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

Fifteen years old. Vomiting at 4:00 A.M. Dictating a poem.

God love you, son, David had sobbed on his knees, hunching over a bed, with his fingers like claws scraping into his tear-ravaged face. You are dead. I’m not unconscious on the kitchen floor. I’m here. I’ve just written your eulogy. And my existence, never content to begin with, will be forever empty until my own death.

A remarkable occurrence took place then. Fireflies filled the dark bedroom. They seemed to blink, and yet their light was constant, like flaming balls from Roman candles; but Roman candles dwindle in brilliance and flash in a straight-line arc, whereas these lights zigged and darted, zagged and swirled. They spun at the same time they soared. The room was ablaze with them, and David thought of them as fireflies because of their random dashing radiant pattern.

Fireflies. Splendrous! Of varying colors but all of equal magnificence. Rushing with the energy of joy. Ecstatic. A swirling cluster of what David intuited beyond any question were rapturous souls.

He made allowance for his grief and stress, his weariness and shock. He wasn’t thinking clearly at the moment, he readily granted. But the brilliant colorful fireflies were spinning and zooming before him, so patently real, so vivid, that he couldn’t dismiss them, couldn’t reject their beauty by denying the exquisite vision allowed to him.

Whether they were a hallucination or a visitation, he gave in to them and embraced their rapture. Of the thousands, among their myriad flashing colors of joy, he identified one in the cluster who he knew beyond doubt was his son. How he was sure, he couldn’t tell. But that he was sure, he had absolute faith.

“Matthew, come to me.”

For no reason he could account for, the spinning specks of flying fire reminded him of children in a playground, of his son as a toddler laughing and racing among other children. And just as Matthew when a toddler had been reluctant to leave the exuberance of his friends, so the darting firefly (no different from the swirling others but who the father knew with total certainty was Matthew’s soul) refused to come to his grieving father.

“Matthew, I’m telling you! Get over here!”

But still distracted, continuing to revel in incomprehensible gaiety, the soul of the son ignored the father.

“Matthew, don’t disobey me! I want you back! Get over here!”

At that, responding to the desperate insistence of the father who loved him beyond measure and mourned to the limits of sanity for his son’s absence, the firefly that was Matthew’s soul soared away from his satisfying companions, sped to within a foot of his father’s weeping eyes, halted abruptly, and hovered for an instant, suspended in time.

“Dad, I want to play. At last, I’m having fun,” the firefly soundlessly said, the inaudible words echoing within the father’s head. “Don’t you understand? I don’t hurt anymore. I’m at peace. I’m where I belong. I’m okay. You’ve got to understand that. I’m okay. You hurt, and I’m sorry. But there’s nothing I can do. You’ll have to deal with it. I know how much you love me. If you didn’t grieve, that’d mean you didn’t love me. In that sense, grief is good. It hurts, but it’s good. It’s a tribute, and I love you for it. Grieve for yourself, for your emptiness and loss. As long as you understand I’m okay. I love you too, and I miss you. But it’s not your time to be with me. Please, if you truly love me, Dad, let me go back and play.”

With a sob that wracked David’s soul, he nodded, and the firefly that was Matthew sped back to his swirling lights of friends. And with that, the vision ended.

The fireflies disappeared. The bedroom returned to darkness.

Kneeling beside the bed, sobbing with a greater sense of loss and yet a strange kind of joyous understanding, David slumped in exhaustion, then slowly, wearily, stubbornly stood. Because there were footsteps and voices from beyond the bedroom door, friends and neighbors, acquaintances come to offer food, respects, and condolences, and their gestures of compassion couldn’t be demeaned by being ignored.

That had been the first of the three signals David received, making him suspect there was a mystical property in the universe.

The second experience had occurred one evening later. It hadn’t been as dramatic as the first, but for all that, it had been affecting and in its way profound. This was on Monday. Matthew had died on Saturday; the eulogy had been written and the fireflies had appeared on Sunday. But now it was Monday, the evening of what is politely called the visitation at the funeral home.

In this case, the visitation had not involved a view of Matthew’s corpse, for David and Donna had agreed that a thorough autopsy had to be performed on the frail, scarred, pain-twisted remains of their wonderful son, who wasn’t Matt anymore anyhow.

“Examine his body every way you can,” David had said through scalding tears to the physician who signed the death certificate. “Take him apart. Learn everything you can. Perhaps what you discover will save some other poor kid’s life. Do so thorough a job that there can’t possibly be a public viewing. His body’s yours.”

“Thank you,” the physician had said. “We appreciate your understanding. Sometimes commiseration for the family-and respect for their attitudes toward public viewing-prevents us from doing as complete an examination as possible and learning as much as we can.”

“Some meaning has to come from this,” David had said, so dizzy he’d feared he’d collapse. “To keep this from happening again, to crush this fucking disease. Ewing ’s sarcoma. It isn’t just cancer. It’s evil. It’s the Devil. Sometimes I think we didn’t need physicians. We needed an exorcist.”

So there hadn’t been a public viewing of Matthew’s remains. But not just because of the thorough autopsy. For the second reason wasn’t scientific but aesthetic. A corpse filled with formaldehyde and prettied-up with cosmetics to make the dear departed look lifelike, sort of, but not really? Spare me, David had thought. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Never mind formaldehyde. Matthew had already been injected to saturation with too many chemicals.

So Matthew was cremated. His fifteen-year-old ashes filled a bronze container the size of a coffee grinder. According to local law, David, Donna, and Sarie could have done virtually anything they wanted with the urn. They could have taken it home and placed it on the mantel or stored it in the stereo cabinet or opened it and sprinkled Matthew’s ashes onto a flower garden-just so long as they didn’t dispose of the ashes in a public waterway or on public grounds.

But the mantel and the stereo cabinet seemed too morbidly remindful, and the flower garden-for all its natural appeal-would have prevented David from transporting Matthew’s ashes if the family ever decided to move. No, to keep the ashes in the urn and then to place the urn in a mausoleum was the only acceptable option in a totally unacceptable force of choice. At least in that way, mother, father, and sister could be close (but not too close) to the beautiful son and brother they’d lost.

The visitation showed mourners the urn; next to it, a photograph of Matthew in his long-haired glorious prime; and next to that, on a stand, Matthew’s seldom-played Kramer combination electric-acoustic guitar. Hundreds arrived. One heartbroken well-meaning youth brought a plastic bag filled with the light brown hair-already falling out from chemotherapy-that Matthew had told his friends to shave from him. The well-wishers, the mourners, the friends and loved ones at the vigil had been appreciated but emotionally draining. At the sight of Matthew’s hair crammed within the plastic bag brought by Matthew’s friend, David had nearly fainted. But two of David’s friends had escorted him from the mortician’s and driven him to the church where the funeral next day would occur.