Ink and Vein

The poet Andrea Gibson died on July 14th, 2025 surrounded by loved ones.

Their death sent me over the edge of a ledge I’d been teetering on for a while, into a deep and painful depression.

I have a support system. I have people I can lean on. Most of those people live in other states.

My support system where I live is complicated.

When I heard of Andrea’s death, all I wanted was for someone to hold me while I cried in a decidedly ugly way: undignified, snot-filled, body-wracking sobs.

I don’t have a romantic partner, anyone I’m dating, or even a situationship, so there’s no one in my life I can call up and ask to spend the night and spoon me for several hours. And that’s really what my body and spirit needed and wanted: sustained touch and holding, another person to help me feel real when I felt like I was dissolving, disappearing.

Andrea’s death felt like solid ground crumbling beneath me. I didn’t know them personally; I only met them once at a show in Oklahoma City. But I found their words before I knew I was queer. I heard their work either in the middle of my divorce, or shortly after, at a time when I felt broken, when I felt as if I was irreparably damaged, wrong, unlovable.

I started to recognize who I was, started to recognize that there wasn’t something inherently wrong or bad or broken in me. I was just queer, and coping with a lifetime of unhealed trauma.

Andrea’s voice planted something in me. Their words are one of the many things that saved me, and continued to save me.

Their death left me feeling all of that pain, that grief, that sense of being irretrievably lost. Their death left me feeling not only the grief of their passing, but the grief I felt before their words helped me start to heal.

I’m coming out of that grief, now, but it was a difficult couple of weeks, and I still feel raw.

Each grief I experience, now, seems to trigger grief I experienced years ago, grief that was never fully processed, grief that wasn’t acknowledged or given space at the time. Grief that I shoved down so I could survive the moment and just keep going.

The most common emotions I allow myself to experience are anger and disappointment, often directed at myself. I feel disappointed in myself for missteps, for mistakes, for expecting or wanting things to work out differently than they do. I feel anger at myself for repeating patterns. I feel anger at others, too, but I find myself trying to justify and excuse that away and redirect it towards myself or towards social systems.

I feel other emotions, of course, but I shove them down or shift into analyzing and trying to understand the why of it without allowing myself to fully experience the what of it.

The grief I felt and feel over Andrea’s death triggered feelings of grief, rejection, abandonment, anger, deep hurt, and sadness that had built and built and built over years and months. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to put any of these emotions away until I talked them out, wrote them out, cried them out, for days.

I went out on a hike a few days ago, along San Francisco Creek, and listened to the running water, touched the aspen trees, and took pictures of the wildflowers. Moving my body and pushing myself along the trail, despite feeling out of shape and tired, allowed me to shift even more of the stagnant emotions.

I am coming back into myself; I don’t feel like I’m dissolving or fading away.

The grief is still there, and that’s okay. In some ways, I think the pain is what kept me here – grief and pain a sign, somehow, that I do have substance, that I am real. The grief gave me a reason to stay, a reason to live.