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

As the dove continued flapping, David set the urn on the podium at the front of the chapel. He, his family and friends, along with the sexton and the mortician’s representatives, stepped back to the pewlike chairs. They watched the priest put on a vestment, then open a prayer book and begin the final liturgy for the dead. “Heavenly Father, accept this soul of your faithful departed servant…”

Throughout, the priest kept glancing nervously from the urn containing Matthew’s ashes toward the dove flapping overhead.

Then the next coincidence occurred. As the priest neared the end of the prayers, the dove, which till now had been in a panic, suddenly calmed and settled from the ceiling toward a low ledge on the wall of glass.

The priest held his breath, directed an even more nervous look toward the dove, and resumed his prayers.

There’s no way to verify what went through David’s mind just then. He later swore to those in the chapel that he knew what would happen next, or at least that one of three things would happen.

The dove will land on the floor beside the podium that supports Matthew’s urn, he thought. Or the dove will land on the urn itself. Or the dove will land on my shoulder.

David knew this as certainly as he’d witnessed the fireflies and heard one in particular in the bedroom two nights before, as certainly as he’d felt an unaccountable repose and heard an echo of the firefly’s voice in the church the evening earlier.

The priest opened a vial of holy water, and the first thing David had imagined occurred. The dove flew down to the floor beside the podium.

The chapel became very still. The priest’s voice fell to a whisper as he prayed and sprinkled the holy water over the urn.

The service came to an end. For several instants, no one moved. David felt strangled.

“After you leave,” the sexton said, his voice soft with respect, “I’ll put your son’s remains in his niche, and then I’ll remove the dove.”

“No, we’ll do it right now.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I want to be here when the urn’s put into the niche,” David said. “But first I’ll take care of the dove.”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s in a panic. It’ll be difficult to capture,” the sexton said.

David’s brother-in-law added, “I’ll take off my jacket. Maybe we can throw the coat over it and capture it.”

“That won’t be necessary,” David said. “No need to worry.”

The sexton frowned. “Then how are we going to-?”

“It’s very simple. I’ll pick up the dove.”

“You’ll what?”

“Oh, sure,” David said. “Just watch.”

For that had been David’s final precognition. The dove would let him pick it up.

“Impossible,” the sexton said.

“I told you, watch.”

For David was already moving, neither fast nor slow, but steadily, with calm. The dove, its feathers ruffled in panic, darted its frantic eyes right and left toward corridors of escape, but remained where it was.

David stopped, and though the dove flapped its wings with brief uncertainty, it stayed in place.

David eased his hands around the dove. It didn’t struggle.

David stood and faced his eleven witnesses.

“And now I’ll set Matthew free.”

He carried the dove past the urn, past his family and friends, and approached the mausoleum’s sunbright open door. Outside in the radiance of what otherwise would have been a splendid June morning, he smiled at the dove, though his tears made the gray bird misty to his eyes.

“Matt, I hope you meant what you told me the other night. With all my love, I want you to be okay.”

Reluctantly David opened his hands, and if the previous eight minutes had been packed with strange events, there was one more yet to come, for the dove refused to fly away. It perched on David’s open palms and, for fifteen seconds, peered at him.

David almost panicked. His thoughts could not be verified anymore than his precognitions could. Nonetheless he swore that this is what he thought.

My God, when I picked you up, I hope I didn’t hurt your wings.

At that, the bird soared away, its feathers making the distinctive whistling sound of a mourning dove in flight. It sped straight out, then up, ever higher, toward the brilliant sky, toward the blazing sun.

And was gone.

That’s it, an inner voice told David. That’s the last sign Matt’ll give you. Three will have to be enough.

David felt pain, yet joy. The significance of the dove having lingered in his open palms he took to be this: the extensive surgery that had removed Matt’s four right ribs and a third of his right lung was like picking up a dove and breaking a wing. But the dove had been all right, and as the firefly had said, so was David’s son.

Matt was at peace.

In the days, weeks, months, and years that followed, whenever David returned to that mausoleum, he scanned the grounds in hopes of seeing the dove, praying for another sign from his son.

But he never saw it. He saw robins, blue jays, and sparrows. Never any doves.

That day, the sexton unscrewed the glass pane of a two-foot square niche in a wall. David handed the urn to Donna, who handed it to Sarie, who then handed it back to David, who kissed it, placed the urn in the niche, and watched the sexton replace the glass pane.

The ritual had ended. Time was now measured differently.

Before Matt. After Matt.

As the group left the mausoleum, David turned to the priest. “At the risk of sounding… I’ve got the feeling something spooky happened in there.”

“David, to tell you the truth, I feel a little weird myself.”

The group drove back to the family home, where the several hundred mourners had been invited. Because Matthew had asked for a party if he died, the largest, most animated his parents could arrange, with music, food, soda pop, beer, and anything else that would make the kind of celebration they’d have had if he’d survived. A few months before his death, Matt had prepared a demostration tape of his guitar skills. That tape was played a lot that day. So was music by Matthew’s favorites: the Beatles; Van Halen; Bon Jovi; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. And all through the mournful party, the priest and everyone else who’d been at the mausoleum couldn’t stop talking about the dove.

When you lose a child (and you truly loved that child and weren’t just an indifferent caretaker or that scum of existence, a brutalizer), you search for some meaning, some justification, anything to ease your agony. You think about God and whether He exists and what kind of God would allow something so heinous as Matthew’s death. You think about ultimates, about the point of existence and whether there’s an afterlife and what it would be like. Would Matthew be waiting when his father, mother, and sister died? Would he be the same?

You question everything. You grasp at anything. To make sense of what seems to have no sense. To find meaning in what you despair might be the ultimate meaning: nothingness. You seek in all places, all cultures. You search in all philosophies and faiths.

Reincarnation? Plato believed in it. For that matter, a full half of the world’s present population believes in it. In the East. As the theory goes, we struggle through various stages of existence, not always human, sometimes animal or even plant, rising until we’ve perfected our spirit sufficiently to abandon material existence and join forever in bliss with God.

A complicated but comforting belief. Because there’s a point to life, a payoff. Certainly it’s easier to accept than the notion that God tortures us here on earth to punish us for our sins so we’ll be happy with Him in Heaven. In that case, how do we explain the death of an infant, who couldn’t possibly have sinned? Or the death of a fifteen-year-old boy, who by all accounts was remarkable and never harmed anyone?