The Butterfly Effect

My dad died just before Christmas, 2008. He had cancer. His death was expected for several months and a blessing to see him no longer hurting, no longer in pain. Those first few months were a surreal time for me. He was gone, but he was still so present in everything around the farm. He’d done so much remodeling over the years he’d pretty much built the house, and he had such a distinctive… we’ll call it ‘style’ that you could just see him in all the boards he’d cut and weird little designs he’d put into things. In some ways it was like he’d never left and every time I visited Mom I’d expect to hear him clomping in through the back door, kicking snow or mud off his boots.

There were lots of those moments over the first few months. But eventually it starts to settle in. His voice became memory instead of that wistful aching emptiness. His hats and boots were cleared off the back porch (well, all except for his favorite hat. That’s still there.).

I’m not religious, but I do believe that there’s something…after. Some remnant or echo or effect that the living have that carries on after they’re gone. Mom talks all the time about things going missing around the house only to turn up later in odd places. Molly heard a masculine voice at night when she’d stay at the farm with Grandma. Things like that.

I never experienced anything like that so always kind of wrote it off with a healthy dose of skepticism. But I remember the day that skepticism was turned on its ear and I found my belief in that something. I was up at the farm in late spring a few months after Dad died, probably up for the day to help cut the grass or chop up some limbs or something. Behind the house, at the very top of the hill that the house is on, Dad built a bench a couple decades ago. It faces west and looks out over the longest contiguous stretch of fields in the farm holding. He used to go sit up there with the dog most evenings to watch the sun go down.

After a long day of cutting grass and hauling stacks of limbs out to the brush-pile, I went for a walk around the yard. Of course without even thinking about it I ended up at Dad’s bench. I sat down in the hazy warm dusk and looked out across the yard, past the cedar trees, and out into the fields, just like he used to. The corn was starting to poke through, the first planting in six decades that he wouldn’t see. I was there for a few minutes, almost in a meditative state, just kind of thinking about him.

And a butterfly buzzed my head. Growing up on the farm I’d seen tons of butterflies, of course, but I remember being a kid and having a net and spending half an afternoon chasing one single butterfly around the yard. They’re not exactly social insects. And here was one circling my head like the planes around King Kong in that old black and white movie.

But then the butterfly, a big black swallowtail with blue edging on its wings, landed right on my knee. He just sat there, slowly fluffing his wings in and out, and for the first time since Dad had died I could feel that overwhelming presence he always seemed to have. I shed a lot of tears in the month or so after he died but not really since then, but some internal breaker switch tripped and the tears poured down my face—happy tears this time though. Something of Dad was still around, still keeping an eye on the farm, still watching over things. We had a good little chat before the butterfly kicked his wings and disappeared into the pines.

In the years since then obviously I’ve seen butterflies around the farm and around our house, and I usually pause and give a little nod, just so he knows I know.

But also now and then, when some important decision is looming or some big turning point is in my life, sure enough a butterfly will pop up somehow in some weird way that’s distinctly noticeable. Sometimes it’s a real one, even at times of year when there really shouldn’t be butterflies around. Sometimes it’s just a commercial on TV or an image in a magazine or something, but it’s just enough that I always know.

Well here I am, sitting on the back porch of the house in Indy, sipping a glass of wine and writing an email to my tax guy with some questions about the upcoming changes with Helios, and in the back of my head wondering for the hundredth time what Dad would think of all this change. And son of a bitch if I didn’t just get buzzed by a big black swallowtail. Two laps around my head so close I could actually hear his wings flapping and back out to the trees at the back of the yard.

So yeah. Hey, Dad. Glad you approve.