Lines Written Upon the Discovery of a Corpse

The day my mother died I tried to write a poem.

When my grandmother had passed away three years before, I had written a little poem to read at her funeral. No one had asked me to, but the words appeared in my mind even as she lay in her hospital bed, each of her tortured breaths coming with the assistance of thousands of dollars of machinery. Wearing a black blouse and a black skirt, I stood in front of all of her friends and descendants and read:

Cookies from your easybake oven taste the sweetest.

Quilts made with love are the tenderest by far.

You demonstrated your love by how you treated us.

There must be a new joy wherever you are.

The poem went on like that, very sing-songy and sweet. Had it not been written by a 14 year old my audience might have been more inclined to judge it. I knew that I wanted to make something to publicly commemorate the life of my grandmother, so I wrote it to be simple and accessible. Preparing a dozen lines full of little in-jokes that my grandmother's loved ones would recognise cleaned something out of me. My audience cried and laughed, and I knew that I'd done my part in putting her to rest correctly. It was a permanent memorial for her made out of words.

When my mother killed herself three years later, I tried to recreate that.

I failed.

Twice I wrote couplets that I thought could function as the start of the poem memorialising my mother.

I do not know where you have gone

or when our paths will cross again

There was a couplet that demanded a but. I could feel it even as I wrote it out on my tear-spotted legal pad. However, I couldn't imagine what might follow that but.

My mother was dead. She took the pistol my father kept in the safe, and she walked a quarter of a mile to the frozen lake where she went to think, and when she was done thinking she permanently deactivated her thinking apparatus. I heard the gunshot, but it would be two hours before I made it out to the lake, because my mother hadn't been expressing suicidal thoughts. I'd mostly forgotten about the noise, and then I went to ask about dinner, and that was when I found her next to the sheet of ice.

Red.

Your final mark on this would was red.

The poem about my grandmother's death had been simple. She had lived a good life and died a good death surrounded by her family. Her poem only required memories of the Vaseline she used to moisturise her hands and the peppermints she kept in her purse. Try as I might, I couldn't begin to capture my mother's bloody death.

"You don't have to write anything," my father told me when he came into my bedroom. I'd been crying over my legal pad, blurring the letters into smudges. I'd been working on the poem for a full day, but I'd cried enough to erase both couplets.

"I do," I said. I needed to erect another monument of words because I couldn't make sense of my mother's death otherwise.

"No..." He put an arm around my shoulder and held me, his body trembling with his own tears. He has always been a silent crier, but I could feel his tears.

Nine months later I started my first semester at university, taking a full course-load entirely composed of courses that included the word Intro in their names. Intro to Latin, Intro to English Literature, and so on. Of course, the last course that I added to my shopping cart--one which I did not mention to my father--was Intro to Psychology.

A bro who sat in the front and played on the college's terrible basketball team opined one day, "I think suicide is the most selfish thing a person can do."

It spawned exactly the sort of heated debate that made bros like him smirk, but I didn't say a word. I turned to my notes, where I had carefully transcribed all of the professor's slides, and I wrote in the margin:

Were you feeling selfish when you pulled the trigger?

When you took the gun, what was on your mind?

When I found your body the wound was much bigger

than all the problems that you left behind.

It was sloppier than any memorial to my mother should be, and I knew it. It was one thing to write something simple about my grandmother. But I'd seen the red stain on a white world and the woman who bore me laying face down in the snow. When I ran home, I told my father that she'd been murdered, but the police confirmed that there was only one set of footprints that broke the snow down to where she'd been sitting, and it was my father's gun. They had no reason to believe that foul play had been involved.

"You have no idea what you're talking about, so why don't you just shut up?" one of my classmates screamed at basketball bro.

Basketball bro looked offended. "Haven't you heard of free speech?"

The professor dismissed the class ten minutes early so we could all cool off. In the hall outside, I still heard murmurs of debate about whether suicide was selfish or not, but I didn't participate in them.

"I knew someone who..." The girl's comments ended in a half-sob. She picked it up again, "So I know what it's actually like, okay? And pricks like that are not cool."

I wrote a short story for the university's journal. In it a basketball bro got drunk and flipped his car. The entire story was told while he was trapped in his vehicle, unable to escape and realising that he was going to die. There was no particular point to the story, but it was well-received. I don't think my classmate from Intro to Psych read it, and if he did I doubted that he would have the self-awareness to recognise himself in the portrait. It was just a little something for me to remember him by.

Part of Intro to Psych was history. Freud, Jung, Stanford Prison. Part of it was theory. Desires, fears, habits. None of it brought clarity. In Intro to Latin we worked on our vocabulary, because without our vocabulary the declensions meant nothing. Neither Latin nor Psychology gave me the vocabulary I was looking for.

Did you know that I would find you?

Would it have changed a thing if you did?

You told me I could do anything I put my mind to.

O Lord, don't damn her for lying to a kid.

The vocabulary I needed had to be out there somewhere, so why not Intro to English Lit? But when we read Beowulf, I did not see myself. We discussed two books of Paradise Lost, but I couldn't care less about the catalogue of demons. We read "Tintern Abbey" and I felt nothing.

I retreated home for Christmas, and our house was silent. Dad made a great show of all of it, but I saw the recycling bin in the garage that was brimming with empty bottles and cans. He didn't drink a drop during my time at home, but I smelled the desperation on him. He must have been so thirsty.

After he went to bed, I sat by the window and watched the snow fall. We were coming up on the one year anniversary. I hadn't written the poem that would make sense of the world in time for the funeral, but maybe I could for the anniversary of your departure.

I sat with my legal pad and my pen and I watched the snow.

Over the past year, I'd learned about how you first expressed depressed feelings as a melancholy teenager. No one had ever told me before that you spent your 22nd birthday on a psych ward at a hospital. I searched the house for the journals that you'd kept so diligently across your life only for Dad to tell me that you'd recycled them all about a month before the gunshot. I had so many questions, and I had so few answers, and I still did not know how to write everything I felt.

The snow fell, uncaring.

The problem was that I didn't have the words to express how much I loved you. I could tell, but I could never show. And at the same time, I lacked the language to explain how much I hated you. It felt like you'd abandoned me and gone somewhere beyond the reach of love and hate.

I made myself a cup of tea. It fogged up the window. With the tip of my finger, I wrote the words that came closest to expressing my feelings.

Mommy I miss you.

Then I watched until the window cleared.