Falling Apart Hopefully

for all of us

Andrea Gibson died this morning. They faced terminal cancer with courage and grace. They articulated a relationship with death I think we can learn from. They were a poet for the working class, the queer, the sick, the self-doubting, the people shy and bold sharing their reflections sincere enough to admit we’re all trying to figure out what the fuck it means to live, to love, to survive, to die, to keep loving. Not a poet for the MFAs.

“Whenever I leave this world, whether it’s sixty years from now, I wouldn’t want anyone to say I lost some battle. I’ll be a winner that day.”

For many people, Andrea is an inspiring example of radical acceptance.

I need to say that radical acceptance is neither if it’s rolling over, if we don’t also make a time and a space for those who shoot into crowds, those who bomb kids, those who calculate profit from death, those who fill this world with carcinogens and develop cures and figure out how much we pay for permission to use them. Those people have names and addresses and the time is fast approaching where doing the inevitable deed won’t even help us but we’re going to do it anyway because we’re past questions like “how do I live with myself after” since we saw the cliff coming and should have known it’s not about us it’s about those who come after.

But for today, for tomorrow, for the words that they found and the hope they shared, I’m going to let all my rage collapse in tears the way I did when I heard them perform, and just share the beauty.

Here’s “Love Letter from the Afterlife”

Love Letter From The Afterlife

and, this morning, before I knew and I think before she knew, R sent me this poem. It’s by another poet, and it’s beautiful, and I want to share it with all of you. And anyway, it’s not about one person because “to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive”.

---

to hold

So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into alignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,
she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we’ll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn’t for our having.
So often, fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I’ll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.

--li-young lee

---

thank you