Dying Is the Opposite of Leaving
In Memoriam: Andrea Gibson and Their Voice Across the Veil. Read, maybe grieve, but believe that they lived a full life.
The world feels quieter today. Andrea Gibson1, an award-winning American poet and spoken word artist has died. In the strange mathematics of grief and love, their absence feels like presence. "Dying is the opposite of leaving," they said and it feels so.
For three decades, Andrea's voice cut through the static of a chaotic world. But for us on Indian Subcontinent, when the spoken word poetry began gaining traction around 2015, there were few poets on YouTube who lit candles on our paths. Andrea was one of the brightest, warmest, candle among candles. A being of light, I'd like to think.
Andrea had cancer since 2021 and with vulnerability and grace they kept us close, updated, connected. Through a season of winter in their life, they remained warm. Their words a lighthouse for anyone lost in storms of identity, trauma, love, and loss.
Andrea possessed a rare ability to transform deepest wounds into windows of understanding. In "Instead of Depression," they offered us a revolutionary reframing:
Instead of Depression try calling it hibernation. Imagine the darkness is a cave in which you will be nurtured by doing absolutely nothing. Hibernating animals don’t even dream. It’s okay if you can’t imagine Spring. Sleep through the alarm of the world. Name your hopelessness a quiet hollow, a place you go to heal, a den you dug, Sweetheart, instead of a grave.
This is hard-won wisdom of someone who had walked through the valley of the shadow and returned with maps for the rest of us. Andrea validated shadows, and the low seasons of existence. Notice how they insisted on resilience.
In “Tincture,” they imagined the soul grieving the loss of the body, missing not just the beauty but the bruises, and the stubbed toes, and the funny bones:
Imagine, when a human dies, the soul misses the body, actually grieves the loss of its hands and all they could hold. Misses the throat closing shy reading out loud on the first day of school. Imagine the soul misses the stubbed toe, the loose tooth, the funny bone. The soul still asks, Why does the funny bone do that? It’s just weird. Imagine the soul misses the thirsty garden cheeks watered by grief. Misses how the body could sleep through a dream. What else can sleep through a dream? What else can laugh? What else can wrinkle the smile’s autograph? Imagine the soul misses each falling eyelash waiting to be a wish. Misses the wrist screaming away the blade. The soul misses the lisp, the stutter, the limp. The soul misses the holy bruise blue from that army of blood rushing to the wound’s side. When a human dies, the soul searches the universe for something blushing, something shaking in the cold, something that scars, sweeps the universe for patience worn thin, the last nerve fighting for its life, the voice box aching to be heard. The soul misses the way the body would hold another body and not be two bodies but one pleading god doubled in grace. The soul misses how the mind told the body, You have fallen from grace. And the body said, Erase every scripture that doesn’t have a pulse. There isn’t a single page in the bible that can wince, that can clumsy, that can freckle, that can hunger. Imagine the soul misses hunger, emptiness, rage, the fist that was never taught to curl—curled, the teeth that were never taught to clench—clenched, the body that was never taught to make love—made love like a hungry ghost digging its way out of the grave. The soul misses the unforever of old age, the skin that no longer fits. The soul misses every single day the body was sick, the now it forced, the here it built from the fever. Fever is how the body prays, how it burns and begs for another average day. The soul misses the legs creaking up the stairs, misses the fear that climbed up the vocal cords to curse the wheelchair. The soul misses what the body could not let go— what else could hold on that tightly to everything? What else could see hear the chain of a swingset and fall to its knees? What else could touch a screen door and taste lemonade? What else could come back from a war and not come back? But still try to live? Still try to lullaby? When a human dies the soul moves through the universe trying to describe how a body trembles when it’s lost, softens when it’s safe, how a wound would heal given nothing but time. Do you understand? Nothing in space can imagine it. No comet, no nebula, no ray of light can fathom the landscape of awe, the heat of shame. The fingertips pulling the first gray hair and throwing it away. I can’t imagine it, the stars say. Tell us again about goosebumps. Tell us again about pain.
This was Andrea's theology: that grace lives in our imperfections, that the divine resides in our most human moments. They celebrated the body as a holy text, written in scars and laughter, in the way we hold each other and become "one pleading god doubled in grace."
Even Andrea's love poems were about the revolutionary act of choosing connection in a world that suffers from isolation. In "Maybe I Need You," they wrote with the raw honesty of someone who understood that love is both magic and melting ice:
The winter I told you I think icicles are magic, you stole an enormous icicle from a neighbor’s shingle and gave it to me as a gift. I kept it in my freezer for seven months until the day I hurt my foot and needed something to reduce the swelling. Love isn’t always magic— sometimes it’s just melting or it’s black and blue where it hurts the most. Last night I saw your ghost pedaling a bicycle with a basket towards a moon as full as my heavy head and I wanted nothing more than to be sitting in that basket like E.T. with my glowing heart glowing right through my chest and my glowing finger pointing in the direction of our home. Two years ago I said I never want to write our break-up poem; you built me a time capsule full of Big League Chew and promised to never burst my bubble. I loved you from our first date at the batting cages when I missed 23 balls in a row and you looked at me like I was a home run in the ninth inning of the World Series. Now every time I hear the word love, I think going, going… The first week you were gone, I kept seeing your hand wave goodbye like a windshield wiper in a flooding car in the last real moment I believed the hurricane would let me out alive. Yesterday I carved your name into the surface of an ice cube then held it against my chest till it melted into my aching pores. Today I cried so hard the neighbors knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to borrow some sugar. I told them I left my sweet tooth in your belly button. Love isn’t always magic. But if I offered my life to the magician— if I told her to cut me in half so tonight I could come to you whole and ask for you back— would you listen for this dark alley love song? For the winter we heated our home from the steam off our own bodies? I wrote you too many poems in a language I did not yet know how to speak. But I know now it doesn’t matter how well I say grace if I am sitting at a table where I am offering no bread to eat. So this is my wheat field; you can have every acre, Love. This is my garden song. This is my fist fight with that bitter frost. Tonight I begged another stage light to become that back alley streetlamp that we danced beneath the night your warm mouth fell on my timid cheek as I sang maybe I need you off key but in tune. Maybe I need you the way that big moon needs that open sea. Maybe I didn’t even know I was here ’til I saw you holding me. Give me one room to come home to— give me the palm of your hand. Every strand of my hair is a kite string and I have been blue in the face with your sky, crying a flood over Iowa so your mother can wake to Venice. Lover, I smashed my glass slipper to build a stained glass window for every wall inside my chest. Now my heart is a pressed flower and a tattered Bible. It is the one verse you can trust. So I’m putting all of my words in your collection plate. I am setting the table with bread and grace. My knees are bent like the corner of a page. I am saving your place.
They reminded us that love requires showing up with "bread and grace," that our hearts can become "a pressed flower and a tattered Bible," and that sometimes the most radical act is simply "saving your place" for someone who may never return.
In their brief but profound "Wellness Check," Andrea distilled a lifetime of therapy, meditation, and self-discovery into a single transformative question:
In any moment, on any given day, I can measure my wellness by this question: Is my attention on loving, or is my attention on who isn’t loving me?
This was a practice, a daily invitation to redirect our energy from lack to abundance, from resentment to radical love.
Even in their exploration of grief and mental health, Andrea never lost their sense of humor. "LALALOL" captured the beautiful absurdity of human miscommunication—a mother sending LOL to grieving friends, thinking it meant Lots Of Love:
And then came the day I discovered my mother had been writing “LOL” on the Facebook walls of her grieving friends. Roger was a kind man. LOL. Susan left this world far too soon. LOL. Heaven has another angel. LOL. Bless her heart and the hearts of the grieving families but I couldn’t help but Laugh Out Loud. My poor mother, trying to send “Lots Of Love” and not knowing how. I knew if I told her she would never be able to forgive herself. But I knew if I didn’t… Jenny will be deeply missed. LOL. You will meet again in a better place. LOL. I’m so so sorry to hear about your loss. LOL. What do we owe to the truth? Certainly not our mothers’ smiles. I couldn’t think of a worse thing to take from someone than the comfort they had offered others. So I stayed quiet, and prayed that if she became the laughing stock of town, the laughers would Laugh Out Loud and she would hear it the way she always had. Just Lots Of Love. Just Lots And Lots And Lots Of Love.
They understood that sometimes the kindest thing we can do is let people be wrong if their wrongness comes from a place of love.
Compassion was a lens Andrea turned inward, too, as they navigated their own journey through mental health, with the same honesty and grace they extended to others. They wrote about nutritionists and psychics, therapists and pharmaceuticals, each offering their own version of salvation:
The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables. Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day I would be grounded, rooted. Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives. The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight. Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do. I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling. You will find a good man soon.” The first psychotherapist told me to spend three hours each day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and my ears plugged. I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet. The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth. Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness when they care more about what they give than what they get. The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamictal, Lithium, Xanax.” The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me forget what the trauma said. The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.” But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River convinced he was entirely alone.” My bones said, “Write the poems.”
It was Andrea's mission to write the poems that would let others know they weren't alone, that their pain mattered, that their stories deserved to be told. They wrote about healing:
Trauma was not being able to get the hands of the clock off me. Healing was learning no one has ever laid a fingerprint on the part of me that's infinite.
In what may be their most profound and prophetic work, “Love Letter from the Afterlife,” Andrea offered us comfort not just for their own departure, but for all the moments we fear losing the ones we love. As if sensing our grief in advance, Andrea left behind a poem that feels like a soft lamp in the hallway of memory, guiding us back to them. What a gift:
My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive? Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I will answer, “How tall are you?” In my back pocket is a love note with every word you wish you’d said. At night I sit ecstatic at the loom weaving forgiveness into our worldly regrets. All day I listen to the radio of your memories. Yes, I know every secret you thought too dark to tell me, and love you more for everything you feared might make me love you less. When you cry I guide your tears toward the garden of kisses I once planted on your cheek, so you know they are all perennials. Forgive me, for not being able to weep with you. One day you will understand. One day you will know why I read the poetry of your grief to those waiting to be born, and they are all the more excited. There is nothing I want for now that we are so close I open the curtain of your eyelids with my own smile every morning. I wish you could see the beauty your spirit is right now making of your pain, your deep seated fears playing musical chairs, laughing about how real they are not. My love, I want to sing it through the rafters of your bones, Dying is the opposite of leaving. I want to echo it through the corridor of your temples, I am more with you than I ever was before. Do you understand? It was me who beckoned the stranger who caught you in her arms when you forgot not to order for two at the coffee shop. It was me who was up all night gathering sunflowers into your chest the last day you feared you would never again wake up feeling lighthearted. I know it’s hard to believe, but I promise it’s the truth. I promise one day you will say it too— I can’t believe I ever thought I could lose you.
Andrea didn’t see death as disappearing. They saw it as becoming even more present. In one of their most beautiful lines, they imagined guiding our tears toward “the garden of kisses I once planted on your cheek, so you know they are all perennials.” That’s how they saw love—always growing, always becoming.
Andrea’s legacy remains in the lives they touched. And maybe the best way to honor them is to live a little more like they did, unafraid of heartbreak, with all our attention on the loving. Oh so gently, and authentically.
Rest easy, Andrea. You were a being of light, and to light you have returned. Thank you for your stretch-marked heart. Thank you for your poetry. Thank you for your presence.
Your poems are still here. And so are you. So are you. <3
If this was your first introduction to Andrea Gibson, your life is about to get abundant. I gently urge you to seek out their work—on YouTube, Tumblr, Substack, or their website. Let their voice accompany you through the tender, the messy, the brave. It’s a lifelong conversation waiting to begin.
Andrea Gibson was the author of seven albums and seven poetry books, including You Better Be Lightning, Lord of the Butterflies, and The Madness Vase. They coauthored How Poetry Can Change Your Heart with Megan Falley and edited the social justice anthology We Will Be Shelter. In 2008, they won the first Women of the World Poetry Slam. Gibson was a two-time Independent Publisher Book Award winner, a three-time Goodreads Choice Awards finalist, and served as Colorado’s poet laureate in 2023. In 2024, they received a Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets.
Gibson lived in Longmont, Colorado, until their death on July 14, 2025. They left this world surrounded by their wife, Meg, four ex-girlfriends, their mother and father, dozens of friends, and their three beloved dogs