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

Don’t misunderstand. If someone close to you has died and you’re suddenly overwhelmed by panic attacks (the two frequently go together), there’s nothing wrong with taking Xanax if a psychiatrist prescribes it. I’ll say it again: a psychiatrist, preferably one with experience in grief counseling. Anxiety/panic disorder is an emotional illness with physical/psychological causes. A family doctor can temporarily treat the physical part by prescribing what amounts to a tranquilizer. But if the psychological causes aren’t also addressed, the source of the problem will never be solved, and the risk of getting hooked on medication is high. Indeed, not everyone who needs counseling requires drug therapy. In that regard, psychotherapists (they’re not physicians) can be as helpful as psychiatrists, and if they conclude that a drug like Xanax would be helpful, they can get a psychiatrist to prescribe it.

I’ve met many people so impaired by panic attacks that they need counseling, but for various reasons they refuse to use that resource. Their motive is often fear of what people will think if word gets out that they’ve been to a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist. This attitude goes back to an intolerant time when various emotional and physical diseases (depression and cancer among them) had a social stigma. My response is this: Anybody who thinks less of someone for getting psychiatric help isn’t anybody whose opinion has any value in the first place. A further excuse for not getting help is the notion “What do shrinks know? It’s all fake. I’m as smart as they are.” There’s an old joke that an attorney who tries to represent him- or herself in a court of law has a fool for a client. The same applies to anyone with an emotional disorder who thinks that he or she can handle it without the help of an expert. I’m proud to say I spent three years going to a psychiatrist (once a week to start, then once a month). My panic attacks had so aggravated my despair that I contemplated suicide several times, and I credit the psychiatrist for saving my life. After a four-year respite, the panic attacks returned, and without a second thought I immediately sought more help. What does a good psychiatrist or psychotherapist know that the patient doesn’t? Plenty.

I still have a bottle of Xanax in my medicine cabinet, but, knowing my illness better and knowing about alternative methods of treatment (breath control and biofeedback, for example), I’ve learned to use the drug the way I would an aspirin to subdue a headache. The last time I had the prescription refilled, I was pleased to discover that thirty pills of one-milligram strength (which I break in half) had lasted me two years. In the meantime, believing that knowledge is power, I continue to educate myself about the disease. There are many good books on the subject, but for me the most useful is The Anxiety Disease, by Dr. David Sheehan, a former director of anxiety research of the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. If you know someone who has suddenly become a victim of panic attacks, get that person this book. If you yourself are the victim, do what Dr. Sheehan tells you. Sometimes, when I feel an attack coming on and I don’t know which is going to kill me first, the “coronary” or the “stroke,” I reread several well-thumbed chapters of The Anxiety Disease, and remind myself of the true nature of the attack I’m having. That’s often enough to calm my symptoms.

When I was a professor of American literature, one of the novels I most enjoyed teaching was Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. It’s one of the few classic American novels that isn’t pessimistic. Wolfe embraced everything in life, its tragedies as much as its triumphs, managing to find all of it ennobling. The epigraph to the novel (I’m condensing it somewhat) announces its theme.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth…

… Remembering speechlessly, we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

Judged only on its tone, this passage might not seem optimistic, but in the context of the book it is powerfully so. Wolfe says that we existed in another state before we were born. It’s not such a radical idea. Plato had several things to say about this. So do most Eastern religions. We come into exile (birth) and spend the rest of our lives trying to remember where we came from (“the lost lane-end into heaven”). Anything in this existence (“a stone, a leaf”) is worthy of study because it might be the trigger that frees our repressed memory and allows us to recall the perfect existence from which we were separated. If we’re alert, we should always be looking for the unfound door that will take us back to where we began. The “angel” of the title is our soul. The “home” it is looking for is the ideal existence above this illusory physical one. From that ideal world we once knew, something calls to us, our ghost, our spirit, to return: “by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”

I find this theme eerie and profound. It addresses the loneliness that even the most optimistic of us feel. At the same time it gives us an answer to that loneliness by urging us to grasp every aspect of life, no matter how insignificant something might seem or how painful it might be, because all experience leads to an understanding that takes us to a higher level and an even higher one after that, eventually to the perfection from which we came. That’s a hard notion-to accept the grief that comes our way. Lord, do I know. But I keep thinking of that universal spiritual force I mentioned earlier, the overwhelming transcendental spirit that Emerson and Thoreau wrote about and that van Gogh depicted in his paintings. Whitman said it well:

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led toward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it…

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed.

Whitman’s words are basically what Look Homeward, Angel is about. Life doesn’t begin and end. Like energy, it only changes its form. In the years after Matthew’s death, constantly remembering my vision of the fireflies, I have come to think of life at its ultimate as a speeding point of light and that Matthew has been translated into one of those points. Wishful thinking? Perhaps. But one of the lessons I took away from this horrid experience is that as long as I refused to accept Matthew’s death, my mind and my body rebelled. Oh, I admitted that he was dead, but I kept fixating on the past, on events before he died, telling myself how wonderful life had been before he got sick. And life indeed was wonderful back then, by virtue of being life. But my refusal to put my mind in the present was a form of denying that he was dead. Another American novel I enjoyed teaching (this one pessimistic) is John Barth’s The End of the Road. In it, a character observes that reason and logic can’t account for the world. There’s no ultimate reason for Cleveland Stadium to seat a specific number of spectators. That number could have been more or less. The number it does seat just happens to be the way things are. “There’s no reason in the long run why Italy shouldn’t be shaped like a sausage instead of a boot, but that doesn’t happen to be the case. The world is everything that is the case, and what the case is is not a matter of logic.” Why is gold yellow? Why is there one moon? Why are there two sexes? No necessary reason. Things just turned out that way. Why is Matthew dead? Same answer. But as long as I refused to accept what was the case, I was in terrible shape. One day, about four years after his death, I surrendered. I stopped dwelling on the past. I accepted the present, the after-Matt present. The day I came to terms with the fact that life would never be as it was, that it had changed and transformed-that was the day I began to heal. Because I came to believe in what Wolfe and Whitman had written about. “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,/And to die is different from what any one supposed.” E=mc 2.