Local author takes on task of sharing daughter’s poetic journey through cancer

Morgan M. Hurley | Downtown News Editor

Established poet, author, and SDCNN theater critic Charlene Baldridge always expected that her only daughter would one day publish her more personal works posthumously; what she didn’t expect was to take on the task of publishing her daughter’s works that way, not the reverse.

Laura Jeanne Morefield was an avid poet and writer in her own right, though she spent the majority of her career in banking and then philanthropy. A graduate of Madison High School in Clairemont Mesa, she went on to get a communications degree from Pepperdine University later in her life.

Married for almost 30 years, Morefield chose to travel extensively with her mother the last 10 years of her life and the two had just completed a cruise through the Baltics a few months prior to her diagnosis.

Morefield lived her life artfully and generously, always on the go, her mother said. In fact, when Morefield was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in November of 2008, she had triumphantly walked off an 18-hole golf course just two days prior.

A nagging pain in her side prompted her to finally visit a doctor, and for the next two-and-one-half years, Morefield faced the most challenging battle of her life. Baldridge said she continued to play golf to the very end.

Morefield’s choice to document that battle was not a surprise to her mother, who had enjoyed a collaborative relationship with her daughter, sharing first-draft poetry readings with her for decades. What was a surprise to Baldridge was the day her daughter gave her an assignment.

In the book’s preface, Baldridge describes the assignment.

“In one of her last conversations with her mother, Charlene Baldridge, Laura, a lifelong poet, expressed the wish that her post-diagnosis poems be collected and made into a chapbook. She believed them to be her best. These, then, are but a few fruits of the warrior’s last years.”

Baldridge’s first draft of her daughter’s work amounted to about two-dozen poems, all piecing together the difficult journey Morefield had undertaken. Baldridge said she thought she was done, but soon her son-in-law alerted her to the many more poems he found in various stages of completed prose while perusing her personal journals.

Morefield’s husband hired someone to “extract” the poems from the journals, something Baldridge could have done but not without bearing witness to personal thoughts in and around the poems that she knew she’d be better left without knowing.

Though the extraction amounted to 66 more poems that clearly fit the task at hand, Baldridge, after much thought and counsel, said she decided against using them out of respect for her daughter’s privacy. As a minor compromise, Baldridge pulled nine or ten fragments and/or poems from the journals and included a few others written throughout Morefield’s life to add context when needed.

Baldridge said she went through each poem, each fragment, each line of prose with “a fine tooth comb,” to ensure the line breaks, punctuation and spelling were accurate. The finished chapbook, titled “The Warrior’s Stance,” contains 39 poems. It was a “painstaking and emotional” task, but something Baldridge is very proud of.

“It was a wonderful thing to be with her through the work,” she said.

The title comes directly from two of the poems – a metaphor often assigned to those challenged with cancer, Baldridge said, as Morefield summed up her role in the battle for her life.

“Although definitely she was a pacifist and did not approve of that metaphor, she never found anything that applied better,” Baldridge said.

In a moment of serendipity during the editing process, Baldridge recalled that years before, she had a random encounter with a homeless man and felt the need to sketch him upon returning home.

Now, decades later, screen-printed on the cover of “The Warrior’s Stance” and dressed in Morefield’s favorite colors, that random sketch has finally reached its destiny.

Another unique and personal touch was the choice Baldridge made to use her daughter’s cursive pulled directly from her journals to adorn the borders of each page in the chapbook.

Morefield preferred to write on graph notebooks and the fine-lined boxes are evident in between her handwriting along the borders.

As mother and confidant first, and now editor, Baldridge has carefully woven her daughter’s journey together in a dramatic arc, and added notes when needed to assist the reader with even deeper insight to the work. It is not hard while reading to realize just how challenging this must have been for her.

The work ends with a poem written by Morefield’s husband, titled “She Died Midsummer,” which acts as a proper post-script as he uses his late wife’s similar style and prose.

The chapbook will come with a matching bookmark, and all the proceeds from the book will go to the Colon Cancer Alliance.

“By some miraculous, mysterious process, the book was completed by mother suffering eyestrain and too many trips back to the scans, hoping to decipher words, make out punctuation and hew to Laura’s intent as much as possible regarding line lengths, words, repetitions, dashes etc.,” Baldridge said. “[The] big deal was, did she really want ampersands – or should ‘and’ be spelled out? I’ll find out when I next see her.”

A publication party has been set for March 25, from 4-7 p.m. at ion theatre company, 3704 Sixth Ave. in Hillcrest. Refreshments will be served. If you’d like to attend, RSVP to the editor, Charlene Baldridge, at [email protected].

To donate to the Colon Cancer Alliance in Morefield’s name, visit ccalliance.org/laura. Baldridge also has a blog morefieldandbaldridge.blogspot.com.

Excerpts from The Warrior’s Stance, ©2013

The thing with brambles

Today, I planted Arapaho blackberries – just

seedlings. So delicate in their small tangle of green

on tender stems. If experts are to be believed,

my first crop of berries will be two springs hence.

The crop of cells that grew wild

in my bowels – that spread suckers to liver

and lung – experts have their predictions

about that fruit, too. Few expect me to taste the distant

spring’s berries.

So why plant them?

Why turn the clay of our natural soil shovel by shovel,

mixing in the dark amendments? Why cultivate

and water and surround with natural deterrents

from out neighborhood’s benign, cotton-raild marauders?

A more realistic woman, more

practical, might use the space instead for flowers

or greenery – even for the small comfort of ground cover

or the parsimonious sipping of desert grasses. I am not

she. I am a woman who plants blackberries, not promised

to taste them. But hoping. Yes.

Hoping for the tiny burstings of dark fruit.

––

Excerpt from “The work at hand”

A warrior keeps her back leg strong, connected

to the earth. She faces her hips forward.

She lifts hands and face skyward as

her front leg leans into the territory of the enemy

as far as, as long as, her breath will take her.

––

I am not my cancer (a journal fragment)

I am not my cancer. I am me –

lover of Dan, Child of God, squarer of

shoulders, digger of weeds and mistress

of words.