Her First Publication Came After Her Funeral
The acceptance letter arrived addressed to a woman we'd just buried.
Nine days after we buried my mother, a literary magazine wrote to tell her they loved her work. The envelope was cream colored, addressed in laser print to Mrs. Lillian Okafor, and I stood in her driveway holding it for so long that a neighbor came out to ask if I was alright.
I was not alright... I was doing math.
The postmark was dated two days after her funeral. Whoever sent it had typed her name while we were washing casserole dishes and returning folding chairs.
Here is what you need to understand: as far as any of us knew, my mother was not a writer. She was a school administrator for thirty-one years. She clipped coupons and moved them between envelopes labeled in her tall, slanted hand. She read novels from the library two at a time and returned them early. If you had asked me to list one hundred facts about Lillian Okafor, writes poetry would not have made the list, and I would have bet the house on that list.
The letter said they were delighted to accept her poem, Instructions for the Left Behind, for their spring issue. It said the editors had read it three times aloud. It asked for a short biographical note.
I sat down on the front step of her empty house and read it four more times... looking for the mistake.
There was no mistake. There was a desk.
My sister and I had been avoiding the desk since the funeral, the way you avoid a room where someone is sleeping. It was a heavy oak rolltop that had belonged to her father, and we had never in our lives seen it open. That evening we opened it. I want to tell you it was cinematic, but mostly it was two grown adults kneeling on a carpet, going quiet one drawer at a time.
The bottom drawer held a shoebox.
Inside the shoebox were rejection slips. Two hundred and twelve of them.
The oldest was dated 1981, from a magazine that no longer exists, and the paper had gone soft as cloth. The newest was from last October, printed from an email, folded twice. Forty-four years. My mother had been writing poems and mailing them into the world for forty-four years, collecting no for four decades in a shoebox under a rolltop lid, and she had never once mentioned it.
Not when I published articles in my college paper. Not when my sister read a poem at her own wedding. Not once, at any kitchen table, in any of the ten thousand conversations we thought were the whole of her.
My sister said the thing we were both feeling: She sat through every one of our small victories and never claimed a single one of her own attempts.
Under the shoebox were the poems themselves, in labeled folders, because of course my mother's secret life was filed. Poems about her mother's hands. Poems about the janitor at her school who fed strays. Poems about my father's death, and those had dates on them, and the dates were the exact anniversaries, year after year, a private ceremony we never knew we were missing.
Some were dazzling. Some were ordinary.
All of them sounded like her the way a voicemail sounds like someone, so much that you have to put the paper down and breathe.
And taped inside the rolltop lid, where only she would see it, was an index card with a list titled When I'm brave. Twelve magazine names, written over what must have been years, in slightly different inks. Eleven were crossed out... Meaning tried. Meaning no.
The twelfth was the magazine whose letter I had carried in from the driveway.
Do not save your bravest thing for later. Later is a door that locks from the other side.
We pieced the timeline together from her email. She had submitted Instructions for the Left Behind in January, eight days after her oncologist stopped talking about treatment and started talking about comfort. Forty-four years of working down that list, and she finally reached the last name on it when the horizon did. The poem itself, when we found the draft, had been revised over and over; the earliest version in the folder was dated the year I left for college.
She had been writing us goodbye instructions for decades.
She just kept editing until she meant them.
I wrote back to the editors. It is the hardest email I have ever composed, and it was four sentences long. They responded within a day, kind beyond any professional requirement, and asked if the family would allow the poem to run with a note about her life. The biographical sketch I sent was the first thing I had written since the funeral: Lillian Okafor wrote for forty-four years in secret. This is her first publication. She was braver than she believed, longer than anyone knew.
The issue came out in April. My sister and I drove to the cemetery with a copy and read the poem out loud at her headstone, taking alternate stanzas, both of us doing the thing where your voice stays level while your eyes do not cooperate. The poem's last line gives instructions, true to its title. It tells the left behind to plant something anyway. There were daffodils coming up by the fence when we read it, which proves nothing... and which I think about every single day.
Grief for a person is one thing. I had expected that, and it came on schedule and stayed like weather. What I had not expected was grief for her silence: for every dinner where she asked about my writing and I never thought to ask a question back, for two hundred and twelve envelopes opened alone, for a woman who filed her own heart under a lid. Some nights the regret is so specific I can hear it. She was seventy-three.
The yes was always coming. It was nine days too polite.
But here is what I refuse to do: I refuse to make her a tragedy. Two hundred and twelve rejections means two hundred and thirteen acts of hope. She kept a list titled When I'm brave and crossed off eleven fears. The last thing my mother ever did as a writer was try, and the world's answer, arriving late, was still yes.
Since then I have found others like her. There are pages that keep profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, and I read them the way some people read obituaries, except these run in the other direction: unknown, unknown, unknown, then suddenly a name in print. Every one of them is somebody's mother or father or quiet coworker with a shoebox. I want to knock on all their doors and shout: now, do it now.
My own shoebox was getting full, is the embarrassing truth. So in May, on her birthday, I pulled out the least safe poem I have ever written and entered it into a monthly poetry contest before I could talk myself down. When the confirmation screen appeared, I taped an index card inside my desk drawer and wrote her list's title at the top, and then crossed out the first line.
The cream envelope is framed now, in her hallway, in the house we cannot quite sell. Acceptance letters are usually private things. This one is a public argument, and it makes its case to everyone who walks past it: whatever you are saving, spend it.
Somewhere a magazine is typing your name... Try to be alive when the letter comes.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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