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

I started to pray. But not to God. To Matt. I’m in trouble, son. I need help. As I plodded toward another streetlight, I prayed harder. Matt, this is serious. I need your help. In my desperation, I suddenly had the sense of a small figure putting an arm around my right side, supporting my unsteady weight. Years later, as I write this, I can still feel the palpable presence leaning against me, holding me up. The help being given to me was so strong that I didn’t need to grab each streetlight and try to catch my breath. I was now able to aim toward the end of the block and the end of the next one. The sense that Matt-himself frail and thin from his operation-was holding me up was uncanny. Then I turned the corner toward the hotel, and as abruptly as the sense of him had come, it left. I was on my own again, managing the last few unsteady steps to the hotel. Inside, the clock on the wall showed five to three.

I don’t offer that story as a version of synchronicity. It wasn’t. As far as I’m concerned, Matt was holding me up, helping me along, but he wasn’t visibly there. No meaningful coincidence of the inside and the outside occurred. I can’t prove anything extraordinary happened. The point is something else, the sense that I have each day (in less dramatic ways, usually) that my son is with me. I was raised a Roman Catholic. In grade school, the nuns used to talk to us about guardian angels. At the time, I thought of it as a pleasant notion. Now I think of it as much more. Often when I feel overwhelmed with cares and I can’t think of a solution, I ask Matt (or my dead mother or two writers, now deceased, who were father figures to me, Philip Young and Stirling Silliphant) to find me an answer. Almost always, I receive it. A skeptic would call this a psychological device that happens to work, without having a spiritual basis. I can’t prove anything. This is a book about candor and faith. All I know is, whenever I need help and ask for it, I’m not alone.

The butterfly I referred to brings to mind another source of help, one that my wife and I found extremely comforting. Because a butterfly was once one life form that became a beautiful other, it is the symbol for The Compassionate Friends, the world’s largest self-help organization for bereaved parents, siblings, and grandparents. A friend recommended that we go to a meeting. Dazed, wondering how on earth the group could help us, apart from letting us know that we weren’t alone, we nonetheless went and experienced one of the most meaningful evenings of our lives.

The meeting took place in a basement room in an Iowa City hospital. The corridors seemed so mazelike that we had trouble finding the place, a process metaphoric of our lives. Coffee and cookies awaited us, as did a group composed of about one-third kindly welcomers and two-thirds silent participants whose downward gazes and stunned, gray faces gave an idea of their psychological shock. Before the evening’s speaker was introduced, the group’s leader asked everyone to sit in a circle, then give his or her first name and say something about the child they were mourning.

Donna and I were two-thirds around the circle. I braced myself, not sure that I would be able to get my voice to work when I tried to describe what had happened to Matt. In my compartmentalized world, I assumed that nothing worse could have happened to any child, but as each person spoke, I was shocked into a greater perspective. I learned about children who had died in every way imaginable, crushed, burned, poisoned, drowned, stabbed, shot, hit by cars, falling from cliffs; seldom dying instantly, most of them suffering. Some parents had lost more than one child. Some grandparents had lost their children and their grandchildren. As the litany of anguish went around the room, I found myself thinking, Good Lord, these people are really in rough shape. I belatedly realized that after Donna and I had finished speaking, those across from us would be thinking the same about us.

The effect of the meeting was to make us realize we weren’t alone. But, far more, we were overcome with sympathy and sorrow for those around us. We were taken out of ourselves and taught to care about others, just as others in the room learned to care about us. The Compassionate Friends. A perfectly descriptive name. We went to numerous meetings after that, and the painful process by which we began to be functional again would have lasted a lot longer if it hadn’t been for the friendship we found at those sessions. To someone who has suffered the trauma of losing a child, a grandchild, or a sibling, I can’t think of a more helpful step that person can take than to get in touch with the local chapter of The Compassionate Friends. Its phone number is (877) 969-0010 and its Web site is www.compassionatefriends.org.

The panic attacks finally lessened, but not until nine years after Matt’s death. Meanwhile, anxiety/panic disorder has been widely reported in the media. Millions of people suffer from the disease-more each year, it seems. And yet there continues to be a wide misperception about it. As someone said to me, “Your son died a long time ago, and you’ve got a successful career as a novelist, so what on earth do you have to be anxious or panicked about?” The answer is that years of stress or a single overwhelming incident can so weaken the body’s ability to handle tension that the smallest amount can cause the brain to trigger the release of stress chemicals. The effect on the body is similar to what someone would feel if suddenly confronted with a maniac jumping out of an alley, swinging an ax. In the latter case, the rapid heartbeat and heaving chest are appropriate spontaneous defensive reactions that the mind uses to urge the body to defend itself or race out of harm’s way. But with anxiety/panic disorders, the chemicals that trigger a fight-or-flight response are in undue proportion to the minor incident that caused the stress. Or else they’re released when there isn’t any apparent stress at all. I’ve had panic attacks walking down a street, going up an escalator, eating a hamburger, watching TV-in just about any benign situation I can imagine. Sometimes it was because the defective “valve” in my brain dumped stress chemicals into me for no other reason than that it was faulty. Other times it was because an unconscious association stimulated a massive stressful flashback to Matthew’s death.

My treatment was a combination of visits to a psychiatrist and a drug called Xanax. Part of a class of drugs known as benzodiazepines, Xanax (a cousin of Valium) works by affecting the ability of neurotransmitters to relay stress messages. Put simply, the drug stops the brain from sending out panic signals. It’s an effective drug. It works. The trouble is, its side effects include foggy thinking and short term-memory loss. These inadvertent results aren’t good for anybody, but for a writer they’re disastrous. One reason I wrote little for two years after Matt’s death is that I’d get to the middle of a sentence and not be able to remember how it began or how it was supposed to end. So the task became to use as little Xanax as possible while struggling to come to terms with Matthew’s death and get the broken part of me to heal. The trouble is, Xanax is addictive. I later discovered that only about a third of the people who take it for a considerable period of time ever manage to stop. There’s a phenomenon called “rebound.” If you take enough of it, your body gets so used to it that when you reduce it with intentions of stopping altogether, you reach a point where your body says “Wait a minute, what’s going on, I need that stuff, where is it?” In other words, you’re addicted; and when you try to stop you experience withdrawal, a stress that weakens the already weakened stress valve you’ve been trying to repair. The consequence is a panic attack caused not by the original trauma but by reducing the treatment for the trauma. What a mess. I started with four milligrams of Xanax a day. I reduced it to three and a half. Waited. Reduced it to three. Waited. Two and a half. Two. One and a half. One. And bang, I had clusters of panic attacks that forced me back to taking four milligrams of Xanax a day. I went through the process six times before I finally overcame the effects of withdrawal.