Grief, Joy, and the Language of Losing Andrea Gibson (Full Transcript)

[00:00:14] Speaker 1: That's Serena Partridge, a singer and choir director I met in Minneapolis last week, and like so many people I spoke with there, she talked about the grief she's feeling.

[00:00:24] Speaker 2: Our grief needs our attention. It's a really important part of our human experience, and the more we try to quiet it down and not look at it, I think the more insistent and engrossing it can become. And it can be so scary to really turn to it. But our grief and our love are like the same entity. And if you are not making space for the grief and heartbreak, I think you're also dimming down the love. So it feels really a different kind of urgent to find ways to let our grief move in a held container so we're not going to be completely undone by it. But we're also not going to pretend it's not there, because the heartbreak is really important. My community deserves my love, which kind of means that my community deserves my grief, too.

[00:01:27] Speaker 1: How to let grief move in a held container so as not to be undone by it. Well, that's something I very much still struggle with, and maybe you do, too. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, you're not alone. My guest today is writer-poet Megan Falley, who was married to the poet Andrea Gibson. Andrea died last summer after a years-long battle with cancer. As you'll hear in the interview, Megan says Andrea allegedly died, and I kind of love her explanation of why she says that. My interview with her is right after a break. Welcome back. My guest today is Megan Falley. She's a writer and poet and the spouse of the late poet Andrea Gibson. Andrea was 49 and died last summer after a long struggle with ovarian cancer. Andrea used the pronouns they and them. And I want to show you a clip from the documentary that was made about Andrea and Megan as they faced Andrea's illness together. It's called Come See Me in the Good Light.

[00:02:27] Speaker 3: I wrote a new kind of bucket list. It isn't an index of wild adventures. It requires no bungee jumps, wingsuits, or hot air balloons. No passport stamps or dolphin swims. As riveting as those things may be, none of them ignite me as much as what most of us were taught to think of as the little things. These are my biggest, tiniest dreams. To sit with the mourning dove who cries for her lost love. To mend a friend's clothes with my grandmother's thimbles. How about my power drill? We might need your power drill. There are four squirrels here, and they fight when I bring out nuts. So I got these houses. To watch a squirrel rebuild her nest in the only pine that survived the storm. Yes.

[00:03:22] Speaker 4: Yes.

[00:03:24] Speaker 5: Yes.

[00:03:25] Speaker 3: To fix the mailbox after the snowplow knocks it down.

[00:03:28] Speaker 4: I came out and the mailbox was completely gone, with all our mail in it too. Have you looked for the mailbox? I mean, why? Have you seen it? To fix the mailbox after the windstorm knocks it down. This seems weird that it comes with a kid's thing, like is it for children?

[00:03:38] Speaker 3: No, it's an actual mailbox. But look at this. To fix the mailbox after a bear knocks it down, and a hundred times again. Gibby had this aesthetically pleasing solution. To say goodnight to my mother every night of the year. Alright mom, sweet dreams, bye.

[00:04:11] Speaker 1: I spoke to Megan Fowley several weeks ago. Thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. A lot of times people ask the question, how are you doing? But I know that I read what you wrote about that question that you get. And I wonder, can you just talk a little bit about why that question, how are you doing, doesn't feel right?

[00:04:35] Speaker 6: I ended up writing that that question feels like a thimble at the mouth of the river. That it is just this tiny little container asking to hold something that feels so rushing and just that has so much magnitude and it's just an impossible mechanism to hold it all. It's also really unspecific about like, how am I doing when? Like in the last four months or this week or right now in this moment. And so I think that a better question to ask somebody in grief is maybe, sometimes I just like to share an image of something I'm experiencing and let, and maybe that's as a writer, but and let the person I'm talking to feel the image. And so like right now before I got on, I was trying to roll up my sleeves and realized that Andrea would always roll up my sleeves for me and how cumbersome it is to try to do that by myself.

[00:05:44] Speaker 1: Have you noticed the difference of doing things by yourself a lot since Andrea's been gone?

[00:05:53] Speaker 6: Certainly. I think I've never lived alone before until now. And I do this thing sometimes where I just sort of whisper to Andrea, I just say like, put your arms around me. I just said it before we got on camera together and then I could feel Andrea at my back too. So I'm hesitant to use the words like alone or without them.

[00:06:19] Speaker 1: Is grief different than you thought it would be?

[00:06:24] Speaker 6: Yes, it is. I don't think that I thought that I would be able to have as much joy as I've had. In some ways I think Andrea has been maybe my magnificent teacher because these last four years what they've been trying to show the world is how much joy and presence and love they were able to experience with a cancer diagnosis. And so I guess if I wasn't able to find joy and laughter now, I would have missed the point of Andrea's messaging. I also feel like I'm in a very unique position because I'm right now like on a tour promoting the documentary about Andrea and our love story. And for a lot of people, you lose somebody unless and unless people speak their name. And I'm having in person that experience where more people are learning of Andrea and that's unique and really special and a privilege.

[00:07:45] Speaker 1: Andrea wrote a love letter from the afterlife and I'd like to just play part of it.

[00:07:53] Speaker 3: 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 okay. 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?

[00:08:48] Speaker 1: That idea of to die is to be reincarnated in those we love is so extraordinary to me. I mean, I've never heard it said in that way and that dying is the opposite of leaving. Do you feel that? Do you believe that's true?

[00:09:10] Speaker 6: It is the most singularly, the most comforting thought that I could have. It's the most, I'm just going to make up a word, but like warm blankety piece of writing or thing that I could feel. And I, of course, I don't know, but I choose to believe it.

[00:09:38] Speaker 1: When I heard it, I started crying because I mean, that idea is so, it is so comforting and it's not something I've been able to feel most of my life until recently of feeling like my dad again, which is just one of, I wish there were more people I felt, but it's a start and, but I love, I just find that so incredibly comforting. What was it about Andrea? Did you know right away, like this is my person?

[00:10:08] Speaker 6: We were friends for, for a really long time and they felt pretty untouchable to me. We had a 13 year age difference and I just, I didn't let my brain even go there. And then once it did go there, it never left. Yeah. We fell in love on a dance floor.

[00:10:31] Speaker 1: I mean, I've done that a couple of times, but it often doesn't last past the dance floor.

[00:10:39] Speaker 6: Yeah, it lasted a long time past the dance floor. I think we, we sort of didn't stop dancing and then we kept, we really started dancing even more throughout their diagnosis. Like that sounds metaphorical, but literally we, we were always dancing and kind of like two kids putting on a living room show at all times. We just had fun together.

[00:11:03] Speaker 1: There's part of the film, which is so beautiful. It's something Andrea said about something that happened after you both took a car ride and a feeling that, that Andrea had. And I don't display that.

[00:11:18] Speaker 7: I feel like I lived so much longer in these last years than I did all the years before. It was just this f***ing wow. I, wow, I got this life and I know I'm not going to die today. Like I feel pretty certain. It's so wow, like wow, I get tomorrow too. So what happens next? I don't know. I want to live in the mystery, you know.

[00:12:05] Speaker 8: I want my very last second to be like, damn, I wish I had a million more of these.

[00:12:19] Speaker 1: Is that what you feel that Andrea's last second was like?

[00:12:24] Speaker 6: One of the few like lucid things that Andrea said was I f***ing loved my life. They said that to a room, their parents, four ex-girlfriends, um, TIG, uh, yeah, so a few people they hadn't made out with. And I think it really stunned everybody in the room. Andrea died over the course of three days and really wanted to live longer. They loved this life. They loved this planet and wanted to be a hundred years old for sure. So yeah, I will say they definitely wanted more, more seconds here.

[00:13:04] Speaker 1: TIG said it was a gift to be not only there in that time, but to be and hear Andrea say I f***ing loved my life.

[00:13:17] Speaker 6: Yeah, there's, I think the way that people navigate their own death or illness experience has a profound impact on the people around them witnessing it. And I will say like my relationship to death has changed profoundly since watching Andrea die.

[00:13:38] Speaker 1: How so?

[00:13:38] Speaker 6: I, I mean, this is going to sound morbid and I don't mean it this way because I also would really like to live a long time, but I don't feel afraid of it because I feel that I will meet Andrea there and I will just preface like I didn't, didn't grow up with any kind of religion or anything, but Andrea was just such a, was so much energy and spirit and it doesn't feel possible for that to be gone. And so where is that? And I feel like dying will be the answer to that or the reunion of that. And it just, it intrigues me a bit more than, more than I would say it ever had. Again, not, not rushing it in any way.

[00:14:39] Speaker 1: You're not afraid of it in the way you might have been before.

[00:14:43] Speaker 6: Yeah. I mean, Andrea died at home. They died in our bed. You know, their heartbeat stopped beneath my hand. Like I, they don't, I don't think there's a way to get, to get closer. And that was my experience.

[00:14:59] Speaker 1: You felt Andrea's heartbeat stop?

[00:15:02] Speaker 6: Yeah. I don't know if I've ever told this story, but the last thing I said to Andrea was, you're, I said, you're a star, you're a comet. And it was seconds after that, that their heart stopped. And my friends who were there told me, I remember that, but they told me that that afterward, I said to Andrea, you did it like, like, congratulations, like you did it.

[00:15:33] Speaker 1: We're going to take a short break when we come back more with Megan Fowley. Welcome back. We're talking to writer Megan Fowley. Living with the, that diagnosis for, for four years, did you, did you grieve before Andrea died? Did you feel a form of grief or allow yourself to feel a form of grief while Andrea was alive?

[00:16:02] Speaker 6: I think subconsciously that must have always been going on just to welcome mortality into our home and have conversations. And there was definitely never a day since their diagnosis that I didn't think about cancer. Um, I believed that if anybody in this planet had a chance of being the miracle or having a radical remission or anything like that, it would have been Andrea because they were so miraculous in so many ways. And I held a lot of hope right through the end. And so did Andrea. I mean, they were in the last week of their life. They were on oxygen, but they were also refusing to eat sugar because they wanted to stay healthy in the very last days. And so I think we're both really, um, made of hope. Um, I'm a very present person. I don't worry. Uh, which is really, really confounds people, but I really don't tend to worry. Um, and so I feel like my grief really came most as, as it was happening. I wasn't really grieving Andrea before that. I was celebrating Andrea and loving Andrea and living with them.

[00:17:42] Speaker 1: I saw something you wrote where you say you started to use the word allegedly when you talk about Andrea's death, which I kind of love. Can you talk about that a little bit?

[00:17:54] Speaker 6: It felt so weird to, to talk with such certainty to say Andrea died as if any of us even know what that means. We actually don't know what it means. I don't think.

[00:18:11] Speaker 1: No, I mean, it's true.

[00:18:14] Speaker 6: And I, I had felt so many sort of signs and communications that it felt, it just didn't feel right. And it still doesn't to say Andrea died. There's been a lot of little, just little nods, maybe, or winks, cosmic flirtations. I do. I really, I do. Um, I mean, there've been some that feel like too wild to ignore, and then there feel like other things where, um, maybe I'm like choosing to see it a bit more and, and why wouldn't I make that choice? So I, I, I love saying that Andrea allegedly died, um, to my limited understanding of a body and a spirit. Andrea's language is very important to me. So if, if I feel like something is not quite getting it right, I'm going to make whatever adjustments I need.

[00:19:28] Speaker 1: I think that I invite you to try it. Well, no, I, I mean, I, I'm, I'm crying because, uh, what you said is so unique and I think true and yeah, we have no idea what, what this means, you know? I mean, yeah, we have no idea what death means. I understand you played a song by Andrea's bedside. Could you tell us a little bit about the significance of it? And especially playing it at that moment.

[00:20:03] Speaker 6: So when the hospice nurses told me that, um, they would sedate Andrea, I didn't actually understand what that meant. I thought that meant Andrea would be sort of like loopy, but feeling, I didn't know it would mean like pretty non-responsive, non-verbal. And I, uh, was in tremendous grief because I thought we would have more conversation. Or like when that time came, we would just talk about, at least say like, hey, it's going to happen now and just have whatever our final words would be. And I felt robbed of that, but within an hour or so of having that intense, bereft feeling, uh, our friend, the musician, Chris Parica sent me a text message that said, you've never heard this and Andrea has never heard this, but Andrea wrote a love song for you. It's a song about their death and how they will come back to you. And I, I just want to send it to you now. And I, when I first played it and you know, the hospice nurses tell you, they can hear you keep talking. Um, I, I watched just their, like, I don't remember if it was their smile twitch or their eyebrow raise, but I saw some recognition in the face of what it was.

[00:21:42] Speaker 1: Let's play some, some of that.

[00:21:57] Speaker 5: It will carry me somehow. Don't say goodbye forever, not too far. The other side's just a stone's throw from loving you got a great arm. You've got a great arm. I think that's a good thing. I had, I had Wow.

[00:23:23] Speaker 1: That's extraordinary. I love, I love those words. Hold, hold down the fort.

[00:23:30] Speaker 5: Yeah.

[00:23:31] Speaker 1: Do you feel like you're holding down the fort?

[00:23:36] Speaker 6: Huh? Sure. Yeah. I feel like, um, I am now, uh, Andrea carried and held so many people through life, through their art, their poetry was a lifeline for a lot of people dealing with mental health struggles or, um, gender queerness or really heartbreak anything. And now I sort of feel like in their death, I'm holding hundreds of thousands of people who, who lost Andrea.

[00:24:22] Speaker 1: I saw on your Instagram, uh, incredible moment between you two, uh, with, uh, with an aging filter, an app that does sort of aging. Can you talk a little bit about what it is? And I just, if it's okay, I'd love to show people that.

[00:24:40] Speaker 6: Yeah. Um, Andrea had received really hard news, um, but they'd had a metastasis on their bone. And this was about a year and a half ago. And I ended up on Tik TOK and saw that there was an aging filter and I just something lit up in my head, which was like, oh, I need Andrea to see me old. And I need Andrea to see themselves old, but also I think the deeper knowledge that they would likely not see those images in a mirror and get the opportunity to see them somehow.

[00:25:20] Speaker 1: Let's take a look.

[00:25:23] Speaker 6: Today would have been your 50th birthday. I wanted you to see this day so badly. So did you, when you were only 48, you told people you were 50. That's how much you wanted to get here. I have a measly wrinkle collection compared to my end goal. You once wrote, now that you're gone, I see these videos of you and almost lose my mind with grief because it's proof of something that has always been true. I would have loved you at 80, at 100, at 142. When our friends complained about the physical evidence of getting older, the age spot, the skin sag, the detritus of living, it stung us both. We knew how unlikely it was that you would live to see your hair turn completely silver, but what is more valuable than silver in the loved one's hair?

[00:26:19] Speaker 1: So beautiful.

[00:26:22] Speaker 6: You know, it's so wild because they're so cute. When I watch the film, I just think, God, you're so like, I still have such a crush on them, which is a weird feeling, you know?

[00:26:36] Speaker 1: A love letter from the afterlife. It's one thing to hear it while Andrea was there. I'm wondering, hearing it now that they're allegedly dead, do you hear it differently? Do you hear things in it that you didn't hear before?

[00:26:53] Speaker 6: The new line sort of hits me every time, which feels fortunate, but I really love the line. I'm more with you than I ever could have been. So close, you look past me when wondering where I am. The day is when I find Andrea hard to find, that's extremely comforting. That it's me who's missing them, not Andrea not being there.

[00:27:24] Speaker 1: Is there something you've learned in your grief that would be helpful for others?

[00:27:28] Speaker 6: I think when I first saw the film again after Andrea died, a lot of people would be like, how can you do that? How can you sit in it? How can you sort of open this thing up again? And for me, I can't imagine another way through, but to keep opening it up, to keep watching it, to keep sitting inside of it. And it's such a gift to me that I just keep getting to throw myself back into images of them or their words and hold them in that way. And so I feel like because I am so fully experiencing Andrea still is the reason that I'm not depressed because I'm not locking it away in the door. And that's obviously, I've like snot pouring down my face. So it's not to say I'm not crying, but I am not numb. Andrea would say that not shutting yourself off to grief or sadness or anger is that you can't shut yourself off to those things and keep the channel for joy. Open that you have to allow yourself to feel every feeling that comes up so that you too can feel joy and feel love.

[00:28:58] Speaker 1: That for me has been one of the revelations of my life and that is only I've only learned or maybe I'd heard it once before, but I only learned it and feel it in the last year or two of my life because I'm talking about what I've run my whole life from, which is grief and loss. And it's so true that you cannot have one without the other. You can't have joy without allowing yourself to feel sadness. And it's extraordinary to me that so many of us, and I hear from so many people who have run from grief their entire life and lived in this kind of middle ground of no high highs and to avoid the low lows, to avoid the pain of feeling the loss of the person they love. They've robbed themselves and I've robbed myself of feeling tremendous joy. And yeah, I think that's such an important thing that you bring up and I'm glad you did. Is there anything else you want people to know about Andrea, about anything?

[00:30:11] Speaker 6: I think what Andrea's main message was, what they most wanted to pass on is the idea that there's not, there are certain circumstances in life where we're kind of given a prescription of emotion or taught like you get divorced or you lose somebody or you are sick or something happens and so you should feel mad at the world, or you should feel like you should come with this bitterness or something. And I think Andrea wanted people to see that there wasn't, that there isn't, that they found joy in what they did not believe that they could find joy in. And they want people to know that that's possible.

[00:31:05] Speaker 1: Meg, long live Andrea Gibson. Thank you.

[00:31:09] Speaker 6: Long live Andrea Gibson. Thank you so much.

[00:31:14] Speaker 1: I'm rooting for you.

[00:31:17] Speaker 6: Do you know that's how I sign all my books? Are you kidding?

[00:31:21] Speaker 1: It's so funny you say that because I literally started saying this, I don't say it to everybody, but I started saying it this summer to some people who I am genuinely rooting for. I hadn't heard anybody really saying it, but I just started saying it and the ripple effects of it are really fascinating. I said it to this guy named Jesse Itzler who is all over Instagram, he's just this like force of nature and I've met him years ago and I just think he's a lovely guy and like putting great things out into the world and I just randomly said to him, you know, I'm rooting for you. And he kind of looked at me oddly and then he came back to me the next day because we were at this conference, he came back to me the next day and he said, you know, I've been thinking about what you said about rooting for you and I think it's like the greatest way, it's the nicest thing to say to somebody like I'm in your corner, I'm rooting for you. I love that that's how you sign your books.

[00:32:17] Speaker 6: Yeah, I've had a sign of it in my house. I also, the other way I tell people, yeah, I also say stay tender.

[00:32:26] Speaker 1: Yeah, stay tender. I like that. Yeah, that's good.

[00:32:31] Speaker 6: Either one. It depends.

[00:32:34] Speaker 1: Meg, thank you so much.

[00:32:36] Speaker 6: Thank you so much.

[00:32:39] Speaker 1: Come See Me in the Good Light is now streaming on Apple TV. Next week on Thursday, February 12th, join me at 9.15 p.m. Eastern for my live streaming show, All There Is Live. To watch, just go to cnn.com slash all there is. If you missed the live stream, it will be posted the following day for a week on the site. If there's something you've learned in your grief that you think would be helpful for others, or you want to tell us about your own grief experiences, feel free to leave us a voicemail at 1-404-827-1805. You can also send us a video message and email it to us at all there is at cnn.com or send it to us on Instagram at all there is. Thanks for listening.