What Andrea Gibson Taught Me About Living

A Tribute

I have never cried over the death of a stranger until now.

On Monday morning, I found myself alone in my office, tears streaming uncontrollably down my face because I had learned that earlier that morning, “at 4:16 am, Andrea Gibson died in their home surrounded by their wife, Meg, four ex-girlfriends, their mother and father, dozens of friends, and their three beloved dogs.”

I have never met Andrea Gibson. I did not know their favorite food or any of their secrets. I didn’t know the names of their dogs or their ex-girlfriends. I knew them from a 2022 viral reel and their Substack. I knew them as a Queer icon and trailblazer. I knew them from the lessons that they taught me, unknowing, in these intervening years.

Those same lessons often pour out of me, regurgitated to friends who will listen, and who are always better for the wisdom of Andrea’s teachings.

In fact, I was just talking about them a few days ago.

My favorite lesson I’ve learned from Andrea is about the beauty of our aging process. They found out they had cancer in 2021, and much of their writing explores how to find Things That Don’t Suck in the face of such a diagnosis. And framed by cancer, aging becomes not an inexorable pull towards death, but instead a beautiful reward of living a full life.

But Andrea can say it much more beautifully than I can, so please, enjoy this excerpt from their piece “The Surprising Gift of the ‘Old Age’ Filter.”

“Meg found me in the living room, wanting to show me something on her phone. Ever since a friend told me social media can lower one’s immunity more than drinking and smoking combined, I’ve drastically reduced my screen time––and I tend to be particularly allergic to my phone in very real moments such as that one. But Meg knows me well and said, “I’ll think you’ll want to see this, baby. I just discovered an aging filter,” and passed her phone to me.

What I saw took me to my knees. I’ve never been so undone by anything as I was by the sight of Meg’s face at what I guess was around seventy-five-years old. “I know this woman,” I gasped. “I know her.” She was so stunning I couldn't stop kissing the screen. I pressed my lips to the lifelines of her wrinkles, the garden of her silver hair. Every age spot was a lucky penny falling into the wishing well of my chest. “I love her, I love her, I love her!” I kept crying, and only then did I realize how much I’d feared the possibility of never laying eyes on that version of my love. I traced my finger through the valleys of her laugh lines, and felt a peace unlike anything I’d ever experienced. A peace that seemed wildly incongruent with the news we’d just received. A peace that made no sense to me, until I found its source.

Let me try to explain. Never in my life had I seen myself so clearly as I did when I saw Meg like that. No photo had ever captured me with more exacting detail than a photo of Meg old. I had never felt so infinite, so unsinkable, so buoyed by love. I could see myself living in Meg’s eyes. I could see my spirit in the shyness of her smile. I could see that we were still together and always would be, whether I had a body of my own or not. And in seeing that, I understood anew that I could not die. None of us can. We live on in each other. We are each other already.

“Can you see it too?" I asked Meg.

“I can,” she said, and then she asked if I wanted to see myself old. The question stopped my breath. I was trembling and couldn't find words for why. But as soon as I made eye contact with elderly Andrea, I nearly hyperventilated with joy. I knew that by the world’s standards I had aged terribly, but all I could see was beauty. “WOW WOW WOW!” I kept saying, oscillating between laughter and tears. Wow. Wow. Wow.

I’m not a musician, but I write song lyrics constantly. A few years ago I wrote a song that included the words, “I saw a photo of you/ I saw the lines on your face/ I made you smile once/ so maybe one of those lines has my name.” Staring into my own ancient eyes, I knew that every wrinkle on my face had the name of someone I loved. I have so many wrinkles, I thought, because I have loved so many people. To me, that is aging WONDERFULLY.

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This story and this lesson have been my guiding lights any time I think about aging and what it means to be a mortal being. Both Andrea and I have/had an existential fear of death and the unwanted companion of anxious hypochondria.

The questions that haunt any human haunt me too.

What will happen to my body as I age?

What will happen to those I love?

What will happen when I die?

These existential fears about death have plagued me ever since I was a little kid. Ever since I learned about the concept of forever, death became something I couldn’t truly wrap my brain around, but terrified me nonetheless.

I’d always had a hunch that this was somehow a shrouded gift, but it wasn’t until reading Andrea’s “The Lifegiving Benefits of Befriending Our Mortality” that I believed it.

I will never deny how badly I want to live.

But I did not meet this life until I met its brevity

Did not meet my voice until I knew every word

could be my last. I did not know what prayer was

until I started praying for what I already have.

The thought that we cannot truly live until we come to terms with the fact that life will end invites me to think about death more frequently and with more grace. If we know a thing will end, does that not give us more appreciation for its beauty while we’re in it?

As I scroll through Instagram and Threads and Substack, my feeds are covered in Andrea’s name. Friends, celebrities, and strangers have all been pulled to honor Andrea in whatever way they can. There are comment after comment and tribute after tribute of thousands of people who feel the same way I do, astounded that someone we’ve never met could have touched us so profoundly, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sob again writing this piece.

If you know my writing, you know I have a lot of problems with the internet, but to me, Andrea is the one, best thing about it. Andrea is proof that goodness can spread around the world as easily as darkness. Andrea is proof that people want the love and light that they shared constantly. Andrea is proof that you don’t need to know your impact to have one.

And what an impact they will continue to have on me.

Andrea has invited me to think about death more. Andrea has reminded me that language can be a beautiful, flowering, blooming thing if you just nurture it and give it permission to be spellbinding. Andrea has inspired me to be obsessed with the sensual act of living because one day this journey will come to its conclusion, and on that day, I want to say what they did: that “I fucking loved my life.”

(Which I do, but bears reminding.)

When I die, I hope that my life will have had a fraction of the impact on strangers that Andrea did on me. I hope that the lessons they passed to me are passed to you, and you pass them to others. I hope the beauty of their words and their poetry inspires you to feel new depths of emotion and leaves “your heart covered in stretch marks”.

I hope that we all leave a legacy colored by love, like Andrea did.

“Though Andrea desperately wished to have lived a longer life,
they could not have possibly lived a fuller one.”

And that is my greatest wish. For myself and for all you incredible people out there. While we may not all get long lives, I hope that we have the fullest ones we can.

I’ll leave you with Andrea’s own words to her wife Meg in “Love Letter From The Afterlife.”