Grieving a Stranger-Andrea Gibson

Hello dear ones,

How are your hearts? How is your grief? How is your joy? These are the only things that seem to really matter these days.

I’m grieving the Colorado poet Laureate Andrea Gibson who is such an advocate for full wholehearted living through feeling everything life has to offer-both the grief and the joy. We need both. 

They wrote:

GOOD GRIEF 

Let your heart break

so your spirit

doesn’t.

 

If you don’t know their words, find their words and read them like oxygen. 

Another one:

 

Every falling leaf

is a tiny kite

with a string

too small to see,

held by the part of me

in charge of making beauty

out of grief

I’ve been collecting screen shots of their words on their instagram feed since last Monday, July 14th, the day of their passing. Their instagram story feed is now like an ongoing vigil. I’ve never seen so much love pouring through from so many people like this before. It’s a new way of grieving a stranger I never met yet I felt like I knew their deepest longings and yearnings for love, life and grief through their now legacy of poetry.

 

Just to be clear

I don’t want to get out

without a broken heart.

I intend to leave this life

so shattered 

there better be a thousand separate heavens

for all of my separate parts

 

They are my new grief hero. Go see the film-“Come See Me in the Good Light.” It’s about them and their partner Megan Falley and their experience of having ovarian cancer. When they started filming it, the crew realized that this just wasn’t about Andrea, but it was a love story too. The crew knew how important it was to weave in Megan as their partner and caregiver into the story. It’s something that obviously speaks the language of my soul and story as I continue to navigate my partner’s life with quadriplegia. 

Yesterday while on my walk I was in awe of a bird’s song who I couldn’t see in a cottonwood tree-it was as if the tree had decided to take up singing. And then I thought about how Andrea most likely loved birdsong. And then I thought how glorious it is to be alive and interact with this beautiful world. I stood there is awe of how amazing it is to be alive because someday I’ll be gone too. 

So I thought about Andrea in the afterlife now and wondered if they are enjoying it. Then I said this out loud to them-“Thank you for your amazing life and all your amazing poems. Thanks for inspiring us to keep going even when things are hard and grief-y.” Just then I looked up to wide open hawk’s wings circling above me. 

I didn’t drop to my knees but I could have. I felt seen and confirmed. Thank you Hawk and Andrea for the spiral of connection from above. 

I will keep reading their poetry out loud to honor and praise them. 

And I will keep writing and playing with my own words. 

May you be ignited to write your own grief praises and read it out loud to each other, the birds and trees and all that is alive and unseen. 

 …

 

I had planned to write all about my online grief group that is starting this fall-on September 24th in fact. 

But then I got the I had to write about Andrea and the hawk. Giving homage to a poet celebrity. The world needs more of those. Will you begin writing? They inspired many people to play with words. And I have no doubt they will continue doing so even from the afterlife. 

So I do want to give you a bit about my upcoming online grief group called the Wheel of Grief: Moving Through Loss. We begin on September 24, 2025 and we will gather twice a month until the spring. The timing-beginning in the fall and ending in spring is intentional. Here in the northern hemisphere we enter the season of grief-in autumn/fall, when nature begins the cycle of decay and death. We will gather as we lose the light and the darkness leaks in more each day to become our friend. We will gather until the spring solstice time where the buds begin to burst up and through, the light leading in a bit more every day. We will gather in this sacred time. 

If you need a community of people who are ready to grieve along side you, come be with us. 

This was birthed from my own dive into shadow work and the elements through working with two shamanic healers. 

Here’s what will be woven into our time:

• Welcoming grief as a dear friend. We will befriend grief. We will invite them in and listen to what they need,
• Prompts and tools to be open to grief’s medicine.
• The magic of community shares-who knows what may happen in our group context.
• You will be invited to share through creativity of writing, poems, and art. (I will most likely include poems from Andrea).
• You will get support through grief maps or diagrams to look at the nuances of your loss or losses.
• You will find ways to give voice to the collective grief.
• You will be invited to tune into the grief in your body and find ways to be with it and move it through. Somatic practices will in included. This is not about getting over grief or fixing it-you will find ways to let it be there gently sighing along side you.
• You will invite grief in for tea and get to know it. It has so much to teach you if you let it.
• You will be guided through the four directions or the medicine wheel. Each direction giving you guidance and wisdom that can be directly applied to your grief. 

This guidance will be like a grief tool in your back pocket or chest locket.  

I will end for now with the poem…

Every time I ever said I want to die-by Andrea Gibson

A difficult life is not less

worth living than a gentle one.

Joy is simply easier to carry

than sorrow. And your heart

could lift a city from how long

you’ve spent holding what’s been

nearly impossible to hold.

 

This world needs those

who know how to do that.

Those who could find a tunnel 

that has no light at the end of it,

and hold it up like a telescope

to know the darkness

also contains truths that could

bring the light to its knees.

 

Grief astronomer, adjust the lens.

look close, tell us what you see.