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

by David Morrell

What David saw was a bird. It flew around the chapel, soaring, swooping, circling, flapping in panic.

  Recovering from his surprise, David turned to look past Donna and Sarie toward the priest, who followed through the open door.

  David, who needed a respite from sorrow, a mitigation of grief, said with bitter irony, his humor black, “That’s all we need, Father. The Holy Ghost.”

  But the priest stopped rigidly, reacting neither to irony nor to black humor. Indeed the expression on his face was a combination of shock, disbelief, and reverence. His face paled. “But, David, look closer! It really is a dove.”

  That statement might not make sense to non-Catholics. In the Catholic Church, the Holy Ghost is a term that describes God’s ability to inspire as well as console, and traditionally the Holy Ghost is symbolized by a dove.

  That’s what David—and the priest, and Donna, and Sarie, and the rest of the twelve—were seeing now. A dove. Not white, as in religious paintings. But gray, its name appropriate, a mourning dove, so-called because of its dirge-like “coo,” so much like a sob. It flapped and swooped and soared.

  “My God,” the sexton said, not intending to sound religious. “I’m terribly sorry. I deeply apologize. I left the door open to make it easy for you to come in, but I should have thought. Sometimes a bird flies in if the door isn’t closed. I’ll try to get the dove out right now.”

  David shook his head, his black irony irrepressible, and anyway the service was all that mattered.

  “No, leave it,” he said, scanning the crypts to his right and left. “This place could use some life.”

  The sexton narrowed his eyes. “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  The sexton and the mortician’s representatives relaxed.

  David found out later that an accidental interruption of the service, a distraction such as the dove, sometimes spurred mourners into fits of indignation, into accusations about insensitivity and incompetence.

  Everybody’s different, he thought. In his own case, he welcomed the dove. In fact, in a strange way, he even loved it. For its life. Let it flap and swoop and soar. As long as it doesn’t hurt itself. When Matthew’s in his niche, we’ll take care of the dove.

  The service began. As yet, there was nothing mystical, nothing supernormal about the dove. The door had for convenience been left open. The dove—as coincidence can happen—had by chance flown in. Perfectly explainable. Not usual, but nothing remarkable.

  So far. But then coincidence was added to coincidence until, for David and the other eleven witnesses in the mausoleum’s chapel, the dove became very remarkable indeed.

  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.

  13

  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?

  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.

  14

  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 (po
lished 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.”

  15

  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.

  16

  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?

  Who knew?