Two Poems

Two Poems: Carrie Shipers

my Mom’s death with revision

My mother chose to die because she was tired and in pain. For months she’d heard my dad’s voice calling her name, so when she felt infection building in her blood, she’d chosen to wait and let it take her. That was my first draft. In the second draft, my mom was doing laundry when she died, and her last load—the one she washed but didn’t dry—included the blue-and-white polo shirt she’d worn to Dad’s deathbed five years before. Every time I saw her wearing it—and sometimes when I didn’t— she mentioned how the shirt made him feel close. In the third draft, I’m not sure if my mom was doing laundry out of habit or boredom, or if her death was unexpected after all and happened to arrive while she was doing chores. In the fourth draft, I feel compelled to clarify she didn’t die at home. A friend found her collapsed on the back porch and she lived one more day but was never awake. In the fifth draft, I gathered sour clothes from her washer but left the polo shirt to wash again with the outfit

I’d flown west in, towels she’d set aside for her next load. In the final draft, I still mostly believe my mother chose to die, but I admit what I will never know: If she’d missed my last call on purpose or by accident. If by the time she’d wanted help, she’d been too sick to summon it. If she’d been afraid or if she’d heard my dad promise she’d be okay. How much of what I tell myself about her death is true, and how much is made up to ease my grief.

Gratitude with Revision

In the first draft, as soon as your mom dies you start a list of thanks you’ll need to send: to the hospital and chemo center, the man who’d mowed her lawn and hauled her trash, the vet’s office where she was undercharged. The notes don’t take you long though you write each one twice—first on scratch paper and then the real version. In the second draft, she’s been gone six months when heavy snow reminds you of the frigid week she’d waited for a new furnace, how every day the man she’d bought it from came by to carry firewood and check her space heater. In this draft, you understand you’re doing a strange thing— it was a year ago and he got paid to put the furnace in—but you can’t forget your mom’s relief when she had heat again. In the third draft, you admit you sometimes thought that she lacked gratitude. Once she’d finished chemo, she’d dumped the friend who’d driven her without explaining why. She’d also said you left too soon after her surgery and that it wasn’t nice to not pick up her calls. In the next draft, you realize how much she must’ve hated always needing help, and also that your notes have been apologies for living far away. Each time you wrote, Thank you for all you’ve done, you made yourself go back

and name specific tasks you weren’t there to perform. In the final draft, it’s eighteen months since your mom died and you wake up remembering how often she called on the fire crew to lift her from the floor and maybe walk the dog. In the final draft, it seems too late to say what you’re thinking, so you just send a check in memory of and wish that you’d done more.