Anyhow, these friends whom we hadn’t seen in a while, who suddenly showed up and exemplified the generosity of good samaritans, were with my family, my wife’s sisters, and my brother-in-law when we left the funeral and went to the mausoleum to deposit Matthew’s ashes. They were present during the incident with the dove, standing in the background, staring (I later learned) in astonishment.
Now understand, my friend is not religious.
But this is what he later told me. He turned to his wife and whispered, “Can you believe this is actually happening? Look at that dove. Look at how it waits while David picks it up. And look at how many people are seeing this. Thirteen people. It can’t be we’re all, so many, just imagining this.”
Did you catch the error? I’ve mentioned several times that there were twelve of us in the mausoleum. Donna, Sarie, myself, two of Donna’s sisters, my brother-in-law, the priest, the cemetery’s sexton, and two representatives from the mortician. Plus my friend and his wife. Count them. Twelve.
But that day in the mausoleum, my friend saw thirteen. And to this day, no matter how often I count the witnesses with him, he still says he saw thirteen. And his wife who counted with him that day in the mausoleum agreed with him. Thirteen. A shadowy figure among the crowd, but a figure who wasn’t there. Who or what? As my friends now say, “It’s getting harder to be an agnostic.”
I’m not claiming we saw a column of flame. And I’m not claiming my son was so special that if there is a God we received a sign. But something holy and unusual happened in that mausoleum. The priest who blessed Matthew’s ashes had twenty years of experience in his vocation. At our home, at the gathering after the mausoleum, this seasoned professional of the spirit couldn’t stop telling the hundreds of mourners about the dove. He based several sermons on it. Whenever I saw him afterward, he kept talking about the dove.
The mortician in charge of Matthew’s disposition-another veteran, not of the spirit but of the soulless flesh-said in all her experience she’d never seen anything like, would never forget, the dove.
Make of the dove what you will. But I’ve been through hell, so now I’m willing to believe in the opposite. “Willing,” I said. But I’ve got a good reason to grant that possibility. To be more specific, I’ve got a reason to want to believe. More about that later.
2
Why did I write this book? The truth is I didn’t have a choice. It would have been impossible for me not to write it. I’ve never felt more compelled to put words onto paper. I guess you could call this a form of self-psychoanalysis. Something horrible happened to my son, and by extension to my wife, my daughter, and me. The worst thing. The most dreadful thing. I’m still trying to figure it out, to come to terms with it, to vent my emotions. In the months I’ve been writing these pages, I could barely see the keyboard because of the tears that blurred my eyes.
Then why not quit? Why torture myself?
Because even though it’s torture, this book is also an act of love. In my mind, I’m still at the hospital, holding Matt’s hand, stroking his forehead, trying to assure him there’s hope. I can’t give him up. He’s been dead for months, and yet each day I study pictures of him (how I wish we’d taken more photographs). I caress his slippers. I strum his guitar. But my mental images of him are becoming cruelly less vivid. One day they’ll be a blur, like my keyboard. So while he’s still fresh in my mind, I write about him, even if the events I describe make my soul ache, because I want to make him permanent, if only on paper.
After his surgery, when Matt was told he still had a remnant of the tumor and would probably die, he murmured, “But no one will remember me.” I promised he would be remembered, and as long as these pages exist and someone reads them, he is remembered.
But isn’t that being merely sentimental?
In the first place, there’s nothing wrong with being sentimental. That emotion and others such as compassion set us apart from animals. They make us human.
But in the second place, no, I’m not being merely sentimental. There are lessons here. Truths. They tumble through my mind.
3
Children are a gift. Throughout these pages, I’ve maintained that Matthew was a special child. His verbal and musical skills, his intelligence, his good nature were extraordinary. Everyone liked him. Everyone recognized his unusual potential. I truly believe that if he’d lived he would have made our world a better place.
Or is that fatherly pride? I don’t want to nominate Matt for sainthood. He was special, but he wasn’t perfect. He and I had “discussions” about curfews and other household rules. But yes, I was-am-proud of him. And that’s my point. Every parent ought to have pride in his or her child, because every child is special, by virtue of being a child. From when Matthew was diagnosed in early January until he died in late June, for those six months, his mother, his sister, and I were with him almost constantly. Not always as a group, and not between treatments, when Matthew found the strength to go to school. But then his treatments lasted longer, and his sessions at school became shorter, and our family grew even tighter. For the last eight weeks of his life, Matt’s home was the hospital, and one or all of his family was with him day and night.
When you think about it, the average parent sees his or her school-age child for an hour or two at most each day. In the morning, when the family’s getting organized, and in the evening, when settling down at supper, then at bedtime. During the intervals, everyone goes a separate way. But we saw Matt every hour. During his final six months, and in particular, his final eight weeks, we spent more time together than an average family does over a lifetime. Maybe that closeness was a backhanded compensation for the pain and terror Matt (and by extension the rest of us) endured. Maybe Donna, Sarie, and I got to know Matt better than we ever normally would have, and to love him with greater intensity. Maybe six months or even eight weeks can be a lifetime. Maybe it’s not how long but how well.
4
In the eulogy I wrote for Matt, I described how “I read in the newspaper about mothers who strangle unwanted newborn infants, about fathers who beat their children to death, while we wanted so desperately for our own child to live.” I asked, “Why can’t evil people suffer and die? Why can’t the good and pure, for Matt truly was both, populate and inherit the earth?”
There’s a writer I admire. Andrew Vachss. To date, his novels are Flood and Strega. Read them.
I admire him for two reasons.
First, because his sentences are strong; his stories make me turn the pages.
But the second reason I admire him is that he became a novelist out of frustration, because he wanted a broad audience to get the message of what he considers his true profession. He’s an attorney who deals with child-abuse cases. Some time ago, I wrote a rave review of Strega for the Washington Post. He was kind enough to send me a letter of thanks, not for the review but for emphasizing the message of his books. “Not for my writing,” he said, “but for my work.” After Matt’s death, he phoned to convey his sympathy.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” he said. “Truly it breaks my heart. But for what it’s worth, if this helps… I’ve seen so many dead battered children… at least your son had this privilege. He died knowing he was loved.”
I started to cry but somehow kept talking. “Your days must be hell, dealing with…”
“These scum who treat children like sacks of garbage? No. My days are victories. I feel as if I save the lives of more children each year than most doctors do in emergency wards. Tomorrow I go to trial against a fourth-generation incest case, and man, I can’t wait to put those perverts out of society. Abused kids are POWs. Establishing them with a decent family is like ending a war.”