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

Matthew was a child with a wisdom beyond his physical age. At school, he’d become the envy of his fellow ninth graders because he’d been adopted by those in grade twelve. He ate lunch with the older students (unheard of). He went to grade-twelve parties (unheard of). He gave them advice about the problems in their lives, and (unheard of) the older students heeded his advice.

There was something about his character, his humor, his intuition that set him apart. Uniqueness by definition is one of a kind, and Matthew by all reports was indeed a breed unto himself. At school, a type of unfashionable student known as a nerd might be victimized by cruel remarks and equally cruel antisocial jokes. But Matt would put a stop to it all.

“Give him a break. If he’s truly a nerd, if he was born that way, then let him be what he is, because you weren’t born so unlucky. And if he’s a nerd for other reasons, because of family problems maybe, all the more reason to give him a break-because he does have problems.”

Matt’s ability to grasp mathematical, philosophical, and verbal skills at school was astonishing. Instinctively. With minimal effort. Perfect grades. A Presidential scholar. In Iowa, where the test of basic skills is one of the standards of the nation, Matthew ranked within the top 1 percent of the most-gifted students.

And he never had to try. He budgeted his time for assignments at school as a necessary tedious inconvenience. His achievements seemed as effortless and natural as putting a record onto a turntable, as remembering. “Trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home,” Wordsworth says, the title of his poem appropriate: “Intimations of Immortality.”

The transmigration of souls. Passing from one existence to the next, we accumulate in wisdom so that, no matter our physical problems, our spirit and intelligence grow stronger. Maybe so. David had often thought that Matthew was a mature man at eight. Matt’s sense of fairness and justice, of virtue and honor, was astonishing at so early an age. He passed through stages more quickly than any child David had ever seen, and David had once worked as a counselor to adolescents. Before his death, Matt had-unbidden-been studying Oriental philosophy and its theory of reincarnation. Could it be that Matthew’s soul had reached its prime, and the disease of his body, his soul departing from it, was like a butterfly leaving a chrysalis? Had Matthew’s death not been a tragedy but part of the natural order? Such were the desperate thoughts that a grieving parent used to find solace.

Desperate thoughts. Nonetheless comforting.

But they didn’t assuage David’s loss, and after the funeral, after the party, the torture still hadn’t ended. Because he, Donna, and Sarie each day had to enter Matthew’s room, itself a black hole of absence, to stare at the clothes in his closet, the games on his shelves, the phonograph records on his bureau, the rock-star posters on his wall. The last day of school, Sarie and a friend had gone to Matt’s locker to bring home his bag of notebooks, texts, and gym shoes. Sorting through that bag, and his closet, and his bureau drawers was an agony so extreme that it had to be done in stages, a little each day for weeks and months.

What do you want to save, what to throw out? How do you dispose of the vestiges of a treasured life? Matthew’s tapes and records, collected over the years, had mostly gone out of fashion. His friends didn’t want them. The posters on his walls came from a culture changing so rapidly that even those purchased six months ago might as well have been sixty years old. Those posters and rock-star buttons and banners were valueless without the perspective of the mind that had attached significance to them. Souvenirs have no worth without nostalgia, after all. They’re meaningless if a memory isn’t linked to them.

So once each week, David carried a plastic bag of the remants of a departed life out to the street and walked far from home so he wouldn’t see the trash collectors take those bags away. Old shoes, still redolent of Matthew’s smell. Socks and underwear, too personal for anyone else to put on. Stacks of bank statements, five dollars withdrawn on one day, seven dollars another day, a lifetime of withdrawals, until the ultimate withdrawal. The useful items, Matthew’s clothes, were given to Goodwill.

At the last, what remained were three albums of photographs showing Matthew as he grew to his final year, and a pair of slippers shaped like bear’s feet complete with claws. How he’d grinned as the nurses kidded him about those slippers, when he pushed his IV stand for exercise down the hospital corridor. Those slippers-too precious to be discarded, their smell of Matthew too comforting-were tacked to a wall in his room. And that was that, the conclusion of the disposal of what once had been a life.

Except for a final gift. One of Matthew’s closest friends had moved far from town several years before. Each summer they’d taken turns flying to visit one another. Matt’s friend had lost his mother to breast cancer, and one evening when the boy, delightfully sixteen with his life ahead of him, had phoned to keep in touch and say how much he missed Matt, the boy had added that his home had been burglarized, all his rock-music records stolen. The next day, all of Matt’s tapes and records, nearly one hundred of them, were mailed to Matt’s friend. How satisfying a gift, not so much for Matt’s friend, though he surely appreciated the package, but satisfying for David, Donna, and Sarie. Because they knew how Matthew would have been delighted to please his friend.

What finally remained of Matt’s possessions was the bright white Kramer electric-acoustic guitar that Matthew had treasured more than anything else he owned. That precious guitar (polished frequently, with reverence) stayed in Matthew’s room, almost like a holy object, supported upright on a stand, and each day, mustering a face to meet the faces that he met, David entered Matthew’s room and stroked that guitar. For luck and strength.

“Help me make it through the day, son. And especially the night.”

Time is the greatest healer-so David had been told. Untrue. Parents who lose a valued child never get over the dear one’s absence. As David aged, he, his wife, and his daughter continued to cherish one another (a blessing, for too often the death of a child produces a split within a family: arguments, recriminations, and divorce). Except for terrifying anxiety attacks that imitated coronaries and eventually required psychiatric therapy, David’s health was perversely good. His career as a writer prospered. The famous character he’d created (sometimes reviled, sometimes revered, but never ignored) took second place to other of his characters, who because of the sorrow David had suffered from Matthew’s death spoke to readers who suffered their own sorrows.

He prospered. He persisted. But he did not flourish.

Maybe that was the final irony. David’s unwanted success could have been a boon to Matthew, could have eased Matthew’s way, through David’s contacts, into the world of influence.

So David thought as he lay in a stupor, dwindling toward his own death, his faithful loving daughter beside him holding his weakening hand in the shadowy raspy confines of an isolation room in Intensive Care. His exceptional wife had died five years before him, and he’d grieved for her, how much so, but never the spirit-burdening grief he’d felt for Matthew. His wife, he knew, would understand. When Matthew had died, the world had shrunk. Everything afterward had been like climbing an endless flight of stairs.

God?

Heaven?

Reincarnation?