Her Last Poem Was About Rain
She wrote it that morning, watching the window, unaware of endings.
The kettle was still warm when I let myself in.
That is the detail I keep returning to, two years later: not the ambulance tracks on the wet driveway, not the neighbor crying into her sleeve on the porch... but the kettle, warm as a hand, waiting for a tea my mother would never come back to make.
Her notebook was open on the kitchen table. Spiral bound, ninety nine cents, the kind she bought in stacks every August when the school supplies went on sale, though she had not stood in front of a classroom in twenty years. Blue ballpoint. Her handwriting slanted hard to the right, like it was leaning into wind.
The last poem was about rain.
Not about me. Not about my brother in Vancouver, or my father, gone nine years by then. Nothing luminous, nothing you could read at a funeral and watch a room dissolve. People talk about the last words of a loved one like they arrive gift wrapped, a deathbed sentence that reorganizes a family. My mother wrote about the gutter over the back door, how it had come loose again, how the water fell past the window in, and I am quoting her exactly, a bead curtain the sparrows will not walk through.
Then she stood up, apparently. Put the kettle on. And her heart, which had carried her through seventy one winters, simply set her down on the kitchen floor like a bag of groceries.
I want to be honest about my first reaction, because nobody warns you that grief sometimes shows up wearing anger's coat. I stood in her kitchen holding a poem about a gutter and I thought: this is what you were doing? You had one morning left on this earth... and you spent it on weather?
I took the notebook home and did not open it for five months.
The funeral happened the way funerals happen. My brother flew in and we divided her house between us like polite strangers, and people kept saying she went peacefully, which I now understand is a thing people say when they need the conversation to end.
I nodded. I wrote thank you cards.
I kept the notebook in the glove compartment of my car, which makes no sense... except that I wanted her near me and I could not bear her in the house.
What finally made me open it again was a leak.
February, my own apartment, rain finding its way in through the window frame above the sink. I rolled a towel along the sill and stood there watching the water come down off the roof in a solid sheet, and I heard myself say, out loud, to an empty kitchen, a bead curtain. Her line, surfacing in my mouth like a hiccup. I laughed... and then I did the other thing, and then I went out to the car in my socks and got the notebook.
This time I read it backwards. She always read magazines from the back, a habit that drove my father insane, and it felt right to enter her last book the way she would have.
Eleven pages in, another rain poem. Different words, same window. Forty pages in... another. One was dated in October, one in June. I had assumed the last poem was a one off, a morning doodle.
It was not. It was a rehearsal.
She had been writing the same poem over and over, the way you might keep dialing a number to hear a voice on a machine.
The next weekend I drove to her house, which had not sold yet, and went through the closet in the sewing room. Fourteen notebooks. I sat on the floor until it got dark outside and I can tell you now what I found, because I have the dates written down. The rain poem appears in 2019. In 2011. In 2003, the year my father had his first surgery. In 1996. In 1989, in a notebook with a peeling unicorn sticker on the cover, which means she was writing it before I could read.
And then I found the first one.
A loose sheet, folded into an envelope, tucked in the back of the oldest notebook. It was dated three days after her own mother died, which made my mother twenty four when she wrote it. It is shorter than the others and worse than the others, and it ends: the rain kept falling like it did not know.
I sat on the floor of the sewing room and understood, all at once, the way you understand a joke, what I had been holding in the glove compartment of my car.
She was not writing about rain. Rain was the door she opened every morning to stand beside her dead, and on the last morning of her life, she was not alone in that kitchen.
Her mother. Then her sister, who I barely remember. Then my father. Every loss went into the same poem, and the poem got quieter and stranger and better across fifty years, until it was no longer about grief at all. It was about a gutter and some sparrows. That is the part I cannot get over. Fifty years of practice and what she arrived at was attention. The bead curtain. The birds who would not walk through it. A woman at a window, wholly there.
I used to think last words had to be a summary. Now I think they are a sample. One tile from the mosaic, and if the life was made right, any tile will do.
It took me a long time to write about her. For the first year I wrote around her, careful little poems about kettles and driveways that never said her name, until a friend who has buried more people than I have read one and said, gently, you keep describing the door and never opening it. That week I finally wrote about the grief instead of around it, and it was ugly and true and I did not show anyone for a month. Later I found a whole archive of poems about memory and read them the way you drink water after a fever, realizing how many strangers had stood at this same window before me.
This spring I did something she would have called showing off. I typed up the 1989 rain poem, the one with her twenty four year old handwriting shaking in the last stanza, and entered it into a monthly poetry contest under her name. It did not win. I have the rejection email and I treasure it, because it is addressed to her, present tense, as if somewhere a stranger believes my mother is alive and writing and simply needs to try again next month.
She would have tried again next month. She tried for fifty years.
Her notebook lives on my kitchen table now, open, next to a jar of blue ballpoints. On mornings when it rains I sit down before work and add a line to the poem. I am not good at it yet. My sparrows are still cardboard, my water still falls like water. But the rule is one line, every rain, no exceptions, and the poem does not get to end.
This morning the gutter above my own back window came loose. The water dropped past the glass in one bright unbroken sheet, and the whole sky went soft behind it, and I stood there with my tea and watched, and I did not call anyone to fix it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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