Fireflies (4 page)

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
un
acceptable 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.

That was where the second mystical experience took place. Donna and Sarie had been going through their own emotional strain, sustained by relatives who helped them to the church. At nine o’clock on a beautiful dusky June night, the family had entered the church. There were arrangements to be made, a funeral to be planned. In the end the music the group selected was “
Pie Jesu
(Merciful Jesus),” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sad sublime
Requiem
, which he had written in honor of his dead father.

Stooped, barely able to maintain his balance if not for the supporting hands of his two friends, David had managed to enter the shadowy church. As he shuffled up the main aisle, his unsteady footsteps echoing off pews and rafters, his tear-reddened nostrils widening to the redolence of incense, flowers, and scented candles from that morning’s mass, an eerie change went through him. A strength of solace, of well-being and reassurance suddenly grew within him.

For a second time, he heard the echoing voice of the firefly. It rephrased its words from the night before in the bedroom. “I’m okay, Dad. I’m sorry you hurt, but your grief is the proof of your love for me. Mourn for your loss, but don’t mourn for me. Because you can’t imagine how happy I am.”

David abruptly straightened. He no longer needed his friends to hold him upright. With a strength that came from spiritual assurance, he approached the front of the church, where family and friends who watched him said afterward that he seemed different more than in manner, almost as if he had a glow.

He didn’t feel better. His grief was as agonizing as before. Nonetheless he stood straighter. He could function. For he knew beyond doubt that his son was at peace, or in the firefly’s word, “okay.”

That I can handle, David thought. I can manage to suffer. For myself. If my son sends a message he’s okay, I can strain through grief for myself.

Because I don’t matter.

That was the second experience.

And the third? Twelve people saw it. All were astonished. None ever forgot it. As a witness later said, “It’s getting harder to be an agnostic.”

This is what happened. When the funeral service concluded, David stood and put his arms around Donna and Sarie. Sobbing, struggling to muster dignity and not stumble or faint, they left the church, followed by several hundred mourners.

That Tuesday morning was hot and bright. Blinking after the shadows of the church, David, Donna, and Sarie sat in a limousine whose white seemed incongruous yet appropriate because innocence—though dead—did not merit black.

The mourners remained outside the church, in grieved confusion. Three relatives and two very close friends got into the limousine as well. The representative from the mortician brought Matthew’s urn, his photograph, and his guitar from the church. She set the urn on Donna’s lap, then drove the limousine from the church, followed by the priest.

After Donna held the urn for a while, she handed it to Sarie, and as the limousine neared the cemetery, Sarie handed the urn to David.

It was heavier than he had expected, not because of the ashes, which for a frail boy had to be slight, but because of the bronze—possibly fifteen pounds. It was square, a shiny deep brown, and by now someone had taped a lock of Matthew’s light brown hair to the top. On opposite sides of the urn, at the bottom, two screws secured the lid and what it contained.

Entering the curved gravel driveway of the cemetery, David noticed the groundskeeper, or what’s known as the sexton, standing at the open gate. The man (who, David later learned, had once been an economics major and had never dreamed he’d make a thirty-year career of overseeing a cemetery) got into his car and led the limousine past seemingly endless, flower-topped graves toward a mausoleum at the rear of the grounds.

The mausoleum (the only one on the property) was not at all like the dingy box-shaped structures you often see in cemeteries. Instead it was peaked, made mostly of light-colored wood and stone, and resembled a chapel. Its front door was open. As the sexton stopped his car ahead of the limousine, David, Donna, Sarie, and the others got out to join him. All told, counting the sexton and the representative from the mortician, there were ten now. Then the priest arrived, and another representative from the mortician, and there were twelve.

“I normally keep the mausoleum locked,” the sexton said, “but I wanted to ease your grief and avoid any awkwardness, opening the door and all that, so I could make this as smooth as possible for you. Later I’ll give you a key, so you can visit your son’s remains whenever you like.”

Stifled tears. A murmur of thanks.

So the procession of twelve, led by David carrying the heavier-than-expected urn, stepped into the mausoleum that resembled a chapel. Inside, on the right and left, there were niches for coffins and urns, but straight ahead were chairs like pews, and an organ and a podium. The large rear wall was glass from top to bottom, with sunlight pouring in. And David, who entered first, his tears dripping onto the urn, was the first to see …

What to call it?

A startling coincidence? A supernormal event?

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.