Yellow Butterflies


Outside the back door, yellow butterflies are fluttering around Patty's Garden. They remind me of Ilse. A bright and cheerful member of our choir, Ilse Newell died of self-inflicted gunshot a Sunday morning, September 1985. We had been in Apalachicola a year, and the men of the church were having our first fish fry. The day before, a couple of them had been out in the bay with cast nets, then a bunch of us gathered in a fishhouse down on the river and cleaned mullet. 

After church I went outside to where the mullet were being fried and immediately Linda called me to the phone. George Chapel was calling from Ilse’s house across the bridge and turn right, on Magnolia Bluff overlooking the river and bay. Ilse is dead, he said. She hadn’t been in choir for church and he had driven over to check on her. I missed the fish fry. Ilse was lying face down in the yard. The sheriff arrived a minute or two after me. 

It was yellow butterfly season. All that afternoon butterflies fluttered round the yard, landing on Ilse’s red hair then flitting away. It was my homily at her funeral: yellow butterflies on Ilse’s beautiful red hair.

Only that and nothing else comes to mind this time of year with the yellow butterflies.

Butterflies are a sign of the Resurrection. That comes to mind more so in the autumn than at Easter. Because of Ilse.

September 1985 was my 50th birthday. At 77, I’m more than half again that age now. It was long ago. Before real personal computers, smart phones, the internet and Google. Googling “yellow butterflies” just now came up with The Butterfly Website. There are stories from people who have known the presence of a dead loved one as a butterfly flew by just when it mattered most, when someone was especially missed and a sign was desperately needed, and hope and joy came present, resurrection in a resurrection symbol. A butterfly. I see no reason in the world why it can’t be true, and every reason why it is true.

Yellow butterflies are like life, gone soon, their season over and done. They will be back.

TW+