Harold S. Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People. But the book you’re now reading is different from Kushner’s in many respects. For one thing, his excellent volume (though prompted, as was mine, by a personal tragedy) is a wide-ranging discussion of crises of faith that he encountered among troubled members of his synagogue.
For another, his book is totally factual.
However, Fireflies devotes itself exclusively to one family’s tragedy, and though almost completely factual, it does have elements of fiction. Not the fireflies, the dove, and the other mystical experiences I will describe. I assure you they did happen. Still, because I wanted to make a statement about grief, about faith and the afterlife, I imposed a frame of fiction onto fact. In an epilogue, I’ll explain where fact and fiction diverge. I’ll also explain my reasons for blending the two, and my conclusion will, I hope, be spiritually rewarding.
Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief?
—WILLIAM BLAKE
Songs of Innocence,
“On Another’s Sorrow”
TO FEAR TO GO INTO
THE DARK
1
Now he was old. One month shy of his eighty-fourth birthday. His daughter, Sarie, not so young herself, sixty-one, stood beside his deathbed in the shadowy, raspy confines of an isolation room in Intensive Care. Shadowy, because the blinds had been closed to ease the strain on his aching eyes. Raspy, because no matter how faint his hearing had become he couldn’t fail to register the constant hiss, wheeze, and thump of the respirator thrusting oxygen down the constricting tube in his throat. No doubt there were odors—of medication, of his own diseased body—but he’d become so accustomed to the pungent, sick-sweet, acrid smells of the hospital that he no longer detected them.
Basically, David thought, I’m all messed up.
Well, what do you expect? he told himself. You learned forty years ago—cancer’s nobody’s friend. And an old fart like you had to run out of resilience some time. Like five years ago. When your wife died.
But the true erosion of his spirit had begun much earlier, with the death of his son of fifteen years, on that night forty years ago when the cancer that now soon would kill the father had killed the son.
The circle was being completed. An agony of soul, a torture of spirit, produced by death would conclude with death. Matthew, the son for whom David had mourned all his life, would no longer be an absence beyond toleration, no longer a loss so profound that the passage of time intensified instead of mollified the pain. Grief, which smothered and swallowed, like a gathering black hole, would soon with damnable mercy end.
Death stops all hurt. Certainly David had tried to console himself with that thought in the first weeks after Matthew’s death. At least my dear unlucky son’s at rest, he’d repeatedly tried to assure himself. Matthew’s six months of suffering, of chemotherapy, nausea, and Black-and-Decker chainsaw surgery had mercifully stopped.
But if Matt hadn’t gotten the tumor, or if the chemotherapy had managed to work, if the surgery had been effective, he’d have survived. In that respect, Matt’s death wasn’t merciful at all. It was a vicious trick inflicted on a boy whose strength of character against panic and pain had made him truly already a man.
Death stops all hurt? You bet. It stops everything, including my son, David thought. And now when it’s my turn, I don’t care. Because I’ve lived my life, such as it was, and I’d have given anything to take Matt’s place, because his love for life was greater than mine. Existence made him laugh, and my wonderful doomed son should have had the chance to continue laughing.
2
So David thought during his dwindling moments in Intensive Care. In his morphine stupor, he couldn’t communicate his despair to the nurses who with stoic skill kept watch on his IV pumps, urine catheter, heartbeat and blood pressure monitors. He probably wouldn’t have told the nurses anyhow, wouldn’t have demeaned the purpose that they had managed to find in life, their solace in alleviating pain.
Nor could he have told Sarie, his sweet wonderful child of sixty-one, that she shouldn’t grieve for his pain and impending death because he didn’t grieve for himself. The pain didn’t matter. It was no more than he expected. And as far as his death was concerned, well, that would be a release that over the years he’d many times considered granting to himself, though for the sake of his loving wife and daughter,