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I'll tell you all that I usually get so upset
when Meg edits my poems.
She's a terrible editor!
Tell them what you mean by that.
What I mean is, Meg is a poetry teacher,
so she's just really skilled at writing and editing.
So Meg just chops and chops and chops my poems up.
And then I cry and get mad at what she's saying isn't good.
And then the next day I realize she was right every time.
But in the process of it, I get...
I've gotten better.
- Wouldn't you say, baby? - Yes.
We have two different approaches to clichés.
Where I always, like, try to eradicate it,
Andrea doubles down on the cliché.
I understand that you would be incapable of making this edit
if you really were tapped into the message of the poem,
but tell me more.
Well, you know, I feel like if you could do this all on your own,
I wouldn't be here.
I like my way and your way.
But my way is a little bit more fun.
So right now I tentatively have this poem titled "Death Anthem."
Last night I was reading the beginning of this to Meg
and I said, "If I was a documentary filmmaker,
I would definitely begin the documentary with the beginning of this poem
as a voiceover as something was happening."
Meg's like, "What would be happening?" "I don't know. Maybe my funeral."
And then you hear Meg's like, "No!" It was so awkward.
I'm nervous!
I'm also scared to read it.
At first I thought it was a stomach bug.
But when it started feeling like a stomach anaconda,
my doctor convinced me to get a CAT scan.
I'd been a lifelong hypochondriac, with debilitating panic attacks
and a chronic fear of death,
so was already trembling when the scan technician asked me to shift positions
to get a view of my pelvis.
There was so much sweat on my palms, I could feel my lifelines drowning.
The technician broke protocol and walked me out to my car.
We stopped twice on the way so I could hyperventilate in his arms.
The next morning, my phone buzzed in my pocket.
'Several large masses on ovaries. Malignancy suspected.'
I couldn't feel my hands.
They'd gone numb from trying to hold on to everyone I had ever loved.
'This is the beginning of a nightmare,' I thought.
A diagnosis that my doctors would later declare incurable.
My worst fear come true.
But stay with me, y'all,
because my story is one about happiness being easier to find
once we realize we do not have forever to find it.
Tonight, my guest has published many books of poetry
and given spoken word performances around the world.
Colorado's Poet Laureate, Andrea Gibson.
So, it's a heavy lift to be a poet laureate,
and it's all coming at a time in your life
where you are really in the midst of quite a health journey with cancer.
Yes. I think that understanding that we are all mortal,
that we're all going to say goodbye to this world,
and to each other in some ways,
and goodbye to our bodies, eventually,
it wakes you up, you know?
Immediately, it's just like your eyes are wide
and you're kind of awestruck to the brevity of it all.
And you don't want to waste a second.
And I was wasting a lot of seconds prior.
I can't get them to stop barking at the mail person,
no matter what I do.
Squash is like, "I know there are medical bills in there
that are absolutely unreasonable.
Get them away from our house!"
If I had to hope for something,
it would be a mailbox.
'Cause our mailbox, I've been fighting with that thing
like the dude in A Christmas Story wrestles with that furnace.
Like, I cannot... I cannot keep that mailbox
from not getting knocked down by the snowplows.
Should take a peek.
I do not understand why they won't deliver mail to this.
It just...
So it has to not move, for her to be willing to deliver our mail.
Dammit. One more rock.
What are the rocks doing?
Well, they're steadying it.
Obviously!
I mean, honestly, I think this is quite great.
If I were the mail person, I would deliver this,
because I would see how hard people tried.
I think what matters most is the trying.
Gib, do you know where the car key is?
No.
Got it.
Andrea has an uncanny ability to befriend people
who normally... like, there's like a line that you don't cross.
In terms of, you know, like, we went to Andrea's doctor's wedding...
Not my oncologist.
- But my primary care physician. - Yeah.
He's one of my closest friends, now, I would say.
It was a really orthodox wedding,
so they separate the dance floor at one point, by men and women.
And we didn't know what to do, so...
We went out to the parking lot and danced,
'cause, I'm, like, "Which side do I choose?"
But he's wonderful. We actually have death meetings.
And what we do is we just get on the phone or get on Zoom
and we just talk about mortality and dying and...
I say this to Meg all the time.
I always thought when I was young
that dying would be a lot easier if everybody died at the same time.
And now my mind has changed,
because... I mean, I can look at all my friends
and I can already see the ways
that my death would, in many ways, just make them more of who they are.
But...
I...
I don't want to...
say that I'm definitely gonna die.
Here we are, party animals.
- Can't wait. - Do you need me to pull you up here?
Yeah, I do.
- It's hurting. - It's okay.
The only way I can describe it is
it just sort of feels like a migraine in my...
bike seat area.
I've not taken any pain pills this whole time,
but I almost did last night.
But my sister got addicted to OxyContin, and so...
I avoid that stuff whenever I can.
What are you guys shooting today?
They're obsessed with me.
Are they?
They just randomly showed up at my house and...
- Well, it's easy to see. - ...started filming everything I do.
- You're stunning. - Oh, thank you. You too!
Yeah, I don't know what it is,
but my whole life, men have just followed me around like crazy.
That's all I need, so go ahead and have a seat over here.
- Thank you. - Of course.
I'm nervous.
- Hi. How are you doing? - Hi. It's good to see you again.
I'm glad you're not in a wheelchair. You feeling better?
- I know. It is a bit better. - Okay, good.
Thanks for asking.
In 2021, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
I went and I did a radical hysterectomy
and then I went on six months of chemotherapy.
And then, six months later, the cancer came right back.
And it came in my liver and my diaphragm.
At that time, I found out there was a two-year life expectancy.
Then I had to go through another year again of the same chemo.
Here's Andrea coming out of their final chemo treatment.
Hi, baby. How do you feel?
I feel so happy.
But after four months,
it came right back again.
And so then, at that point, they declared it incurable.
Right now, I'm past that two-year life expectancy.
They said I could continue with some trial treatments,
but my doctor said, "I understand that you may not want to do more treatment.
And if you just wanna let yourself die..."
But I wanna live as long as I can.
I would love to be able to say, "I'm 50."
I would love it so much that I'm 48 and I tell people I'm 50 now.
So I told my doctor
to stop having one of the things that she offers me
be to stop doing treatment.
I'm gonna keep doing things to live as long as I can.
- See you Friday. - Thank you. See you in a couple of days.
Okay.
It's been three years since I've enjoyed a meal.
Like, when you have cancer and chemo,
you completely lose your appetite.
But I'd live the rest of my life without taste buds if...
I could live the rest of my life.
Normally at this point, we'd ask Stef about her sex life.
Yeah!
- Stef has a new girlfriend. - Yeah.
Stef calls the other day and said,
"She's been fingering me."
- Actually... - No, that's not what happened.
- Wait, what did you say? - You guys called me
to tell me that Meg was fingering you!
- I... We told you that? - Yes.
- I didn't just volunteer my information. - We don't just call...
'Cause the cancer.
We don't... Wait. Tell me why we ended up telling Stef this.
This isn't a common thing we say to our friends!
Wait, what happened?
You called me up and said that
tonight Meg was going to finger you so hard
that she was going to get out the cancer.
Wait, no, I did not say that!
I have it on my phone, and we can find out.
I laughed at this message. I had to pull over
to enjoy it.
Not... I just mean, like, to focus.
Stef. Meg and I are here.
We just heard that Heather gave you the news.
And we want you to know
that Meg's gonna finger me tonight and fix it all.
And Meg feels like she can get her finger up and around it
and say a little prayer with her fingering me.
- Okay, wait... - See? You did!
But I need you to know, the reason I left this message,
Heather just sent you the news I had a metastasis in my bone...
And I knew it was gonna be sad for you,
and sad for my friends,
so these are the kind of messages I leave my friends when that happens.
- It worked. I was not sad at all. - It does. It always works.
Because you did that, you have to play your reply.
Okay.
Andrea and Meg, I also cried for a little bit,
then I got hopeful again, and I'm really hopeful,
now that I know you're getting fingered tonight.
May I suggest getting thumbed?
Because recently I've been getting thumbed
and I don't have cancer,
and that could be a reason why.
Honestly, it doesn't quite feel as good,
and I don't know why it keeps happening. Probably because I don't speak up
and say...
no.
Yeah, I love you two so much.
Stef always is attracted to older women.
- And so her girlfriend is 70. - No, she's not 70!
- I thought you told me she was. - She's only 65.
- That's so young. - I know.
- Why are you worried about that? - 'Cause it's 20... it's 20 years.
Stef is... Stef really loves her.
- Yeah. - You really love her.
And so she doesn't want her to die before her.
It's really interesting, though, I think,
the fear of, like, dating somebody
that could potentially be close to the end of their life.
I've never met someone where I thought,
"I just want more time with you."
That's so sweet, Stef. I feel that about Meg so much.
Like I want all the time.
I wanna be here when her book comes out.
We had this really wild experience.
Did I tell you about the experience that we had that day?
What day?
Where we got the news that I had a metastasis in my bone?
To us, I think we felt like,
"Oh, maybe I only have, like, a couple months to live," at that point.
And I may, I don't know.
But that's what we were feeling that day.
And then,
we were crying a lot, and then,
Meg brought in this video.
I saw that there was an aging app,
and then I set it to a song
singing "You're Still The One" by Shania Twain.
Because that was the song that was playing when I proposed to Andrea.
Still going strong
Still the one You're still the one I run to
The one that I belong to
You're still the one I want for life...
I mean, I just love this person.
Like, she's so badass.
I'm so in love with this person.
But... yeah.
I felt like I had never seen myself more clearly
as I did when I saw Meg old.
I could see all of our years of love in her face.
And I could see that she had carried us into the decades
in the future.
And I could feel that I was just with her for every part of it.
Imagine when a human dies,
the soul misses the body,
actually grieves the loss of its hands and all they could hold.
Misses the throat closing shy reading out loud
on the first day of school.
Imagine the soul misses the stubbed toe,
the loose tooth,
the funny bone.
The soul still asks,
"Why does the funny bone do that? It's just weird."
Imagine the soul misses the thirsty garden cheeks
watered by grief.
Imagine the soul misses each falling eyelash
waiting to be a wish.
When a human dies, the soul searches the universe
for something blushing,
sweeps the universe for patience worn thin,
the last nerve fighting for its life,
the voice box aching to be heard.
Imagine the soul misses hunger,
emptiness,
rage,
the fist that was never taught to curl - curled,
the teeth that were never taught to clench - clenched,
the body that was never taught to make love - made love
like a hungry ghost digging its way out of the grave.
The soul misses the unforever of old age...
Happy birthday to you!
- And many more - And many more
The soul misses every single day
the body was sick,
the now it forced,
the here it built from the fever.
Fever is how the body prays,
how it burns and begs for another average day.
The soul misses what the body could not let go.
What else could hold on that tightly to everything?
Andrea's having a serious medical emergency,
which is that their thumb is just coming off.
I'm gonna bring it up to the nurse when she comes back,
because I think this might be a little bit more important
than the tumors.
Nothing in space can imagine it.
No comet, no nebula,
no ray of light can fathom the landscape of awe,
the heat of shame,
the fingertips pulling the first gray hair
and throwing it away.
"I can't imagine it,"
the stars say.
"Tell us again about goosebumps.
Tell us again about pain."
I'm doing a poetry workshop for this poet laureate event.
And the hosts are asking me to say how I got into poetry and writing.
I grew up in a tiny town in the woods of northern Maine.
It was a very working-class town.
People don't have a lot of money, but it's so beautiful.
I didn't have artists in my life, growing up.
I knew no poets, no writers.
I didn't know that somebody could grow up and make their living from art.
And then I came to Colorado in my early twenties,
and I discovered poetry slam.
And the thing that I loved about it was
it was far more accessible than other poetry.
It wasn't this thing where you needed a PhD.
But I never got on the mic. I was like, "There's no way."
I had a terrible, terrible fear of public speaking.
And then my ex, Bethy, broke up with me.
And that feeling of feeling like you have nothing left to lose,
I just didn't care. I got up on stage and...
I was still very, very nervous.
You couldn't hear my voice over the paper rattling.
I wrote this poem...
I wrote this poem a while ago.
It was emotional and it was raw,
and, you know, I didn't feel like I had to... I don't know.
For lack of a better word, be "fancy."
I fought with my knuckles white as stars,
and left bruises the shape of Salem.
It was always important to me to always write poetry
that people wouldn't need a degree to understand.
Which is maybe part of the reason
I sometimes paint this world prettier than it is.
I think probably because I didn't have much interest
in learning big words.
Like, I know so few words that when I put out my first book,
the publisher was like,
"Andrea, all these poems have the same words rearranged in a different order."
I'm like, "That's all the words I know!"
Why write a poem that's over somebody's head?
Even more than that, over somebody's heart.
I know my heart is a broken freezer chest.
That's why I can't keep anything frozen,
so, no, I am not "always crying,"
I'm just thawing outside the lines.
At the time, I hadn't heard anybody on stage
talking about suicidality.
So I started writing honestly about my own...
...struggles with trying to take my life.
To every day you could not get out of bed,
to the bullseye of your wrist,
to anyone who has ever wanted to die,
I have been told sometimes the most healing thing we can do
is remind ourselves over and over and over
other people feel this too.
Those poems tended to be more hopeful.
You know, because I knew I was also speaking to other people
who were really struggling. And I think it comforted people.
Andrea really thinks of poetry not as "What can I get?"
You know, as, like, this person in the spotlight,
but really, "What can I create to give to people?"
And I think that's why it's been more long-lasting.
Then I was doing one event
and a music manager happened to be at the show
and she said that she had never managed a poet before,
but would I wanna try? And I said, "Yes!"
Gibby! Have fun.
I'm nervous!
Holy, I wanna be holy.
I didn't know then that holy was already me.
We were kind of shocked to discover that people came.
I don't know if they'd want me to say this,
but Andrea was like the rock star of the poets.
One of the first spoken word poets to really be touring in rock clubs.
The show was rowdy and energized,
and people were drunk in the audience, and making out all over the place, and...
X-O-X-O-X-O...
...it was just wild!
And then I would start a poem
and the audience would start saying the poem with me.
Oh my God, it was like... dreamy!
If I was sitting beside a stranger
who'd say, "What do you do for a living?" I'd say, "I'm a poet."
I can't believe that.
That's how lucky I got in this life.
And that's how I met Meg.
Meg was also a spoken word poet.
And I went to do a performance, and she was reading that same night.
Someone asks what kind of birth control you use,
and you say, "The gay method."
And as soon as I heard her, I thought, "She's incredible."
I feel like I fail something else,
myself, mostly...
The poets are a kind of close-knit community,
so we all know each other.
And we saw each other at national poetry slams
or different writing retreats, and we were just friends throughout the years.
It was casual.
And then we were dancing after a big competition in Oakland.
She was in this kitty dress, like, a dress with cats all over it!
But she was such a great dancer, and I guess I'd never seen her dance before.
I couldn't believe what a great dancer she was,
and you all know that I am too.
And I sweat a lot when I dance, 'cause I dance really full-out.
I don't know if I wanna tell you what I did.
They just wiped their hands down my arms
and then licked the palms of their hands...
And I was like, "This is bizarre.
And erotic."
Just such a crude thing to do.
Please, like, I don't wanna suggest that this is appropriate to do to anyone.
But then I got in the elevator with our mutual friend
and she was like, "Yeah, I'm not surprised.
Andrea's had a crush on you forever. For years." And I was like, "What?"
I was like, "That's the gay James Dean. What are you talking about?"
She was like, "You know, you're exactly their type.
Curvy, red lipstick." And I was like...
I hadn't fathomed that I could be somebody's type.
Because I always had just lifelong body insecurities.
My whole childhood, I went to a children's weight-loss camp.
And so, when I met Andrea,
I was probably maybe 50 or 60 pounds heavier than I am now.
And I thought that everyone I had been with had to overcome my body.
When Andrea first sent a text and said, "Do you want to go on a date sometime?"
I texted back, "Sure, with who?"
Em, what do you think about Megan and I?
I think that probably she's the love of your life.
- What? - What?
Meg's favorite artist was Lana Del Rey,
and I got front-row tickets at Red Rocks
and I invited her out to see the show.
And then they flew me out to Colorado.
I felt like I was living in The Princess Diaries.
I'm like, "I'm on a plane!"
Squash, you are about to meet my friend Megan Falley.
Are you excited?
And we woke up the morning of the concert
and I was like, "Let me Google how long it takes to the venue, what time it starts,"
and we saw that... It was May 13th.
And it was like, "The concert, May 12th."
So we'd actually missed the show.
I was sort of fake moping about the show,
because I just wanted their attention. I was, like...
They said, "Well, why don't you come over here and let me see your naked body?"
And it was sort of the first time, like, I presented my body like a gift,
and not like something I was trying to sort of hide.
And...
...they kissed my stomach, which was, like, the part of my body
I'd been told to be insecure about since I was a kid.
And they just kept saying, like, "Sexy, sexy, sexy!"
And... it felt like
somebody kissing a wound and making it better.
I'm not saying goodbye.
- You want me just to leave? - No.
- You want me to quit my job? - Yes.
So that I can do what?
Take care of me.
So that sort of switched something in my head, where I'm like,
if Andrea can, like, love my body, could I love my body?
So in the pandemic, I moved away from poetry and started writing a memoir.
And it was all about my body.
And then my partner gets cancer and I'm like,
I'm writing a memoir about my fucking pant size?
Like, what is... What?
Hey, baby, do you think I'm good-looking?
Completely, deeply, truly, madly.
Truly, madly!
You do?
And then, you know, their hair had all fallen out from chemo.
I had said something like, "Do you miss being a hair icon?"
or something, and...
they had said, "I just wanna have a body. I don't care what it looks like."
I think just, like, the culmination of my whole history with body image stuff
and that was just a sort of...
contextualizing moment.
Like, the futility of doing anything but having, like, appreciation
and gratitude for our bodies, especially when they're healthy.
Putting the world into perspective, or wounds into perspective.
Hello, little monster.
I love you so much.
Oopsie, no kissing me today.
You gotta wait four days to kiss me.
I have to wait too.
Meg has to wait too.
Is today usually when I have roid rage, or tomorrow?
A little bit of both.
Sometimes later, sometimes tonight.
After I finish chemo, I tend to get an attitude from steroids.
So, do you want to know something funny I do
when I have roid rage, that I say to Meg?
- "At the very least." - "At the very least!"
It drives me fucking nuts.
I will be like, when I have roid rage...
Andrea will be like, "At the very least, get me a glass of water."
I'm like, "Are you kidding?"
"Can you at the very least get me a smoothie?"
And she will have done seven thousand things that day.
And I'm like, "At the very least..."
Then I'm like... I think at this point I'm trying not to say that,
but I don't know why I say it. "At the very least."
It's the one phrase where I feel like I'm gonna lose my mind!
Actually, I'm gonna write a new love poem for you
titled "At The Very Least."
As much as I don't like how I look in this haircut,
I am so annoyed by having long hair
that I've decided I'm only gonna have short hair from now on.
And besides, I think it makes me look tough.
And I think, you know...
it's important for the outsides to match the insides.
What should my outsides look like to match my insides?
Sweet.
Brilliant.
Beautiful.
At the very least.
At the very least!
So what I'm about to do right now is open my bloodwork
and see what my cancer marker is.
So Andrea has cancer that can be measured with a blood test.
It's called a CA-125, a cancer antigen 125,
and it's used to measure ovarian cancer disease in the body.
And so, every three weeks for the last three years,
I look and see, is the cancer growing?
And so I sort of wait to see if I'm...
dying.
I feel like we live our life in three-week cycles, almost.
And then I think, as you get closer,
maybe a week away till the next blood test,
you feel that haunting feeling again,
and it just goes in a circle.
The last time I tested, my CA-125 was a 16.
It's kind of hard to know what to feel...
especially if it's a number like...
in the, I don't know, 20s or something.
It's kind of hard to know what to make of it.
I would feel like, if it was a 16 or lower, we'd be pretty happy.
I don't wanna talk about, like, numbers being like equal to emotions.
Okay.
Okay, baby, I don't want you to look.
Baby, how do I log in?
Here.
It's high.
- What is it? - It's a 21.
What does that feel like to you?
My guess, it means cancer's growing in other parts of my body.
And my guess is that means the treatment has stopped working.
And that...
unless, like, a miracle happens,
I would probably die soon.
Do you mind writing my friends?
There is always part of me that can't quite relax
until my friends know.
And I think it's harder for my mom than anyone,
because she lost her sister to ovarian cancer
and then her mom died of a broken heart right after.
And so I feel the most sensitive about telling her.
I don't know all of the what it means.
But I know what the diagnosis is,
so I know, regardless, like, this treatment is gonna stop working,
either now or soon.
And...
when I accept it,
all of the sweetness trickles in.
Because when I'm not accepting it, that's the only place I am,
is hanging out with this number.
But when I accept, "Okay, this is what's happening,"
then I get to be with life.
All of us are gonna have this moment.
Like, everybody here.
We're all gonna have it.
I always say to Andrea, "I couldn't do any of this without you."
Thank God you're here doing this with me, I couldn't do this without you. [laughs]
It's so true.
I couldn't do any of it without you.
I wrote a new kind of bucket list.
It isn't an index of wild adventures.
It requires no bungee jumps, wingsuits or hot air balloons.
No passport stamps
or dolphin swims.
As riveting as those things may be,
none of them ignite me as much
as what most of us were taught to think of as the little things.
These are my biggest, tiniest dreams.
To sit with the mourning dove who cries for her lost love.
To mend a friend's clothes
with my grandmother's thimbles.
To découpage my piano
with love poems.
Baby, will you get your tool box? We're gonna need it.
- How about my power drill? - We might need your power drill.
There are four squirrels here, and they fight when I bring out nuts.
And so I got these houses.
To watch a squirrel rebuild her nest in the only pine that survived the storm.
- Oh, yes! - Yes, yes, yes!
To fix the mailbox after the snowplow knocks it down.
I came out, and the mailbox was completely gone.
With all our mail in it too.
Have you looked for the mailbox?
I mean, why, have you seen it?
To fix the mailbox after the windstorm knocks it down.
This seems weird that it comes with a kids' thing.
Like, is it for children?
- No, it's an actual mailbox. - But look at this.
I said it was Fisher-Price!
Is it actually Fisher-Price?
To fix the mailbox after a bear knocks it down
and a hundred times again.
Gibby had this aesthetically-pleasing solution!
To say good night to my mother every night of the year.
- All right, Mom, sweet dreams. Bye. - Love you.
To hold the hospital's elevator door open for a stranger
minutes after I've received hard news.
Thank you so much for everything.
To thank the nurse too many times.
Thank you so much.
There's a bug.
I gotta let this bug out, you guys.
To feel a spider walk the tightrope of my lifelines
while I carry her carefully outside.
To sleep on a canopy bed beneath the stars
and invent new constellations.
The twin stars,
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
I don't know who that is.
To memorize the way the moonlight reaches through the skylight
to touch Meg's face.
I guess I would ask you if I had permission
to wake you up if I was sad.
You always have my permission.
To feel Meg's warm arms
wrap around me on the back of our two-seater bike.
We're almost there, Idge! Almost there. You got it. You're brave.
To dance while grieving.
To feel the ocean in an above-ground pool.
To love while hurting.
To forget my phone.
To remember everything.
Before cancer, I was so depressed.
When I was diagnosed, it felt like something was just so different.
I felt almost made of gratitude and love.
I've been happy to just have a more quiet life.
Puppy puppy!
Before my diagnosis, I was always travelling around the world.
Hardly ever home.
Doing show after show after show.
And the last three years, since my cancer diagnosis,
I'm not doing that anymore.
Hi, wonderfuls. I recently found out that I'm having a recurrence,
and I have to cancel my fall tour.
To everyone who bought a ticket...
I love you. Thank you so much.
I'm gonna keep you updated on this journey, okay?
And so I haven't done a show in years.
My immunity is so low,
and Meg and I are so quarantined.
It feels like a real risk.
But I'll be real. I really miss performing so much.
Do you want to do another live show?
I would be so broken-hearted, I think, to die without doing another show.
I would love to do a show.
But my health has never been more up in the air than it is right now.
So I don't know.
Alexa, turn off the bedroom light.
Okay.
What was the best part of your day?
You know, I had this moment where...
Ryan asked if I wanted to do a show.
And I...
I so do.
I really, really do.
I got excited thinking about it.
What about you?
There's a few to choose from.
Okay.
But I like this one.
This one?
That wasn't fair. That would have been mine too, if I'd known.
- If you'd known what? - That it was an option.
- Bethy? Hi! - Hi!
Are you excited to go to the dump?
I am.
I'm so excited to go to the dump!
Just so you know, I figured out last night
that if you whisper, they can hear you.
- Oh. - They're hearing me right now.
And so never, ever whisper to me that you don't like them.
Okay.
Do they know we know each other? Or do they think I'm an Uber dump driver?
They know you're my ex from long ago,
and they know you're one of my best friends.
Well, the first thing you should know...
Oh my God, she always says this! Always.
...is that my claim to fame is I broke up with Andrea.
Yeah.
How many people can say, "I broke up with Andrea Gibson"?
A lot!
- A lot can say that! Are you crazy? - I was the first.
I started the poetry career.
Why did you dump them?
It turned out we're pretty much the same person.
We're both boys, and we didn't yet understand gender, right?
I think so.
Ryan, not that two boys can't date.
That's right. It's just too...
- It wasn't our thing. - It wasn't our thing.
When I first came out, my parents were really struggling
to understand queerness,
and to think that I could have a happy life as a queer person.
I was really afraid to meet Bethy's parents,
because I knew they were very Catholic.
And then I walk into their house
and they were so loving.
Bethy's dad, he recently passed of cancer.
And literally, he was diagnosed, and five days later, he was gone.
And I remember calling Andrea and I was like, "I can't stay in the room."
Because it was like... It wasn't sadness.
It was like this discomfort with, like, what was impending.
And Andrea said, "Just open your heart to love.
Everything that you're feeling right now, name it 'love,'
whether it's fear or sadness.
Everything that you're feeling, name it 'love.'"
I feel like that changed my experience with losing him.
Somebody just threw that chair away? It's actually a good chair.
- The white one? - Yeah.
There's a line in one of Andrea's poems
which is, so many queer people are friends with their exes,
because they've lost so much family,
that when they find people they call family,
they will do anything to not let them go.
Will you get it for me, Bethy?
There are two of 'em.
Most of my best friends are my ex-girlfriends.
Like Bethy.
Bethy has a son now
who calls Andrea "Ankle."
So it's like "Aunt" and "Uncle" combined.
And this house that we're living in,
Andrea bought with Emily, who was their ex, like, 25 years ago.
Then when I moved in, I moved in with Andrea and Emily.
And then Heather, who they dated for eight years before.
Most of my heartbroken poems are about Heather.
Now I hired her as my manager. She's one of my closest friends.
So, yeah, a lot of exes.
And they feel like family to me too.
All right, Bone, let's talk business.
So we just opened up conversations again about maybe doing another live show.
I see it being something that's different than something you've done before.
I see people flying in for it.
I see it being an event for people.
In many ways, there's a likelihood that that would be my last show.
So it would be really emotional,
because then all my friends could come
and sort of hold my heart through it.
- Yes. - But I'm so nervous.
I don't wanna keep canceling more shows.
It was really hard for me to do that, to have to cancel a whole tour.
- So, we'll see. - Yeah.
Right now, Andrea's helping me edit my memoir.
We edit each other very differently.
Yeah, it takes me so, so long to write.
And so to watch Meg write, she will just come up with this brilliant,
beautiful...
writing in such a brief amount of time.
That's the thing, Meg. You know so many words.
But one day we're gonna find out that all these words that Meg says are words
- aren't really words. - Okay.
Let's take a vote. What's more weird,
me knowing words as a poet and a writer,
or Andrea, poet laureate, knowing... five?
Do you know how good of a writer you have to be
to write as many poems as I have with five words?
Sorry!
But, like, you have way more tools.
It's like I just built a house with a screwdriver.
- Okay. So... - What is this chapter of?
Just to prepare me.
- Leading up to the surgery. - Okay.
"My attention was spellbound by the sight of Andrea's stomach.
Their mid-section, formerly sharp and angular,
had distended so much in the past few weeks,
swollen now in a way that made everything feel more real,
more urgent.
Like me, they had a potbelly.
I'd loathed my own stomach all of my life, but I had never once feared
that something sinister could be growing silently, under the surface."
I think there's so much beautiful in there, baby.
I love the writing. I think it's great.
But there's something missing for me.
We hear, "I don't wanna lose Andrea,"
you know, hopefully,
but I don't know what you're feeling.
Will you tell me more? I agree with it, what you're saying,
I just feel like sometimes I think that I'm doing that, and I'm not.
Like, for me, it was like things were being put into perspective,
and that was what I was trying to...
You have to be able to articulate
why you, as my partner,
the closest person to me...
are the person holding it together. Why aren't you falling apart?
Which it's totally fine that you're not. But it has to be included.
You're the main character, not me.
I'm going to get in where you see my food addiction a bit more
- once we're in chemo. - Okay.
- So you might see it there. - So keep going and let me see.
"Cancer care proved to be octopoidal. My phone--"
- What the fuck is that? - What does it sound like?
- "Octopoidal"? - Yeah.
I have no fucking clue what that means, Meg.
That one's too much, I'm sorry.
Well, I think octopoidal means like an octopus.
But I thought of it as having many arms.
Eight arms.
I'm gonna make a note to say something about arms of responsibility,
just to help along the plebeians. Does that word mean what I think it means?
The plebeians are a race of aliens that lived in Atlantis.
No way!
It's true! It's fucking true!
No, it's a member of the common people in Ancient Rome.
"A commoner or vulgar person."
- Okay, keep going. - Okay.
"At the dispensary, I flashed a medical marijuana card
with 'caregiver' printed next to my name.
My new identity, stamped and validated by the state."
Three years ago, we were just, like, really struggling as a couple.
And when we found out that it was cancer, they basically tried to break up with me.
They were like, "I don't wanna do this with you."
And I was just like, "I am not going anywhere."
It felt like the next day our relationship had healed completely.
And we've been together now for nine years.
I don't know if you all have figured it out yet,
but Meg is an anomaly.
She has lived most of her life never worrying.
It's actually very innate with me.
Any time that I've worried about something,
I have a lot of proof that it was a complete waste of time.
So in the rare moments that I have worried,
I'm like, "Why did I do that?"
How I look at all of it is there's so many different possibilities
of things that could happen.
That Andrea could die is one slice of possibility.
Another slice of possibility is that another medication comes out and it...
works for another year, and then another, and that they could die in five years.
Another possibility is that those medications happen,
and a cure for cancer happens in that time,
or for this, and they can live for a long time.
Like, I just don't know.
I don't wanna pretend to know how it will go.
I feel like if it comes down to me having to grieve something big,
I will grieve something big, and fully.
But it doesn't make sense for me to grieve before it happens.
Maybe that's why, when Andrea's in pain, like,
it feels... I get heavier, just because that feels like,
"Okay, you're in pain right now, you can't walk right now,
and this is hard right now."
I don't know what people's perception of me is,
if they think I'm in denial, if they think I'm really resilient.
She's a little in denial, which is fine with me.
Is it strength or repression?
So, it kept popping up for me, around Meg,
and just imagining that wearing on Meg.
And I sat her down and I told her that I was feeling really afraid
that her joy from here on out
would come at the times where she wasn't around me.
I think there's a fear of, like, feeling guilty taking care of yourself.
I mean, even writing, it's hard sometimes to make that time for myself,
because I'm like, okay, that's time alone,
with the person I love on the other side of the door.
But also, like...
it's the thing that I wanna do with my life too.
I guess there's a part of me that feels sometimes torn of where to be.
It's really complicated to figure out. Like, if somebody said,
"Andrea's gonna die in a month..."
God forbid. But if somebody said that,
I'm not spending any month of that writing my little book.
I'm, like, there, I'm fully present.
It's a dance and a balance that I'm working on.
And I feel like, sometimes, I'm...
too young to be working on it.
I don't think it's that common to be 35...
and holding all of it.
Yeah.
- Hi. - Hi, Dr. Alldredge.
- How are you feeling? - I'm okay. I'm in some pain.
So let me pull this up for you.
So, just to get oriented, here's the table that we're laying on.
So these are the bones of the pelvis, and then there's that spot
which looks more lymph node.
On the surface, it's muscle that's right here.
Yeah.
And may actually be responsible for some of that deeper pain.
If I give you permission to actually point on my body
where I might be feeling pain, do you mind?
Yeah, so I would expect it to be almost up in here.
- Yep, that's-- Yeah. - Is that where it is?
So I think, as we're thinking about what we do next,
is that we can use the Elahere still,
and add Avastin to that picture.
There's still a small chance with Avastin
of having the complications we talked about,
like some kind of bowel injury.
Or that voice change risk that we talked about.
And I know those were hard risks for us to accept.
Right? 'Cause I know protecting your voice is important.
And if you feel like those are unacceptable risks,
- then we don't have to. And that's okay. - Okay.
We still have other things in the toolbox to fight this. This isn't...
Prayers? Songs?
- Sure. And also chemo. - Yeah?
And also western medicine!
But we have several clinical trials of things that have...
- a chance to buy us many, many months. - Yeah.
- And so we're not out of options. - Okay. Great.
- Thank you so much. - Of course.
"Buy me a few months" was hard to hear.
The reason I'm crying is because...
This is the weirdest thing to say, but...
if I die, Meg's gonna really need me to support her...
through those feelings.
Like, I can't stand the idea of not being there for her
through that.
I was telling her the other night too.
I said, "If I do die, I can't stand the idea of not being like,
'Meg, you will not believe it!
You will not believe what happens!'"
I started Avastin.
This new chemo that I'm doing is added to the one that I was doing before.
And the scary side effect of that is you could lose your voice.
But it felt like I was like, "Okay.
Like, stop doing your purpose, or die."
And I woke up just the day after the first infusion
and I couldn't talk at all.
My throat would get so inflamed that I felt like I couldn't breathe.
I was panicked, because I tried to call for Meg, couldn't.
And...
being...
in physical suffering
and not being able to call for help was frightening.
Like, I was scared.
Of all symptoms for me to get, and it's rare!
And I got it, you know?
To me, it feels like a biblical, allegorical thing.
I was like, "What is this?"
It's this trade-off of some sort, like, okay, take the medicine
that is keeping you alive,
but lose your voice,
your gift, your communication, your purpose.
It feels unfair.
And I feel like I have more investment than anyone in the world
of Andrea staying alive. Not that it's up to me,
but I would accept the choice to not continue this medication
if they were going to lose their voice.
So I have to sort of wrap my mind around not speaking.
So much so that I wouldn't be able to read a full poem.
We have to cancel all of my speaking events, all my poet laureate events.
I'm a spoken word poet.
I can't do that right now.
And there's no way, there's absolutely no way I could do a show.
- Gib! - Yeah, baby?
- Will you come up here? - Everything okay?
- Yeah. - Okay.
I found something that I need you to see.
Okay.
Oh my God! That's amazing!
For the Blue Devils, senior guard, number 32, Andrea...
Look, this is you!
- Look at me! I'm so little. - ...picked up by Gibson.
- Let's see. Come on, Gibby! - Gibson drives...
What!
Oh, my gosh.
And it's all over.
Calais has won the State Class C Schoolgirl Championship.
Twenty points. It's a big night for you, and a super tournament.
- Is the gold ball gonna fit in that case? - Oh, sure.
They've been dusting it out all week.
So Calais is a basketball town.
And it was also a town where I never saw an out queer person, ever.
People talked about queerness, but not in...
not in a celebratory way.
I got bullied as a kid.
People were commenting on my gender at the time,
because I often looked like a boy.
I felt like I was a boy when I was young.
I mean... this is ridiculous!
But I used to put Smurfs in my underwear, because that's how I packed, I remember...
Papa Smurf, he had, like, some wild hair,
and it was the right shape!
It isn't that you don't like boys.
It's that you only like boys you want to be:
David with his jaw carved out of the side of a cliff.
Chris, the basketball hero who has a tic.
He blinks 15 times when he makes a shot.
You spend hours blinking in the mirror,
wishing you could be a star like him.
Mary Levine calls you a dyke,
and you don't have the language to tell her she's wrong... and right.
You just show up to her house promising to paint her fingernails red
with what will gush from her busted face if she ever says it again.
You just want to cut your hair
and spit out whatever you don't want in your mouth,
your own name, even,
skirting around the truth.
You want a hard life, that is your life.
Your life in the locker room
that doesn't stop demanding you keep your eyes on the floor,
your life at the prom where you'll run home in a snowstorm,
chucking your last pair of heels in a snowbank,
realizing you are the only boy
you ever wanted to tear your dress off for.
In college, I was still closeted.
I had fallen in love with one of my closest friends from high school, Mandy.
She had come out, and it had sort of woken me up too.
And then I told her that I was in love with her.
And I felt like I had discovered the key to the universe.
But I was terrified. I was so scared.
Mandy,
only you can imagine how much time I spent
picking out my outfit
the night you took me to my first queer bar
in Portland, Maine,
the biggest city I had ever walked through.
I was so excited and so scared
that we'd be spotted or killed
on our way inside.
We sat in the parking lot for over an hour
'til I changed my mind and you drove me home,
mascara pouring down my brand-new boy shirt.
I had so much shame,
but I would turn things that I was still struggling with
into poetry.
Say, my gender, when I first started writing about that,
I felt very anxious getting on stage.
But as soon as I would speak the poem for the first time,
it was as if that shame fell off of me.
Spoken word poetry, it saved me.
Choosing your life
and how that made you into someone who now often finds it easy
to explain your gender by saying you're happiest on the road,
when you're not here or there but in-between,
the yellow line running down the center of it all
like a goddamn sunbeam.
They're gonna keep telling you you are a crime of nature.
And you're gonna look at all your options and choose conviction.
Choose to spend your whole life
telling secrets you owe no one to everyone
until there isn't anyone who can insult you
by calling you what you are:
you holy, blinking star,
you highway streak of light,
falling over and over
for your hard life,
your perfect life,
your sweet and beautiful life.
The year I got diagnosed with cancer,
I got contacted by the high school in Calais,
and they asked me to do the commencement speech
for the high school grad--
...for the high school graduation.
In my whole life,
nothing ever meant more to me in regards to my career
than getting invited to do that.
I talked about growing up queer,
the difficulty I had with being closeted as a student at that school.
I felt like something had come full circle.
It felt so healing
and it felt so important for my young self.
I could feel my younger self hearing me
and just feeling like,
this is what we've become?
And being so happy.
Before I got cancer, if somebody mis-pronouned me,
I would come out of my skin.
Like, I felt so reactive to other people's perceptions of my gender.
But after I was diagnosed,
I almost went from a place of feeling so much gender
to feeling genderless.
I don't know myself by my gender anymore.
It's almost like your identity itself sort of drips off of you.
Like, just falls off.
I feel more in touch with the part of myself
that is eternal.
Because I can't take my gender with me to the other side.
I no longer have any reactions to people mis-pronouning me.
Like, I don't have... I don't...
I just feel like me.
And I can still get upset about gender stuff,
but it's watching what my non-binary or trans friends are experiencing.
And so it's sensitive to talk about this,
because I wouldn't ever want anybody to feel
like there was something wrong with them,
if it was really painful to be mis-pronouned or something.
I very much have compassion for that. It's just not what I experience anymore.
The sea, the sea, the sing, the win, the win, the wind.
I'm trying to get the sound of the poem,
but it's not words.
Are you making sounds to get rhythm?
To feel how the poem should sound.
And then find words that fit into the sound.
It's been hard for me to lose my voice because of this new treatment.
So it was like, okay, maybe we should change courses
and just stop doing it.
But I decided to do another infusion,
even if I lost my voice forever.
And wildly, as soon as I accepted it
and I'm like, "Okay, I'm not gonna have a voice"...
I woke up the next day and I could speak.
It was crazy!
And so tomorrow I have a chemo infusion.
I just really hope this treatment's working,
because I'm still wanting the show.
The show would be a celebration of life.
And I'm thinking it would be the last show that I'll do.
But I hope that's not the case.
And so I'm doing every single thing I can for my health.
There is this thing that basketball players do where,
if you're practicing, you can't leave the court unless you've ended on a make.
And so...
I've been thinking about this time that might be the end of my life, as...
ending on a make.
But I need to find out how much my cancer is growing,
if it would make it impossible for me to do the show.
My back hurts driving right now.
My bone down there is really hurting.
Which is one of the questions they always ask because it could be cancer.
I'm really emotional.
Why, because I was hurting?
You got scared.
You're scared?
You were scared.
This is the exact room that they told us it was incurable in.
You're really making me anxious because of--
you're so different today.
But you get to feel whatever you gotta feel,
but I'm not used to you being like this.
It's making me think there's maybe something I don't know
that you know.
No.
- Do you know something? - No!
Like intuitively, though?
No, not at all. I don't know anything intuitively.
I think it's just...
hitting me that, like, you can't just, like, have a back injury.
I'm feeling this pain today where I'm like,
"That sort of feels like a pain when cancer is growing."
I wouldn't have known this was how cancer looks in someone's life.
Like, every month, you find out,
like, I'm living, I'm dying, I'm living, I'm dying,
I'm living, I'm dying.
It's sort of a terrible lottery every three weeks.
And I think sometimes I don't even realize
the weight of holding it all.
You're all done. I'm gonna let you go.
- Thank you so much. - Thank you very much.
I have that elephant-sitting-on-my-chest feeling.
I can hardly get any air in my lung.
Okay.
I need to open the email.
Like I keep looking at the clock and seeing my mom goes to bed at 7.
Do you mind if I open my thing in here, my number?
Maybe not when we're driving.
We're home in 22 minutes.
Okay.
I'm just gonna go in and read the number, baby.
It's a ten.
Is that right?
Is that right, baby?
Is that right?
Is it right?
Oh my God.
I gotta call my mom.
How is it a ten? How is it a ten?
How?
I wanna call everybody.
- Are you sure I read it right? - Yeah!
- You're sure? - Yeah.
Hi.
Mom, my bloodwork went all the way...
My CA-125 went all the way back down to a ten,
and all of my immune markers are so much better.
- I'm so happy. I'm so happy. - Yeah?
That's so good! I've been wondering.
I've been sitting here worrying 'cause I didn't hear from you.
What was the reading? I didn't hear.
It was a ten, and the last time, it was a 21.
- Oh geez! - That's great.
Okay, you guys. I love you.
I love you!
We just got Andrea's bloodwork back, and their cancer marker went all the way down.
Yes!
I'm gonna go have a glass of wine and celebrate.
Do it, Gay! I'm gonna drink some medical marijuana.
We could go in in three weeks and it could be growing or something,
but these three weeks right now,
I have these three weeks.
And it feels like so much to have three weeks.
I'm so happy.
I'm just gonna let myself be happy.
I could do a show, man.
This is so... I can't believe this.
- Hi. - Hi, Bone.
- How are you feeling? - Feeling pretty good.
Dealing with my excitement because of the show.
One of the dates we're looking at is the end of May.
And looking at your health schedule,
I wanna make sure we're giving you enough space for that.
So do you feel comfortable if that's one of the dates we inquire about?
I mean the only thing that comes up for me
is the further we push it out, I keep thinking, "Will I be alive?
Will I be healthy enough?"
Okay.
But, hey, why don't we just root for the...
possibility of me being alive...
And if I'm not, I will not feel bad about not being there.
I will...
- be in some... - Hologram Gibby!
- ...more beautiful theater. - You will be alive.
I'll be in a theater in the clouds.
"Sweet community, I have cherished these years.
I have cherished my quiet time, my writing time, my home time,
but I'm a spoken word artist at heart,
and I miss live shows so much.
So the news I'm about to share is incredibly exciting for me.
I'll be performing at the Paramount Theater in Denver,
reading poems and sharing stories about what I'm for.
There will be a special guest also performing.
The pre-sale code is 'goosebumps.'"
Stop, Ryan!
- Gib! - Meg, it broke!
How did you break it?
I just opened it. Like, I did nothing wrong.
I can't believe that shit.
God, it seems like you're very serious right now.
It seems like you're gonna talk about cancer or something. Jesus!
If you could kind of recap what the concerns are.
Yeah, I think I'm about to have a hot flash.
Let me see if I can talk through the hot flash.
So one of the concerns is
that I won't be able to speak my poems through a hot flash.
So the thing that I'm most afraid of is
the ways that the treatments I'm doing
will impact my capacity to perform on stage.
Meg, my voice is going.
Good.
Good. That's our new motto.
Try fucking with us, life! Good. Take my voice.
You think I can't do the show without a voice? You're wrong.
You know, it's three years of chemotherapy, which impacts my vision
and my memory, so I don't know if I'll be able to remember any of my poems,
which would kind of be okay maybe if I could do a monitor,
but I won't be able to see the monitor.
So, there...
What I need to do is I have to start memorizing my poems again.
As a kid, I thought 100 was the biggest number there was.
My mother absolutely blew my mind the day she said one hundred and one.
One hundred and what?
Twenty years old when I believed sex had to involve a dude
and the word "screw."
How could I not wanna see her clearly as she pole dances on the tractor
and mows our lawn in a bikini?
Seventeen slow steps to the mic.
She took a breath before speaking.
And I am so far from ready for Cupid, that naked little shit
to fire anything sharp my way.
So far from ready to be the kind of unhinged
only love makes me.
What if you are the love of your life?
I think, "Oh my God, I hope that's not true.
Because I am absolutely not my type."
I can't believe you know that. That's crazy!
I'm trying to decide whether or not I'm gonna put...
'Cause so many people come to my shows who struggle with suicide and...
But I've not been there, so I'm trying to figure out how to...
speak and write about it without saying that I'm there right now.
It's such a weird thing to have, like, lived so much of my life
with the feeling of wanting to die, and then not now.
I was a cutter in my early twenties.
I was so depressed.
And I woke up one day and I was just done.
And I ran into the kitchen
and I just grabbed this really, really sharp kitchen knife
and I just... I was like, I can't look while I do it.
It just has to be over. And I went like this...
Holy shit, this is hard to talk about.
I was bleeding so much.
I was half a centimeter from an artery.
I just simply would've been dead.
But until that moment,
I don't know if I had necessarily conceived of suicide as a possibility,
and after that, I just sort of always did.
But when I was diagnosed with cancer,
I remember right when I woke up from surgery,
I woke up not depressed.
I woke up...
just sort of in a state of cherishing.
I suddenly felt like it was okay if I died.
But it would never be my doing.
I can't believe we're going to a venue today.
- I really can't. - A big venue.
I don't even know, like, what it's like to do that.
All right.
Holy shit!
Have a good time. Enjoy the show. Hi! How are you?
Welcome. Enjoy the show.
Hi, Tig.
It's exciting. I mean, the whole world is waiting for tonight!
That's what it feels like. People are psyched.
- I wanna peek at that audience. - Nobody's here yet.
- But I'll take that bullet. - Okay.
All right. Let me just go feel it out.
Let me just see if I can walk up these stairs without having a panic attack.
There are people in there.
Thank you so much! My name is Tig.
And...
How am I even gonna breathe?
I wanna look like I have color in my face,
so people don't worry about me.
I wanna walk out there as the pillar of health.
Oh my goodness.
I can't believe this is happening.
Baby, you know how I'm never afraid of my feelings?
I'm afraid of the amount that I have right now.
Okay, well, you know what?
Everyone is here to support you and love you.
Me, the most.
Come in.
Five minutes, please.
- Five minutes, please. Bye-bye! - Okay, thank you.
You better be lightning.
That moment when somebody says that, is so intense.
Five minutes.
Five minutes, Andrea.
All of these lines across my face
Tell you the story of who I am
So many stories of where I've been
And how I got to where I am
But these stories don't mean anything
Okay.
To tell them to, it's true
I was made for you
I climbed across the mountaintops
Swam all across the ocean blue
I crossed all the lines And I broke all the rules
But baby, I broke them all for you
Oh, because even when I was flat broke
You made me feel like a million bucks You do
I was made for you
I cannot believe I'm up here.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for being here.
When I was doing my first rounds of chemotherapy,
I lost almost all the hair on my body.
Like, my proudly feminist leg hair had marched to the floor.
I got my first Brazilian wax
using absolutely no wax.
But my eyebrows were still going strong, you know?
Two bushy caterpillars refusing to butterfly off my face.
My mother called one morning and she said,
"Andrea, you will never believe what happened.
Your father woke up with the entirety of his right eyebrow missing."
And it has been three years, three years, y'all,
and my father's eyebrow has not grown back in this entire time.
And what I know is my dad lost his eyebrow so I could keep mine.
And you don't have to believe in miracles to believe in that.
You only have to believe in love.
I wasn't by any means a natural.
Was not one of those wow-hounds born jaw-dropped.
I was tough in the husk.
Spent years untouched by rain.
Took shelter seriously.
Of course, beauty hunted me.
It hunts everyone.
But I outran it.
Hid in worry, regret, the promise of an afterlife
or a week's end.
Then one day,
in a red velvet theater in New Orleans,
I watched Maya Angelou walk on stage.
Seventeen slow steps to the mic.
She took a breath before speaking.
I could hear God being born in that breath.
I'd never felt anything like it.
Searched the encyclopedia for the feeling's name when I got home:
"goosebumps."
Afterwards I thought, "Well, I can do this."
Tore the caution tape off my life
and let everything touch it.
Caitlin Clark on the television
in her third season with the Hawkeyes,
crossover sharp as a V of sparrows
flying through the paint like Michelangelo's brush:
222 goosebumps.
My baby sister, sober for the first time in 14 years,
calling to tell me she just noticed our mother's eyes are green:
505 goosebumps.
At one point, everything started doing it:
a sincere apology, an enemy's love poem,
the moon rising over the continental divide.
And suddenly, nothing in the world was dying.
You ever felt that?
A split second when nothing in the world is dying?
888 goosebumps.
Me in my home, four months into chemotherapy,
watching all of my eyelashes fall on my cheekbones
and realizing that was 400 wishes I wouldn't have made otherwise.
There was no escaping the magic now.
Beauty caught me and never let me go.
And the thing about the world record is,
if someone breaks it after me,
oh, and they will break it after me,
I will love that so much
that without even trying,
I'll just break it again.
Yay, Gibby!
My friend said, "Well, what if you are the love of your life?"
I thought, "Oh, my God I hope that's not true,
'cause I am absolutely not my type."
So at 12:31,
when he decided not to, when he decided to save his own life,
I did too.
My whole heart, my whole mind, went home with living proof.
This next poem is for Meg, and,
what a...
When I call cancer the Big C,
she is the only one who knows I mean the big ocean
where we met our own Titanic and didn't sink.
And her heart was the door
that opened so wide it tore off the hinges
and kept me afloat,
even when I woke up from surgery
and had to ask her what they found.
Anyone who thinks poetry is frivolous
has never needed someone to tell them something unspeakably hard,
beautifully.
Thank you, all of you, for coming out to the show.
I cannot tell you how much this means to me.
Thank you so much. I hope you have a wonderful night.
I love you all, so, so much.
Thank you, really and truly, from the bottom of my heart.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Oh my God!
I have no idea.
Oh my God.
Are you crying 'cause of love?
Yeah.
Baby, that was so good. It was so good.
It was great.
I had so many feelings, I felt like I was gonna...
I was a balloon filled up with feelings and I was gonna burst.
I felt probably more vulnerable than I'd ever felt in my life.
My cancer marker was as low as it had ever been, the last time I was in there.
And so instead of going right in for an infusion,
I said I wanted to do a scan first.
So now I'm just waiting for the results.
I was up the whole entire night last night.
I was in a lot of pain.
It almost feels like my pelvic bone is breaking in the back.
And then the scan results came in on my phone
and I've not opened them yet.
This one feels particularly sensitive, because I'm afraid to--
What was that?
- Right there. - What?
That was really sweet.
I feel like it just came to help.
So we had two mourning doves in our yard that we called The Lovebirds.
And they were here for months.
And so far, for a few weeks now,
there's only been one mourning dove.
That's the sound of the mourning dove.
And then I looked it up
and I got really sad, because it said that mourning doves mate for life.
And then, if one dies...
then the mourning dove will often spend up to a year grieving,
looking for...
her or his partner.
But what could happen right now that would make me really happy
is if another mourning dove would just come over there
and fix everything.
Maybe the other mourning dove found a better-looking tree
and is like, "Come here."
'Cause that one is...
No.
I'd stay with you in a bad tree over a good tree.
I'll just get the scan results, and we can just open them out here.
I feel sick.
Me too.
Yeah, it's everywhere.
- Can I read what it says, baby? - Hold up.
Just give me a minute with it, okay?
"Uptake with Level 2 cervical lymph...
nodes bilaterally of uncertain significance.
Interval progression of metastatic disease
in the chest, abdomen and pelvis."
So that must be what I'm feeling.
It's everywhere.
It's scary that there's one in my abdomen.
I think that, just when I get the news,
then I'm sort of back just in the present moment.
Which is just a lot easier.
I love that for you!
I like to be in my hopeful little moments.
But I am still hopeful.
You are?
Fuck! I really didn't want there to be cancer all through my body.
I really, really didn't.
I think when I got this last news,
I thought
"I'm dying from this, and I'm dying from this pretty soon."
I knew if I went on a ride with Meg,
and I said, like, "This ride is an intentional ride to see if I can...
surrender to my life
in a way that, like, sort of thrusts me back into joy."
So we went on a ride, and...
And I just take it in.
Suddenly, all the heaviness just fell off me.
It was like the whole world changed color.
I remember thinking, in the beginning, like,
two years to live.
I thought, "That's so little."
And now... I feel like...
"Holy shit, that's so much."
A second is so much.
A minute here sitting looking at Meg's face is so much.
I get two years of it?
I feel like I lived so much longer
in these last years than I did all the years before.
It was just this fucking... wow!
I...
Wow, I got this life.
And...
I know I'm not gonna die today. Like, I feel pretty certain.
So, wow, I...
like, wow, I get tomorrow too.
So, what happens next?
I don't know.
I want to live in the mystery, you know?
I want...
my very last second to be like...
"Damn, I wish I had a million more of these."
Give me the light years
But I want the dark ones too
Grief is the singer in my band She's a passenger van
And a shortcut straight to the truth
Learn from the nightshades
They grow in the darkest places
Had we not been stung so many times Would we ever have arrived
At this heaven on Earth That I don't wanna waste?
Pick a lucky penny up
And I'll marry you For your money, love
So keep the Novocain Out of my wisdom teeth
Wanna feel it all
Salt then sour then sweet
Want to kiss you and write love's name On my crumbling walls
Lay them at your feet
With the rest of me
Salt then sour
Then sweet
Come to the porch, love
Look up at the perfect sky
Holding the sun and the moon And the thunder in June
While it teaches the birds And the rain how to fly
I don't need perfect
No, I just want to touch the truth
I want to cherish the trying And the living and the dying
And make big mistakes The way kind people do
Pick a lucky penny up
And I'll marry you For your money, love
So keep the Novocain Out of my wisdom teeth
Wanna feel it all
Salt then sour then sweet
Want to kiss you and write love's name On my crumbling walls
Lay them at your feet
With the rest of me
- Nothing more I need - Nothing more I need
- Life is love I bleed - Life is love I bleed
Salt then sour
Then sweet
So sweet
Life is love I bleed
- So sweet - So sweet
So sweet.