When Andrea Gibson left this world, they didn’t vanish. They simply changed form.
That’s what I believe. What I’ve always believed. That death isn’t the end but a transformation. It’s a reassembly of light, soul, and memory. It becomes energy that lingers in the folds of pillows, in dog-eared pages, in the sound of your laughter.
Andrea said it best in one of their final gifts to the world: “Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away.”
I read those words with a lump in my throat, but not because I was grieving. They reminded me of something I wrote months ago, not knowing then how it would one day connect me to someone I admired from afar.
So when we grieve for an unbearable loss and feel the crushing weight of absence, perhaps we can take comfort in knowing that nothing is ever truly gone.
The ones we miss exist in a different form now. They are scattered across the cosmos, carried in rays of sunshine, drifting in the gentle breeze. The photons that once danced across their skin continue their journey through space. Their laughter still lingers around us, waiting to be felt by those who remember.
If we explain death by physics alone, the conservation of energy means that when we die, our energy disperses into heat, into the environment, and into the people we loved. ~ Excerpt from my blog: The Physics of Goodbye
Andrea’s poems weren’t just poems; they were silent revolts against erasure and the lie that pain and beauty must live apart.
And maybe that’s what we leave behind: words and permission. Especially permission. Permission to grief and cry. To be angry. To acknowledge love out loud. To die beautifully. To stay, even after.
After Andrea
I want to call you by the sound your bones made when they fell into the light. I want to call you return instead of loss, to pin your spirit to my wall like the last goodnight of a sunbeam. You are not gone. You are still here. You are a new verb. You breathe through my ribcage at midnight when I forget my name and remember yours. Your echoes make me who I am. You are the ghost of the lamp turning on by itself, the sudden music when no one’s home. What trick of physics lets a soul remain when the body collapses? What cruel grace? Andrea, I never touched your hands, but I have held your sorrow, your laughter, your thunder, your holy queerness. I carry it now. In me, and in everyone who heard your voice before they knew you. Thank you for the light. Thank you for the absence that still feels full. Thank you for dying like a poet; all metaphor, without end.
© 2025 Olivia JD
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