Just One Poem: “When You Find My Body.”

“When You Find My Body” is a poem I wrote and published that relates details from the story of Geraldine Largay, a sixty-six-year-old hiker who went missing from the Appalachian Trail in 2013.

Local law enforcement, the FBI and hundreds of volunteers, including professional rescuers and park wardens searched by foot, horseback, and air. Her body was found in 2015 two miles from the trail next to a notebook that contained a month’s worth of final entries. The title of the poem comes from her final entry, which reads, “When you find my body, please call my husband George and my daughter Kerry.”

Kakalak Journal published my poem, “When You Find My Body” in their 2023 journal. Kakalak is published in North Carolina and features poetry and art in the spirit of the Carolinas. I decided to submit this poem to this journal because my cohort buddy, Kathleen Calby, has had a good experience working with this publication and because this poem takes place on the Appalachian trail which cuts through 96 miles of the state and runs along 220 miles of the border. Along with Kathleen Calby, several other cohort sisters are published in this issue—Anne Cowie and Adriana Estill.

This is a haunting and troubling poem to me, that gets at how no matter how hard we try, we leave life unfinished. Whether it’s tasks we will never finish, goodbyes we won’t get to say, or spiritual revelations we won’t have, we don’t get to control death. There’s a horror and beauty in this—we will always be human. The most human thing we can do, is to love, and Gerry in her final act embodies this for me.

When You Find My Body

I need more words to say, this is not the life

I expected. Just when my cheek sinks into

what I think is dirt-ground level,

there is another layer to go. The root

of suffering is attachment the ancients say,

but how I love light and the way wind laughs

in leaves. I cannot rid myself of craving

white cake with rich frosting. My body

yearns to be covered in thick lotion,

rubbed in by warm, familiar hands,

and I will always own more books

than I can read. What I think I mean

is, I want to carry all I carry and cannot choose

to lighten my burden. Gerry gets this. Gerry,

hiking the Appalachian trail, blistered

and smiling, nearing what she thinks

is the end where a husband of decades

waits with everything familiar, takes a pee,

a misstep and vanishes. She wanders

for days with her too-full pack cutting

deep tracks in her back, her cheap compass,

search planes flying above the soft pines

that drop needles on her face, her waving hands,

and, finally, her bright bones. When they find

her notebook, it is next to her sleeping bag,

under her crumpled orange tent, and the rest

of her and all she carried is gone. She left

everything in the loose pages she wrote

to her husband and child. The letters

were not finished, but they said it all.