The Dying Poet Who Knew How to Live

The Atlantic

4 days ago

When the poet Andrea Gibson learned two years ago that their ovarian cancer was incurable, the news marked a turning point; Gibson would often say it led to some of the most joyous moments of their life.
Before the terminal prognosis, they were always afraid. They had severe anxiety and chronic panic attacks; they were petrified of the ocean; they couldn't bring themselves to eat nuts on a plane, in case they turned out to have developed a new allergy and might suffocate in flight. For years, they'd lived in constant fear that everything would come crashing down. Then, of course, it did. And just at the moment when patients are frequently pushed to start 'battling' cancer, Gibson finally learned to stop fighting. In an interview last year with the website Freethink, they remembered telling themself: 'I will allow this.'
When Gibson died on Monday, at age 49, those closest to the poet consoled mourning fans by sharing some of Gibson's last words: 'I fucking loved my life.' Accepting their illness and their mortality had transformed Gibson. 'You tap into the brevity of something,' they'd told Freethink, 'and all of a sudden everything becomes more special.'
The idea that facing death can shake you into living life was not, Gibson understood, a new one. But it is particularly fitting for a poet. In verse, brevity is paramount. 'Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful,' the writer Rita Dove once argued. A handful of short lines can capture near-universal emotions and grand existential truths not in spite of their spareness but because of it. Even before their diagnosis, Gibson, the poet laureate of Colorado and the author of seven books, knew this. In Come See Me in the Good Light, a documentary following them and their partner, Megan Falley, that will stream on Apple TV+ this fall, Gibson jokes that their publisher accused them of rearranging the same words over and over in their poems. And certain terms— moon, snow, shotgun, laces, kite —do show up frequently, shuffled around in new variations. (One poem is called ' The Moon Is a Kite.') But the imagery conveys what it needs to, and sometimes it gives you 'goosebumps' (another favorite word). Gibson didn't need much to paint a world—just a small number of apt metaphors, cast in plain but tender language.
Potential weaknesses, in Gibson's poetry, had a way of becoming strengths. The simplicity of their writing made it easy to connect with. Metaphors repeated from one poem to the next placed their work in a shared universe, one in which all the specific fragments of pain or beauty experienced over years felt intrinsically linked. Their verse sometimes risked seeming cloying or sentimental because of how unselfconsciously it concerned love: feeling it, cultivating it, spreading it, protecting it. Much of the time, though, that earnestness felt honest and well earned. When they wrote about burning with righteous indignation on behalf of suicidal queer kids or finding a sense of home in their partner, a reader could sense the intensity of their feeling and the depth of their affection.
And in writing about love again and again, Gibson ended up adopting a rarer theme in poetry: kindness. Two of their other much-used words are soft and gentle —states toward which they seemed to aspire. Nearly every poem is an exercise in empathy, summoning generosity even in response to cruelty. In one poem, Gibson imagines what they would say now to the man who assaulted them when they were 13. They picture how guilt might poison the life he's built for himself; how he might wonder who he could be if he hadn't made that awful decision so many years ago. 'Everyone can / see who they were supposed to be,' they wrote. 'It's the readiest grief in the world.'
To write about kindness in the 21st century is, perhaps, to risk sounding naive or mealy—more concerned with peace than with justice, more set on everyone getting along than on recognizing brutality and inequality. But Gibson wasn't afraid to do the latter either. They wrote with fury about climate change, political failures, religious bigotry, anti-trans violence. They also sought a more universal kind of love; they wondered what pain their ideological opponents had experienced; they wrestled with how to do all this without betraying their political convictions. In ' MAGA Hat in the Chemo Room,' which they performed for NPR, Gibson described their reaction to a fellow patient who kept his Trump hat on during chemotherapy. At first, they were outraged. His apparel felt like an intrusion: Gibson wanted to feel 'that everyone is rooting for me to survive,' and they suspected that a MAGA supporter might not root for the nonbinary poet beside him. But anger gives way to a sense of recognition—they had both felt angst long before the chemo started, and they certainly have it now; Gibson doesn't want to arrive one day to find the MAGA guy's chair empty. This kind of mutual support should feel more attainable in less dire situations, Gibson said, but outside the room, 'everyone thinks they have so much time to kill.'
Facing down death injected Gibson's love poems with urgency; it gave their sense of whimsy and wonder the highest possible stakes. I know that they felt it made them more openhearted, more attuned to life's peculiar beauties. But I keep thinking about one poem, 'Tincture,' which at first I assumed they'd written post-diagnosis—until I realized it was published in 2018. 'Imagine, when a human dies, / the soul misses the body,' they wrote, going on to list the oddities and pains and pleasures of living in a corporeal form. '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.'