AAs I sat by my father’s bedside in the hospice and held his hand in the last hour of his life, I found myself talking about butterflies. But who really knows what to say at the end? He was seemingly insensible, his blank face unfamiliar and cold. For the first time in my life, he didn’t come to my attention quickly, didn’t get the opportunity to be Dad. I told him I love him and that I won’t leave him. I kissed him. I cried. And then I told him about a little turtle shell that I had seen in his garage just two hours before.
I didn’t tell him it was the severed wing of a dead butterfly, a memento mori buried behind a pile of logs I had moved for my mother. The important thing was that I had mentioned a butterfly. Just a few weeks earlier, Dad would have considered this a minor miracle. He was probably hoping for a more helpful miracle at that particular moment, but I’m sure I felt his hand flex in mine. For once he was in no position to doubt my identification (to be fair to him, until that summer I would have said it was the wing of a red admiral). But he didn’t need to question me any more. A transformation has taken place.
Ever since I was a little boy, my father tried to share his love of the natural world with me, and until the spring of 2020, when he received a terminal cancer diagnosis, he failed. But in the last six months of his life I became obsessed with one of his main passions: butterflies. What has changed?
I always found his interests in natural history a bit boring, sometimes embarrassing. I look back now and bitterly regret my adolescent rejection and all the opportunities it squandered. But surely no one could resist their dad talking about things like a butterfly’s jizz—a term carried over from birdwatching to describe a species’ distinctive appearance and style of flight. Maybe I’ve matured. Perhaps as a new father myself, I wanted to be able to share with my son the kind of knowledge that I took for granted in him. Perhaps butterfly stroke was simply my escape from the constraints of the pandemic. Perhaps it was all of these things.
It was also an attempt to be his connection to the outside world, now that he was housebound. Through that scorching, terminal summer I walked the woods and fields of Northamptonshire out of my element while I was self-conscious in his and followed his tips. I would go back to his bedside in my role as a caregiver and now as proxy in the field, with stories and reports of what I saw.
It involved entering uncharted territory and trying not to succumb to a creeping sense of impostor syndrome. I turned around Fermyn Woods in north-east Northamptonshire, hoping to see the famous of the British butterfly kingdom, the purple emperor. I was desperate to avoid the attention of the cognoscenti with their long lens cameras, who talk about jizz. Some characters were inevitable, like the man who scans the woods in a trance, followed by the man who dumped a bottle of urine around the base of an oak tree and avoided deodorant for two days, all in the hope of emperors. attract .
Purple emperors have notoriously foul taste, and devotees will go to great lengths for a meet-and-greet with one. Later that day, I crouched around a dog pool with several strangers, all with a familiar butterfly look as though we might (and through the jerk) give him a kiss. All I wanted was a picture. I managed to send one to Dad as soon as I got back to my car. As always, his response was swift: Well done. Keep it up. I live through you now xx.
I spent as much time as I could that summer looking for hairstreaks, skippers, fritillaries and admirals, eager for things to impress Dad with. He had bigger things on his mind, but he was happy to see my eyes finally open. I hesitate to say that nature has become a comfort. I’m sure it had in a sense, but it also feels a bit clichéd, like a Disneyfication of what was in fact a terribly difficult time. I do not deny that nature can be healing or restorative, but it can also trouble and mystify and unsettle and shock and disrupt. My experiences in nature while Dad was dying were often ecstatic, but they were also tinged with melancholy, frustration, boredom and other less idealized feelings that I now realize were crucial elements in the whole transformation.
I found myself photographing tattered butterflies with pieces of their wings missing, aged and vulnerable, as if deteriorating under the weight of their own symbolism. The butterfly is one of our most resonant metaphors for transformation, the distinct stages of its life cycle taught in songs and stories from childhood. But the metaphor was no longer simple for me. While I was chasing butterflies, as if they might change Dad’s condition or delay the inevitable, he was at home, in bed, shedding his recognizable forms. I bathed him in his last weeks, emptied his urostomy bag in the toilet, trimmed his nails, wiped his nosebleeds; and as I helped him down the stairs to the ambulance waiting outside, leaving the house he built for the last time, I compensated him for a life of self-carriage.
I couldn’t help thinking about time and the generations. I imagined my son, myself and Dad in the order of metamorphosis – my son as a caterpillar, Dad as a butterfly, and me as the in-between crystal, in some ways the younger form of the butterfly, but also somehow the older of it, as if more older than what comes next, complicating the natural order. Who is the parent and who is the child? That old cliche.
I began to question the butterfly’s pertinence as a symbol of possibility, of better times, of the triumph of beauty. Isn’t the butterfly’s cycle also indicative of fixed outcomes, trapped in its own blueprint, each specimen identical to its species, as if they were all spun out by the same great printer? Perhaps it was the inevitability of Dad’s terminal condition that made me think, overwhelmed by anticipatory grief, to mourn the loved one before they were even gone.
But Dad was still on hand to restore me to more magical thinking. I received a text one day saying he thought he could manage a very short walk, as he hadn’t been able to get out all summer. He wanted to show me something special. We went to a precious forest near my parent’s house, in disbelief that we finally got to butterfly together, wishing we had done it earlier when all these gifts were freely offered, now at such a price.
At the start of a footpath bordering a woodland he had stalked with his father as a child, Dad pointed out a tree (apparently a bull) – we wouldn’t get far, I thought, if he going to name each individual tree. “You’ll get streaks of black hair in there in June,” he said. Next an oak tree where, he told me, I would find purple emperors in July. And finally, from the path to the heart of the forest, trees that close above, where we can find the rare and endangered white wood. I realize now that he was preparing me for a time when he would be gone, imparting at the last possible moment years of local knowledge gained through patience, attentiveness and trial and error. “I’ll have to turn around,” he said after too little time, seeing no wood whites, tired and forlorn. We both tried to hide our disappointment – he didn’t like to let me down, and I just wanted the memory of a butterfly to cherish once he was gone.
The threat of the wood white spoke of Father’s condition. But although nothing could be done to save him, there were things that had to be done to help the butterflies. Dad told me how he recently emailed a local landowner who might not have appreciated what he had in his grove, to give him advice on how to keep the wood white. While it’s hard to feel anything but depressed by the overwhelming decline in butterfly numbers, Dad’s effort to protect these special creatures as his own life declined restored the metaphor of the butterfly cycle with hope.
Just as we approached the portal out of the woodland and back onto the footpath, Dad came to life. “There,” he said. “Do you see that?” A delicate spectral butterfly, languidly dancing around the edge of the ride, and then a second, as if the wood whites had come to escort their old friend safely out of the woods and bid him a final farewell. I will come back for you, I thought. And I have done every summer since.
The Flitting by Ben Masters (Granta, £16.99) is available from guardianbookshop.com for £14.44
