As quickly, the spasms dwindled. My heart rate went down. My breathing returned to normal. But I was so shaken by the experience I couldn’t function for two days.
That’s when I decided I needed more medical advice. Through the grace of a doctor friend, I was able to interrupt a cardiologist-internist’s hectic schedule and be examined. This kind man took three hours to check me thoroughly. To be prudent, he even ordered sophisticated heart tests known as echo-and-sonograms. When he concluded, he told me I was one of the healthiest persons he’d ever examined.
“No, there’s something wrong with me,” I insisted. “My head. I think I need a CAT scan. Maybe I’ve got a tumor. Maybe if…”
The doctor, who knew I wouldn’t mind his sense of humor, said, “Oh, I think you’ve got something in your head all right. But a CAT scan isn’t going to find it.”
“You think I’m nuts?”
“I think you’ve been having classic panic attacks. You need to see a psychiatrist.”
Now to me, a psychiatrist meant psychoanalysis, and since I’m a fiction writer, I worried that he might misinterpret my ability to imagine and suspect I was having delusions. But the result was quite the contrary. The psychiatrist listened for ninety minutes as I babbled about my supposed heart condition and my son’s death, and finally he told me with compassion that he concurred with the cardiologist’s opinion. I was suffering classic panic attacks. In lay terms, my emergency defense system-exemplified by my adrenal gland-had worked so hard before and after Matthew’s death that it wouldn’t turn off. Now for no apparent reason but with obvious subconscious prompting, it was kicking into gear when there wasn’t an emergency.
So here I am, on four tranquilizers and a sleeping pill each day. I haven’t had further panic attacks, though I do hyperventilate on occasion; but I’m learning how to subdue that. If you’re suffering from grief and you’ve endured the symptoms I just described, don’t assume they’re panic attacks. Don’t be an amateur physician. Have a medical exam (because your heart might indeed be infirm). But if the diagnosis does turn out to be panic disorder, your condition can be controlled. You’ll still grieve. There’s no cure for that. But at least you won’t have panic to add to your terrible sorrow.
11
Yesterday my son’s principal physician came to see me. He brought Matt’s final autopsy report. It proves that the fantasy you just read isn’t possible. Even if I did have precognition, I couldn’t have saved my son. He was sicker than I feared. The debris from the dead bacteria that plugged his heart and killed him was only one of many things wrong with him. The debris had also plugged an artery to his brain, causing major cerebral damage. If Matt had survived the septic shock, he’d have been mindless at best. In addition, he had fungal and yeast infections throughout his body. They would have been fatal. As well, a brain aneurysm he’d had from birth could have ruptured and killed him at any time.
But most significant of all, the final autopsy, on a microscopic level, revealed that Matt’s cancer wasn’t cured. Malignant cells lingered on his spine. At this moment, my wife, my daughter, and I would be back with him in Intensive Care. But now, in addition to suffering indescribable pain, he’d have been paralyzed, no cure possible, the only mercy death.
My prayer was answered. Dear God, just as You’re supposed to be a father to me and to love me as Your son, so please identify with the love I feel for my son, Please help my son, because Your son is asking You.
Matt died as best as possible. The worst, yet the best. Because at the moment what I formerly thought was the worst would be only the start of something far more horrible: a slower, more painful death.
I grieve. How much it hurts. But I’m at peace. Because I’m convinced at last that my son was doomed. Nothing could have saved him.
But Father…
God…
It hurts.
12
… Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year.
– PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
“Adonais”
Cycles. Circles. Dates. Numbers. Anniversaries.
On November 9, 1977, when Matthew was six, in the midst of an evening birthday party, Donna suffered a miscarriage. She lost what would have been our third child. This child had not been planned, but we anticipated it lovingly. I made two urgent calls-to Donna’s doctor, who told us to rush to the hospital, and to a friend, who agreed to race to our house and allow Matt’s birthday party to continue. Ironically, this friend was also present when I picked up the dove in the mausoleum after Matt’s funeral.
The miscarriage occurred when the fetus was three months old. We never asked what sex it was or what caused its spontaneous abortion. But thereafter, whenever Donna and I celebrated Matthew’s birthday with him, we also mourned for the unknown child who did not survive gestation.
Now on November 9, which is rapidly approaching, we’ll mourn twice-over, for that unknown child and for a son we knew so well and will forever miss.
June 27, 1987. The date of Matthew’s death. Since then, on the twenty-seventh of each month, we light a candle at 9:25 P.M., the moment he left us. Christmas will be hard. So will New Year’s, and Thanksgiving will be most bitter.
Dates and cycles. Mental tombstones.
But this is what I most dread.
Last winter was mild here in Iowa. It snowed almost never. But in early January, when Matthew was diagnosed and received his first chemotherapy, I remember one evening how I stared out a window of his hospital room. Outside, the arc lights reflected off glimmering snow. I turned to Matt, who’d just finished vomiting, and told him, “It’s snowing.”
He murmured, “Yeah, I bet it’s pretty.”
“You always liked snow. Remember how we used to walk in it and build snowmen.”
“I wish I could build one now.”
“You will. Next year. We’re in this together. We’ll see you through this. Next year we’ll walk in the snow.”
“Can’t wait,”
“Me neither,” I said.
But Matt’s not here now, and I’m still waiting for that first snow.
That will be the hardest time. Not November 9, or the twenty-seventh of each month, or Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or New Year’s. No, that first snow will be the worst. But as hard as I’ll have to force myself, I’ll walk in it and build a snowman.
I’ll try to believe in God. I’ll try to have faith that I’ll see my son again. I’ll remember the sudden peace I felt in church that night before his funeral. I’ll recall the dove in the mausoleum. I’ll pretend I hear Matt’s guitar, its power chords blasting from his bedroom window. And as the snowflakes melt on my face, blending with my tears, I’ll imagine those flakes-they’ll glisten from streetlights-
I’ll imagine those snowflakes are fireflies.
June 28-September 4, 1987
Afterword. LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL
1
So much has happened in the twelve years since I wrote those final words. Where to begin? The dove. The memory of it continues to give me comfort, as does my discovery, after completing Fireflies, that what my family, my friends, and I experienced that morning in the mausoleum was not unique.
My first hint of this came in a letter from Father Andrew Greeley, who responded to a manuscript of Fireflies I had sent him. In addition to being a priest and a best-selling novelist, Father Greeley taught at the University of Chicago ’s Social Science Research Center. Studies there demonstrated, he wrote, that experiences of the type I described had happened to forty-two percent of the population. The figure rose to sixty percent when applied to widows and widowers. Our society is so close-minded on the subject that many who have these experiences don’t want to let others know about them for fear of being ridiculed, he pointed out, but perhaps my book would console these people, letting them know that they aren’t alone.