperfect and why God tests us instead of intervening.

But if you don’t believe in Original Sin…

Compassion.

I’ve said that Matt believed in the value of good nature. If everyone every day showed good nature to everyone else, most of society’s problems would disappear. Recently an editor acquaintance called me and paraphrased a quotation from a book whose title he no longer remembered. “From the start of human history, there’s been so much pain and suffering the stars should have stopped in their tracks.” My acquaintance ought to know. He’s suffered twice my tragedy. Two of his children have died. I don’t know how he keeps going. But my acquaintance (I keep using that word because I see him but once a year, and that’s what impressed me-he wasn’t a friend and yet he was phoning me) spoke only briefly about his own tragedies. He said he was calling because he’d heard about my son’s death, and he wanted to tell me how deeply it filled him with sorrow.