I lived in an old brick apartment building in Fort Morgan that had about sixteen one bedroom units. It was next to the post office, just off the main drag, and was in a U-shape that opened to the west. Six garden apartments faced each other across a courtyard that was filled with several large trees, cottonwoods with huge, scarred trunks, which during a scorching summer had kept my apartment quite comfortable. The base of the U had four units, two up and two down. I lived in the upstairs unit to the south.

After I had lived there for about a year, a family moved in to the downstairs north unit. They may have moved in from out of town. Mother and father, a daughter and her husband or a brother, and a younger brother about high school age. I only met them a few times, picking up mail or entering or leaving the building. They were readily friendly as I found most people on the eastern plains. The family only lived there a month or so, they must have been terribly cramped in that apartment, then moved to a house nearby; I recall once waving to them as they sat on their porch.

I probably had the most contact with the younger boy. When my bother’s sister-in-law and her husband dropped in on me entirely unexpectedly while driving across country in their converted bus, they had run into him and asked about me. When I came home sometime later, I saw the boy outside the apartment, and it was with some awe he described Dick’s long ponytail, confusing even me with whom I might know with such long hair. When I went to a Police or Cars concert at McNichols Arena in Denver, I ran into him outside as we reached the steps leading into the arena, and we both enjoyed the gentle irony that we should meet in such a large crowd so far from Fort Morgan.

Several years later, while I was living in Greeley, there was a shooting on I-76 in which a motorist had been killed near Fort Morgan. I followed the story with interest. After a short time, two young men were arrested. Out of boredom and curiosity, the papers reported, they had parked one of their cars on the highway with the emergency flashers on. One of them hid in the trunk, and the first motorist who stopped was shot as he came around to the back of the car. Beyond the boredom, nothing in the stories sparked a memory.

At a later point, a photo in the Rocky Mountain News accompanied a story regarding a court hearing for one of the two boys. It was not a great shot, black and white, from the side and down low as I recall, the boy sitting at the defendant’s table in his prison jump suit. The caption named the defendant in the picture, and referenced the name of his co-defendant. As I read the caption, I realized that it had misidentified the defendant in the picture and switched his name with that of his co-defendant. Even though his name had not rung a bell for me in previous stories, seeing it so close to a photograph allowed me to recognize the boy in the photo as the boy who had lived below me several years before. This was that friendly kid. I don’t think he was the shooter, and I believe he pled to a reduced charge in return for testifying against his friend.

The genesis of Lifer Mom came about many years later. For whatever reason, one day I happened to reflect back upon the incident. I was struck with how much pain the mother of the boy I had known must have suffered. She was a small woman with a somewhat tired look about her already when I had known the family. That is the story of this poem.

I can’t leave this off without some mention of the victim. All of the newspaper stories indicated that he was a well-liked, thoughtful kid, nineteen years old. Just the kind of person who would stop to help a stranded motorist. He had grown up in or near Sterling, and had been a wrestler in high school. He graduated from Northeastern Junior College in Sterling, just started at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, and was returning home for the weekend. The pain his mother, family and friends have suffered is in no way diminished or any less noble than the mother's pain I've tried to evoke.