AAs I sat by my father’s bedside in the hospice, holding his hand in the last hour of his life, I talked about butterflies. But who knows what he will say at the end? He seemed emotionless, his expressionless face alien and scary. For the first time in my life, he was unresponsive to my attention, unable to be a father. I told him I loved him and would not leave him. I kissed him. I cried. And then I told him about a little tortoise shell I had seen in his garage just two hours earlier.
I did not tell him that it was the severed wing of a dead butterfly, a memento mori, buried behind a pile of wood that I was taking away for my mother. The significant thing was that I called a butterfly. A few weeks ago, Dad would have considered this a minor miracle. He was probably hoping for a more useful miracle at that moment, but I’m sure I felt his hand in mine. For once, he was unable to doubt my identification (to be fair to him, until this summer I would have said it was an admiral’s wing). But he didn’t need to ask me any more questions. A transformation had taken place.
Since I was a little boy, my father had tried to share his love of nature with me. He had failed until the spring of 2020, when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. But for the last six months of his life, I became obsessed with one of his greatest passions: butterflies. What had changed?
I always found his interest in natural history a bit boring, sometimes even embarrassing. Looking back now, I deeply regret my youthful disdain and all the opportunities I missed because of it. But surely no one could bear to hear their father talk about things like a butterfly’s sperm—a term that comes from birdwatching and describes a species’ distinctive appearance and flight style. Maybe I had matured. Maybe, as a new father, I wanted to be able to share with my son the kind of knowledge I had taken for granted in his case. Maybe butterfly watching was simply my escape from the restrictions of the pandemic. Maybe it was all of that.
It was also an attempt to be his link to the outside world, now that he was housebound. All through that burning last summer, I wandered the woods and fields of Northamptonshire, out of my element while awkwardly in his, following his leads. I returned to his bedside in my role as carer and now as local deputy, bringing back stories and accounts of what I had seen.
This meant I was entering unfamiliar territory and trying not to let a creeping feeling of imposter syndrome get to me. I tiptoed through Fermyn Woods in north-east Northamptonshire, hoping to see the star of the British butterfly kingdom, the Greater Emperor Moth. I was keen to avoid the attention of cognoscenti with their telephoto cameras talking about sperm. Some characters were unavoidable, like the man searching the bushes in a trance-like state, followed by the man who had poured a bottle of urine around the trunk of an oak tree and gone two days without using deodorant, all in the hope of attracting Greater Emperor Moths.
Purple emperors have notoriously bad taste, and their followers will do anything to meet one of them. Later that day, I was huddled around a dog pile with several strangers, eyeing a famous butterfly as if we could give it (and the pile) a kiss. All I wanted was a photo. I managed to send one to Dad as soon as I got back to my car. As always, his response was prompt: Well done. Keep it up. I’m living because of you now xx.
I spent as much time as I could that summer looking for blues, skippers, checkered whites, and red admirals, eager to find something to impress Dad with. He had more important things on his mind, but was glad that my eyes were finally opening. I hesitate to say that nature had become a comfort. I’m sure it was in some ways, but it also seems a bit clichéd, like a Disneyfication of what was in fact a terribly difficult time. I don’t deny that nature can act as a remedy or a tonic, but it can also disturb, confuse, unsettle, shock, and disturb. My experiences in nature while Dad was dying were often ecstatic, but they were also marked by melancholy, frustration, boredom, and other less idealized feelings that, I now realize, were crucial elements of the entire transformation.
I photographed shabby butterflies missing parts of their wings, scarred by the ravages of time and vulnerable, as if perishing under the weight of their own symbolism. The butterfly is one of our most succinct metaphors for transformation, the various stages of its life cycle conveyed to us in songs and stories from childhood. But the metaphor was no longer so simple for me. While I was outside chasing butterflies as if they could change Dad’s condition or delay the inevitable, at home he lay in bed, losing his recognizable forms. I bathed him in his final 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 and left the home he had built for the last time, I rewarded him for having carried me myself all my life.
I kept thinking about time and generations. I imagined my son, myself and my father in metamorphosis – my son as a caterpillar, my father as a butterfly and myself as an intermediate chrysalis, in some ways the younger form of the butterfly but also somehow its parents, as if we were older than what comes after, which complicates the natural order. Who is the parent and who is the child? That old cliché.
I began to question the relevance of the butterfly as a symbol of possibility, of better times, of the triumph of beauty. Isn’t the butterfly’s cycle also a symbol of predetermined outcomes, trapped in its own blueprint, each specimen identical to its kind, as if they all came from the same great printing press? Perhaps it was the inevitability of Dad’s terminal condition that made me think this way, overwhelmed by anticipatory grief, making me mourn the loved one before he was even gone.
But Dad was still there to pull me back to more magical thoughts. One day I got a text saying he was going to manage a very short walk as he hadn’t been out all summer. He wanted to show me something special. We went to a beloved forest near my parents’ house and couldn’t believe we were finally going to be able to watch butterflies together. We wished we had done it sooner when all these gifts were offered for free and now they were available at such a high price.
At the start of a footpath that skirted a patch of woodland he’d cleared with his father as a child, Dad pointed out a tree (a wood silk tree, apparently) – we won’t get far, I thought, if he gave names to every tree. “In June you’ll find black hairstreaks there,” he said. Next, an oak, where he told me in July I’d find purple emperors. And finally, off the path, into the heart of the woods, where the trees close in on us, where we might find the rare and endangered wood white. I realise now that he was preparing me for a time when he would no longer be there, imparting to me at the last possible moment his years of knowledge of the area, acquired through patience, attention and trial and error. “I must turn back,” he said after too short a time, having seen no wood white, exhausted and forlorn. We both tried to hide our disappointment – he hated to let me down, and I just wanted to preserve the memory of a butterfly that I could keep after his death.
The endangered status of the wood white butterfly was a good sign for Dad’s condition. But while there was nothing that could be done to save it, there were things that could be done to help the butterflies. Dad told me how he recently emailed a local landowner who perhaps didn’t appreciate what he had in his forest, offering advice on how to protect the wood white butterfly. While it’s difficult to feel anything other than depressed at the overwhelming decline in the butterfly population, Dad’s attempt to protect these special creatures while his own life was coming to an end brought hope back to the metaphor of the butterfly cycle.
Just as we approached the portal out of the woods and back onto the footpath, Dad came to life. “There,” he said. “See it?” A delicate, ghostly butterfly dancing lazily around the edge of the path, and then another, as if the wood whites had come to escort their old friend safely out of the woods and bid him a final farewell. I’ll come back for you, I thought. And I have done so every summer since then.
The Flitting by Ben Masters (Granta, £16.99) is available from guardianbookshop.com for £14.44
