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

“What I’ve just described to you was hard to write and more hard to say. But I didn’t do it out of perversity, out of some horrible need to make you feel my hurt. And his mother’s hurt, and his sister’s, and that of all the rest of you who were close to him. I did it because there were many who saw only the carefree, good-natured, happy-go-lucky pose he bravely demonstrated to his associates. Many had no idea, not the faintest notion, of what he was going through. He wanted it that way. And he succeeded. He even successfully completed his ninth grade of school.

“His spirit, his bravery, his humor, his determination ought to be models to us all. Life in the last analysis indeed is suffering, but the lesson Matt gave us is that pain and disease can destroy us. But they need not defeat us. The body in the end must die, but the spirit can endure.”

David had paused again, trembling, struggling not to faint. Through tear-blurred eyes, he’d mustered strength to focus on the swirling words of the text he so fiercely wished he didn’t have cause to recite.

“When prolonged unfair disaster strikes, the obvious question is why? I read in the newspaper about mothers who strangle unwanted newborn infants, about fathers who beat their children to death, while we wanted so desperately for our own child to live. I ask why can’t evil people suffer and die? Why can’t the good and pure, for Matt truly was both, populate and inherit the earth?

“If we view the problem from a secular point of view, the unwelcome answer is simple. Disregarding religious solutions, we’re forced to conclude that there is only one cause for what happens in the world. Random chance. Accident. That’s what killed Matt. A cellular mistake. A misstep of nature. If so, we learn this as well. Given a precarious existence, we ought to follow Matt’s example and prize every instant, to make the most of the life we’ve borrowed, to be the best we can, the bravest, the kindest. For at any moment, life can be yanked away from us.

“There are those who would have lapsed into hedonism, into alcohol, drugs, and other forms of reckless self-indulgence. That was not Matt’s way, for he worshipped creativity. Strumming on his guitar, dreaming of a career in music, he knew with a wisdom far beyond his years that beauty, good nature, and usefulness were the proper values.

“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.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Morrell:

On behalf of the physicians and staff at the University Hospital, I extend our sincere sympathy at the loss of your son. This letter is to inform you of the preliminary results of his autopsy.

1. History of Ewing ’s sarcoma with no gross residual tumor identified. Detailed analysis reveals no evidence of malignancy. (David’s translation: The treatment worked. The cancer was cured.)

2. Status post bone marrow transplantation: successful. Healthy blood had begun to generate. (Translation: If Matthew hadn’t succumbed to septic shock, he’d have been home within a few days, on the way to complete recovery.)