For Andrea, for all of us
Image via YouTube/ButtonPoetry
I’ve had an idea for a while to start writing about the intense process of renovating and restoring the 125-year-old house I bought a few months ago, but I can’t stop thinking about Andrea Gibson. They died last week, and it wasn’t necessarily surprising, as they’d been sick for a long time, but it’s just been so… enormous.
I found Andrea’s poetry during a time when I was accepting hard truths about myself, my body, my relationships, my history. For the first time, I was allowing myself to face so much abuse I’d experienced over the course of my life, first from other people, and then from myself. I was also waking up, however tentatively, to the possibility that I could be loved, and that I could defy it all and learn how to love myself.
The first time I encountered Andrea’s words was in a YouTube video of them reading “Boomerang Valentine”, and their voice, their words, the cadence with which they so perfectly described the deep pain and hope and humanness of the space I was in at that moment, felt like a warm hug.
“...Of all the violence I have known in my life
I have never known violence
like the violence I have spoken to myself,
and I have seen almost everyone around me
hold that same belt to their own back,
an ambush of every way we’ve decided we’re not enough,
then looking for someone outside of ourselves
to clean that treason up.
If I were to ask myself out
of that cycle, I might say, Listen,
I am still going through a growth spurt.
I am still yet to get my worst tattoo. I am still trying
to get rid of my mirror face. I am still learning
to look myself dead in the eye.
I know Facebook is a lousy mortician
desperately trying to make us all look more alive.
I know there are things I haven’t survived.
I know there are people who’ve had to work to survive me.
I don’t ever want to take that lightly,
but I want the heavy to anchor me brave, anchor me
loving, anchor me in something that will hold me
to my word when I tell Cupid I intend to keep walking out
to the tip of his arrow, to bend it back toward myself,
to aim for my goodness until the muscle in my chest tears
from the stretch of becoming what I came here to be: a lover
of whatever got covered up by the airbrush,
the truth of me, that beauty of a beast
chewing through the leash
until I got a mason jar full of water lilies
and a kettle full of sea, and my whole life
is a boomerang valentine
coming right back at me.”
It felt like a message from the universe: I see you. They see you, too. It’s going to be OK.
I’ve been a fan of Andrea’s ever since. I’ve celebrated their public triumphs and grieved their diagnosis and cheered as they faced illness and struggle and their own mortality with an openness and fire that burned so brightly it was impossible to look away from.
The whole time, it felt like, wow, look at this special life I’ve gotten to witness. I am so lucky I found them. I am so lucky to be here at the same time as them.
And then, they died. And everything cracked wide open. Suddenly, everyone around me was grieving. My social media feeds were an endless stream of their words and photos and videos. I was getting text messages from people: “You loved them too? I never knew. I loved them so much.”
In death, Andrea taught me again what they’ve taught me all along: We’re all in this together. We’re all the same, even in our unique struggles and truths and hope and pain. Our hearts beat the same. You’re never alone.
It’s such a strange thing to feel so much for someone I’ve never met. It feels foolish, in a way. Parasocial, as the kids would say. But I do feel it. I continue to feel it. It’s not a sense of loss, exactly. I think it’s more like gratitude. I have woken up every day since Andrea died with their words in my heart and gratitude that they existed.
I think it’s something close to what they meant when they wrote, “Dying is the opposite of leaving… I am more with you than I ever was before.”
Andrea Gibson was a force. Their work was love, in all its forms, and love is eternal. How lucky we are that we get to carry that love with us for the rest of time.
