My Mentor's Last Note Said 'Send It'
Two words in blue ink, and I finally stopped hoarding my work.
Edith returned my poems the way other people return knives: handle first, blade fully acknowledged. "This line is hiding," she would write in the margin, in blue fountain pen, in a hand so upright it looked ironed. Or, once, beneath a stanza I was particularly proud of: "You wrote this with your coat on."
She was eighty-one when I met her, at a Tuesday evening writing group in the back room of a library that smelled of radiators and old glue. She had been a proofreader for a firm of solicitors for forty years, which meant she could find the weak word in your poem the way a customs officer finds the false bottom in a suitcase. Not unkindly. Just inevitably.
I was thirty-four and I was, though I would not have used the word, a hoarder.
Not of newspapers or margarine tubs. Of finished poems. Nine years of them, forty-seven at the final count, sitting in a folder on my laptop named FINAL, inside a folder named FINAL FINAL, never submitted anywhere, never shown to anyone but the Tuesday group and, eventually, only to Edith.
Each one was always nearly ready... Each one always needed one more pass. I had built an entire identity out of the word "almost," and I wore it comfortably, the way you wear anything that stops you from being seen.
Edith diagnosed this in roughly our third month.
"What happened to the poem about your father's radio?" she asked one Tuesday, over the library's terrible instant coffee.
"I'm still polishing it."
"You've been polishing it since March. It's not a horse brass. Send it."
Send it. She said it the way other people say bless you, automatically, after every finished poem I brought her. Send it. I never did. I would nod, and take the poem home, and file it in FINAL FINAL, and start something new, because starting is the drug and finishing is the bill, and sending is the bill with interest.
She got the diagnosis in September. Pancreatic, fast. She told the group with the same flat efficiency she used for line edits: here is the situation, here is the timeline, please nobody bring flowers with lilies in, they make the whole ward smell like a hotel bathroom.
I visited the hospice on Thursdays. The corridor smelled of clean linen and microwaved soup, and there was a fish tank at reception with one enormous gold fish that Edith claimed was in better health than anyone in the building, including the staff. I brought her poems because I did not know what else to bring a dying proofreader. She marked them. The blue hand got shakier week by week, the notes shorter. "Good." "Cut." "More."
The last poem I ever gave her was about her own garden, the one she kept describing to me from the bed: the rhubarb going over, the shed door that needed planing. I handed it across on a Thursday in late January. She was too tired to read it while I sat there.
"Leave it," she said. "I'll do it properly."
She died on the ninth of February, in the early morning, which her niece Carol said was typical, as Edith had always maintained that anything worth doing should be done before the post arrived.
At the funeral, Carol pressed an envelope into my hand. Inside was my garden poem, marked in blue, the letters wobbling like something written on a train. She had gone through the whole thing. And at the bottom of the last page, under the final line, two words, underlined once.
Send it.
I read those two words in the crematorium car park and cried the way you cry when you are also laughing, because she had used her last margin on me, and she had used it to say the thing I had ignored ninety times before, and there is no arguing with a note from a woman who can no longer be argued with.
That should be the end of the story. It is not the end of the story.
In March, Carol asked if I would help clear the house, since I was "one of the poetry people." We spent a Saturday wrapping crockery in newspaper. Under the bed, in the spare room, I found a suitcase. Hard-sided, cream, older than me... I assumed linens.
It was full of poems.
Hundreds of them. Typed on a manual typewriter, then later word-processed, dated in the top right corner in blue ink: 1963, 1971, 1988, 2009, one from the June before she died.
They were finished. They were extraordinary, some of them, and I say that as someone she trained not to say extraordinary lightly. Poems about the solicitors' office, about a man named Arthur who appeared through the sixties and vanished in 1974, about her sister's wedding, about rhubarb.
Not one had ever been published. There were no rejection slips in the suitcase, and I want you to understand what that means. Rejection slips would have meant she tried. There was nothing... Sixty years of finished work and not a single envelope.
The woman who spent her last strength writing Send it had never once sent hers.
A poem in a drawer is not safe. It is just alone.
I sat on the spare room carpet among the newspaper and understood that the note was not encouragement. It was testimony. She was not telling me what I should do. She was telling me what she had done, framed as an instruction, the way drowning people are the best experts on the shore. All those Tuesdays, all those blue margins: she had been correcting her own life in someone else's handwriting.
I had my excuses ready, of course, the same three I had run for nine years: not ready, wrong time, one more course first. I had actually used learning as a hiding place, telling myself I would submit after I had finished just one more round of lessons on craft, as if permission were a certificate somebody eventually posts to you. Edith's suitcase closed that argument. She had been better than I will ever be, and better was never the missing thing.
The Monday after we cleared the house, I opened FINAL FINAL and sent the radio poem to a monthly poetry contest, before the coffee had cooled, before the polishing engine could turn over. The first response, weeks later, was a form rejection, and I am glad it was, because it taught me the essential fact nine years of hoarding had hidden from me: rejection is weather. You get caught in it. You dry off. Nobody has ever been structurally damaged by a no-reply-address email.
The third poem I sent was taken. I read the acceptance in the same stairwell where I take all my bad news, prepared for bad news... and had to sit down on the step.
And Edith? Carol and I picked out one of hers, the 1974 one about Arthur, the one with the last line I will not quote here because it belongs to her. We typed it up and shared it through a page of profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, with her dates and a photograph Carol chose, Edith at about forty, squinting into sun. Strangers read her that month. Strangers commented. One wrote, "Where has this woman been?" and I did not have the heart to answer... under the bed, in a suitcase, being careful.
It has been two years. I still hoard, in flare-ups, the way any recovered anything still flinches at the old trigger. When I catch myself filing a finished poem instead of releasing it, I take out her last note, which I keep in the desk drawer, unframed, because Edith would have found framing it sentimental. I finally wrote about the grief itself last spring, and I sent that one too, ten days after finishing it, a personal record.
At the bottom of every poem I now believe is done, I write two words in blue ink before I am allowed to close the file.
It cost her sixty years not to follow those words. It costs me a click.
I know which debt I would rather carry.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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