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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