The Poem That Carried Me Through the Funeral
Someone else's words held my spine up when mine quit.
Death makes you go through pockets. That is how I found out my mother had been carrying a poem in her purse for thirty one years.
She died in April, on a morning so rudely beautiful that the daffodils outside the hospice window felt like bad manners. We had known it was coming for months, which people assume makes it easier, the way knowing the wave is coming makes it easier to stand in the ocean. My brother handled the flowers. My aunt handled the food. I got handed the reading, because I am the one in the family who owns too many books, and everyone assumed the words would just be in there somewhere, like a spare key.
They were not... I sat with a notebook for three nights and every line I wrote curdled on the page. I wrote she was my mother and stared at it for an hour. It was true the way a rock is true. It just sat there.
So at two in the morning I did what we all do now. I typed poems for grief into my phone and scrolled the lists. Do not stand at my grave and weep. Death is nothing at all. Stop all the clocks. Good poems, some of them great ones, all of them worn smooth by a million funerals, like hotel Bibles. I picked one, printed it at the pharmacy, and folded it into my jacket pocket. It felt like buying flowers from a gas station. Legal. Adequate... Wrong.
Two days before the service, my aunt asked me to pick out clothes to bring to the funeral home, and to go through Mom's purse for her reading glasses. Going through your mother's purse feels criminal at any age. Receipts, peppermints, a pharmacy card, a photograph of my brother missing his front teeth. And in the inside zip pocket, a piece of paper folded into eighths, soft as flannel at the creases, carried so long the folds had gone translucent, like skin over a light.
It was a poem.
Copied out in her handwriting, but a younger version of it, the handwriting from the backs of my school photos. No title. No author. Four stanzas that rhymed in some places and gave up rhyming in others, like a voice deciding that breathing mattered more. And at the bottom, a date: March 1987. The month her own mother died. I was two years old.
It was not a famous poem. I searched every line of it later and the internet just shrugged. Somebody wrote it once, maybe for a church bulletin, maybe for their own mother, and it had one line that stopped my breath where I stood in her bedroom, a line about leaving the door unlatched so love can let itself back in.
My mother, twenty nine years old and brand new to grief, had copied that poem out and carried it. Through four houses. Through my father's death eleven years ago, when I remember her hand going into that purse at the graveside and coming out empty, just resting there, like she was holding something through the leather. She carried it for thirty one years... and never once mentioned it. Comfort was, for her generation, a private supply.
Some poems are not written to be admired. They are written to be leaned on.
At the funeral I did not read the one I had printed at the pharmacy. I stood up with her copy, the real paper, because it seemed important that the actual object be in the room. I told everyone what it was and where I had found it. Then I started to read, and my voice quit halfway through the second stanza... exactly where I knew it would.
Here is what I mean when I say the poem carried me. My own words, the three nights of curdled sentences, would have collapsed with me. But these lines kept walking at their own pace, patient, rhythmic, and all I had to do was keep up.
The poem had been to more funerals than I had.
It knew the way.
When I wobbled, the meter put its hand flat against my back, and I got to the line about the unlatched door, and I heard my aunt make a sound behind me, and I finished standing up.
People think a funeral reading is a performance. It is not.
It is a handrail.
Nobody admires a handrail. You grip it, and it holds, and that is the entire job.
Afterward, at the house, over the casseroles, my aunt told me the part I did not know. The priest had read that same poem at my grandmother's funeral in 1987, off a printed card. My mother asked to keep the card, then copied the poem out by hand that same week. My aunt asked her why, when she already had the card. And my mother said, I need it in my own handwriting, so that it is in my own voice.
So mine was the third generation of that reading. Some stranger's poem, author unknown, holding up the spines of one family's women across thirty one years. I think about that writer all the time now. Somewhere out there was a person who put those stanzas together, probably doubting they were any good, and their words have been carrying grieving strangers through funerals ever since, and they will never know. It is part of why I spend so much time these days reading writers nobody has heard yet. The poem that carried my whole family was written by one of them.
It took me most of a year to write again. When it came back, it came back badly, and then less badly. I wrote about grief until, without my permission, it started reading like healing, which nobody warns you looks identical at first, the way the tide going out and the tide coming in look identical for one long minute. Eventually I finished a poem I did not hate, about a purse on a hospice chair, and I entered it in a monthly poetry contest, mostly so it would exist somewhere outside my drawer. It did not win... It did not need to. It was out of the house.
Her copy of the poem is framed now, folds and all, because flattening it felt like erasing evidence. But before I framed it, I did what she did. I copied it out by hand, my handwriting, my voice, and folded it into eighths, and it lives in the inside pocket of the black jacket I will wear to the funerals that are coming for me, the way they come for everyone.
The paper in my pocket is still crisp. The folds are still shallow.
Give them thirty years.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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