Grieving a friend

Dispatch #45: An attempt not to degrade the silence

Hi friend,

My friend died last week. When Angel entered my studio & told me, I had been tying my shoes on my way out the door. I heard her words, held my head in my hands, & sobbed as a stunned silence filled me. Later, Angel told me that we sat together like that for ten minutes: me crying with my head in my hands on the sofa, her cross-legged on the floor, patiently & lovingly holding my ankle, waiting for me to speak.

“Close-up of a Comet.” © Gerald Rhemann & Michael Jäger via Joceyln K. Glei

Rumi wrote, “Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.” In those ten minutes, which felt eternal & clockless, I thought: Speaking now would degrade this silence. That was the exact language in my head. Degrade. Even as the word rose in my mind I thought, how peculiar, this word choice, how physical. Suspended in that wordless place, I felt my friend in my bones. I wanted to stay there, to commiserate with them. The profundity of realizing that they weren’t on this planet anymore rippled through me.

I stared down at my feet: one shoe was tied, the other had been left untied. The symbolism glowed. When it comes to grief, isn’t this the manner we most often find ourselves? Half-ready? Unkempt? Shocked out of dailiness into severe presence?

I didn’t want to abandon the silence. It was simultaneously comforting & obliterating, erasing & flooding. Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.” In my mind I heard my friend say their nickname for me, Short Stuff. The silence was unimprovable; it was alive with us, our friendship, memories only the two of us shared, their laugh, how their smile multiplied their dimples. I could deeply feel the ways we were eternally, spiritually, bonded. Too, I felt the ways that we had missed each other on the material plane, missed our opportunity to settle some unfinished matters. In that stark quiet, every memory of them Rolodexed behind my eyes; time made no sense. Hadn’t I just met them on that poetry tour in 2009? Hadn’t I just sat in the back of that van while their compassionate listening pulled secrets out of me, truths I hadn’t been ready to even share with myself? Hadn’t Andrea just become my friend?

I was 25 years old & recently graduated from Hampshire College when I met Andrea Gibson. I had returned to Hampshire after taking my senior year off due to a debilitating, life-altering Bipolar episode that required a two-week hospitalization & an entire restructuring of self.

Returning to college was a huge step & I graduated as the commencement speaker, an honor. Because the class I was “supposed” to be graduating with graduated the year I was sick, when I stared out from the stage I barely recognized the sea of faces. That moment became a sort of metaphor for what would come soon after: Sure, I would triumph, but I’d stare out at the unrecognizable. A loneliness would accompany my resurrection like a shadow. Illness is lonely, after all. Mental illness, perhaps the loneliest.

collage by me

That following interim period after college was an increasingly dark season of my life. I decided I was well enough to go off my medication (thank you, stigma), that I was resilient enough to best that illness – as if to dub it an anomaly, not my blueprint. Inch by inch, day by day, I felt as if the blinds were being drawn. I didn’t connect it to my medication going down. I waitressed by day, saw my girlfriend by night, lived on the fringe of Main St. in Northampton & haunted all my old college haunts, the cafes, the vintage store. I tried my best to function, function goddamit, while in my gut I could sense that something was deeply wrong. But it couldn’t be wrong, that was too frightening, so I just did my best to keep my head above water, to act like a normal person in a spinning room. In the summer of that year, I got invited to join a poetry tour performing across America, picking up guest poets as it went. I was one young woman in, mostly, a bus of older men. I woke each morning in a new city, another pitstop. I vividly remember that the first breath I took each morning felt like I had a pile of bricks on my chest.

Then Andrea joined. While I presented capability & smiles, while parts of myself were distorted & hidden from me, they somehow weren’t from Andrea, who I barely knew. In one conversation in the back of the van, their compassion unlocked my armor & I found myself speaking unselfconsciously about my pain. I remember how they leaned in. I remember their eyes. I remember the softness of their voice. I teared up, against my will.

The tour van pulled over for gas & I found an alley to gather myself in. A suppressed panic rose inside me & I let myself cry. Andrea found me there, checking in on me, & a tender friendship began.

A few weeks later, when the tour stopped for a spell in my hometown, my mental distress would crest. I stayed behind & sought help. A mis-assigned new medication would cause a near-death experience. My parents would falter in their response to my crisis, & I would be forced to hospitalize myself. I would necessarily separate myself from my family for months, move back to Northampton, & start a therapeutic journey that would change me & open up vistas of healing. I would become a nanny for multiple families, learn to longboard, write an album, diligently & religiously write nearly 200 poems, become a devoted meditator, & discover myself both within & beyond my diagnosis.

Throughout the year & a half I lived & worked in Western Mass, Andrea would check in on me. When they toured through Northampton, they’d call me. We’d hang out in my room, talking, laughing. They’d invite me to open for them at their shows where I’d sing songs or read poems. When I was just an attendee, sitting in the way back of an auditorium so palpably bursting with love for them, Andrea would shout out my name, read a haiku I wrote, go out of their way to see me. It was a year & a half of being profoundly private. I spent most of my time alone or with the children I nannied, riding my longboard down dusty roads & diving into the Connecticut River after work, writing with prolific fervor, meditating at an old folks’ home where I was the youngest person by 40 to 60 years. But Andrea was like a crack of light through the blinds. They found their way in, always, mentoring me without calling it that, uplifting my work, my mind, & my way. They made me feel not just cared about, but cared for. There is a distinct difference.

I am grieving. I am holding my friend in their wholeness: a radiant, effortful, compassionate, glorious, flawed, raucous, anxious, compassionate squared, nervous, deeply attentive, passionate, wired, funny, traumatized queer & non-binary person desperate to live life at its fullest. When I saw that Andrea passed away on Pema Chodron’s birthday, I felt the universe wink; I could hear my friend laughing with me. It just makes so much sense. Andrea loved Pema. But beyond that, I see Andrea as having taken much of the bodhisattva calling to heart: “In essence, the bodhisattva ideal represents a path of compassionate action and dedication to the well-being of all beings, embodying the core values of Buddhism.” (Wikipedia)

I’ve loved watching the world celebrating Andrea Gibson for their vast heart, curiosity, generosity, bodhisattva spirit, & tenacious commitment to being truly alive no matter the circumstances. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it is also strange. It’s not every day you witness a global outpouring over someone that once leaned onto your bed, kicking their feet out playfully, chit-chatting about girls, poems, music, politics, prayer.

collages by me

Samuel Beckett wrote, “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness." To speak, to write, is to in some ways interrupt silence’s immense & ineffable power. I miss my friend. They taught me, by example, that you can be a real listener for someone, at any moment, anywhere. You have that power. It’s simple. It’s massive. It changed my life.

collage by me

When those we love die, a practical question can seep through the grief: How do I want to live? What matters, knowing with refreshed certainty, that we die? In one of our last email exchanges Andrea wrote me: “I think you are someone who understands there is nothing special about what I’ve been going through. We all live in bodies. You could croak tomorrow as easily as I could.” They understood the assignment: living now. Living with what you have, whatever resources, whatever state you find yourself in. They spent the last years of their life by teaching us (equally, intertwined-ly) about living & dying. They are now on the next step of their journey, merely a few steps ahead of us all. We will all take that step. Time, date, location unknown. The veil is ever thin.

So, friend, how do you want to live? What matters, regarding with certainty, that we die? Andrea was a walking reminder that this is not a rhetorical question & that none of us are off the hook – anyone could croak at any time. What will you do with this urgency, this impermanence, this calling?

Andrea wrote, “I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined…I want to echo it through the corridor of your temples, I am more with you than I ever was before.” When I learned of their death, before I heard these specific words, I closed my eyes & met the silence & already found this prophecy to be true. Silence, it seems, can knock down all strenuous, verbose efforts toward intimacy & become intimacy itself.

drawing from Be/Hold: A Friendship Book by me

Glimmerings:

• The mother as a creator. This blew my mind.

• An introduction to Joanna Macy via Lisa Olivera

• The Americans of Conscience Good News Boost

• Still working my way through this wonder via Gabriellette

• Drag Queens Trixie & Katya dissecting Queer Ultimatum within an inch of its life had me LOLing into infinity

Offerings:

As In Surreal Life’s July session comes to a close my team & I are doing something unprecedented: we’re opening up the (usually private) online closing call where July ISLiens will share their poems written during the session. It is always a love fest. This is bound to be joyous & heartfelt & a really pure way to spend an hour & change. Join us! It’s free to attend! DM @insurreallife on Instagram for the Zoom link.

We, poets Angel Nafis & Shira Erlichman along with Development & Program Specialist Shaniyat Turani, want to invite you to attend a very special digital reading & community fundraising event for the incomparable Asiyah Women’s Center — the first organization in New York City that provides culturally competent & trauma informed housing justice to meet the diverse needs of the Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern, South Asian & Black Indigenous People of Color populations. They have two shelters located on two different apartment sites in Brooklyn in historically Muslim concentrated neighborhoods.

Earlier this year, Angel & I had the pleasure of participating in community cleaning sessions at one of the sites where volunteers do a deep clean of the lodging, launder all the clothing & bedding of the clients, & spend time with some of the kiddos. It was immediately clear what a tremendously special place Asiyah is – warm, intentional, brimming with communal care, truly an org unlike any other.

Currently, they are raising funds to purchase a housing unit that would allow them to safely & efficiently serve all of their clientele as well as allowing for one floor to be explicitly dedicated for refugees from Gaza. If, like me, you are continually looking for ways to make use of your hands, resources, & time & to channel effort towards those suffering from the longstanding devastation of the Genocide in Gaza, please allow me to point you to this as one possible route for action. (Plus, look at that line-up?!) Whether you are able to attend the reading or not, you can donate here!

With ISL winding down until January 2026, I’m offering a menu of opportunities to work with me, starting this September. Single sessions, multiple sessions, & combo packages are all available – along with some perks!

• A generative session is all about making. It involves us writing together to prompts & sharing work in a joyous fashion, with the focus being on creating a delicious & safe playground for your creativity.

• A revision session focuses on unlocking poems you’ve already written, revisiting them with fresh & excited eyes, turning things upside down (because it’s fun), & tooling you with practical strategies for reentering work. I’ll say it: revision is perhaps what I’m most known for. If you want to focus on brand new paradigms for approaching your work, you’ve come to the right place!

• Add a personalized drawing to any package.

• Buy a signed Odes to Lithium with a personalized drawing.

Reach out if you’re interested or if you have any questions. I look forward to cracking open alongside you!

I had a dream the other night where I was told, “Communicate with the nightmare.” So much of life feels like a nightmare right now. Watching a genocide unfold in real time – this continuous, inarguable failure of Palestine – has me feeling deep shame & helplessness. Watching children be starved as a tactic of war. Watching William Anthony McNeil, Jr., a 22-year-old Black man, be punched by a police officer & sustain serious injuries during a traffic stop, with no charges later made of the involved officers. Watching. It is not enough. We must communicate with the nightmare. We must communicate using words, actions, prayer, rage, peace, all of it.

I hope we can remember, as we speak & act, that there is a great mystery unfolding between our actions, our words, all of it. There is a confounding silence available, at any moment, & it can quench us.

We must be worthy of that silence where our gone beloveds palpably dwell.

With maple syrup,