"I think of love and truth as the exact same thing."

Rest in Love, Andrea

“I want to live the rest of my life,” poet Audre Lorde, who died of breast cancer in 1992, once wrote, “however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!”

Another great poet-meteor finally crashed to Earth this last week. Andrea Gibson— poetry slam rock star, Poet Laureate of Colorado, dumbstruck lover of life and people and every other living thing, finally succumbed to ovarian cancer on Monday, July 14, 2025. They were 49 years old.

Andrea suffered from anxiety, hypochondria, and serious health issues for decades. They once said they felt the most successful when they managed to get through a performance without having a panic attack. They didn’t care if they forgot words or bombed out completely, just that they didn’t have a panic attack.

But they did have panic attacks regularly, more often than not, and they kept performing anyway. Their willingness to sit in that debilitating discomfort while still offering themself to audiences drew people like moths to a flame. In a culture that commodifies vulnerability to such an extent that it can feel cheap and meaningless, Andrea never shied away from what it actually costs. But, they would insist, it’s worth every penny. I mean, what else are we here for? How else do we experience most viscerally how we’re all connected in this poignant, finite life we’re sharing, except by letting in how truly vulnerable we are?

They said in the following interview, conducted a year after first receiving their cancer diagnosis, that they had done most of their growing by doing things that terrified them.

And yet, despite the way they repeatedly and fiercely marched into terror, they were so committed, especially in the last years of their life, to getting softer, to being more tender and gentle with themself and the world. They wrote in their book You Better Be Lightening, “I know most people try hard to do good and find out too late they should have tried softer.”

Softness, love, celebration, and wonder. There was no one, I will go to my grave swearing, no one who has ever written with more tender fierocity about what it is to have your heart cracked open by awe and astonishment.

I spent the day today down the Andrea rabbit hole— laughing, crying, and feeling grateful to have spent some of my time alive on this Earth at the same time as them. They were a force of light and love that shone brighter in their too-short life than most of us do in twice as long.

“I think of love and truth,” they said in an interview, “as the exact same thing.” So, if you’re ever in a situation where you struggle to practice your integrity and tell the truth, then I’ll refer you back to Andrea. I’ll say, Tell the love. Just tell the love.

Andrea is survived by their wife, the poet, Megan Falley, their three rescue dogs, their parents and siblings, their many friends, and their legions of fans. I hope, along with me, if you weren’t already, you’re now among them.

I know that to be human is to be far-sighted.

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?”

Rest in love, Andrea, poet-meteor. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your light.