Flowers for Andrea Gibson

A thank you on their birthday

I hesitated to share this post, my overactive mind anticipating how it would be received. Irrelevant. Worse, insincere. That inner critic is enough to paralyze a person. But at this point, my love is stronger, and that’s in large part thanks to Andrea Gibson.

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It was July 14th. Dave and I had just spent a beautiful weekend by the beach, our best trip together since I crashed into severe Long COVID. We didn’t do anything flashy—our one excursion was a balmy roadside Lucharitos, listening to Dave’s musician friend play stunning renditions of our favorite songs on keys. (All the more impressive considering his blindness—you can find him here.) But the whole thing just had that sweet, special air of right place, right time.

An aside for context: I grew up spending summers by the bay on Long Island. An avid rock collector, I’d also come across little pieces of blue tile that washed up with the tide. Sometimes pure cerulean, sometimes speckled with white, always exciting. As I got older and busier, finding these little treasures became even more meaningful. One appeared during a summer break from college, after meditating in the sun and feeling my first moment of connection with God consciousness. Another during lockdown, after I left my toxic life in the city to live alone at what felt like the end of the world. To me, the little pops of blue = thumbs up from the big U.

I found four (!) pieces of tile on our four-day weekend. Yes, I was four for four in magical gifts from the universe. What’s equally amazing is that I was physically able to take that many walks on the beach, each time climbing 17 steps to get back inside (before you picture something out of Sirens, it’s a modest beach house that got clobbered by two hurricanes and wound up on stilts).

The message my heart took from those tiles was: you’ve been to hell and back several times, kid, but your hard, or rather, soft work is paying off in spades. Compared to this time last year, I’m less reactive, more trusting, and overall, more at peace.

Dave and I had taken two separate cars to transport the cat, dog, and wall of gear he needed to play a gig on Friday. Before heading back, I wondered aloud if we should stop at the farm stand to get flowers for the front porch—a little plea from my inner child to make home feel a bit more like home. But we were fully packed up and the cat was fully bawling at this point, so we agreed to do it another day.

And yet, as I watched Dave’s car pass the farm stand and head towards the expressway, something in my heart pressed that I didn’t want to wait another month before getting flowers. I was morbid even before chronic illness, and I literally thought, what if I die and we never got the flowers? So the pup and I pranced into the 87 degree heat to assess our options. A very nice man helped me get a couple large baskets into the front seat, and I grabbed a bouquet of mixed sunflowers for good measure. Little Lisa was beaming from the inside out.

I think this is what heaven looks like.

Back in the car, I blasted the AC and threw a photo up on my stories to share the joy. And then, right before I closed Instagram, I saw Meg’s post. The brilliant writer and beautiful soul, Andrea Gibson had died that morning.

I’ve never cried for a public figure before. When I say I bawled. And I wasn’t alone. Thousands of comments poured out a shared sense of gratitude and loss. To read these surrounded by flowers was surreal—like a global memorial service, a symbol of the interconnectivity Andrea so poetically described.

They wrote the things my heart feels.

Andrea’s words were there for me at a time when I felt both brutally disconnected and raw to the world, simultaneously. I was fighting everyone just to be acknowledged and understood. Doctors said there was nothing wrong with me. My family didn’t know what to do with me. My job required so many things of me. I knew the path I was on wasn’t sustainable but didn’t know how to stop, how to ask for help, how to put myself first. When I finally collapsed into severe chronic illness, Andrea’s perspective was a light in the darkness. They made me feel like I could be myself, whether that was a caterpillar inside its chrysalis, a butterfly just getting the hang of its wings, or a boyish ladybug, like them. They helped me learn to love myself as I am.

They posted this absolute revelation in January 2024, and I listened to it over and over. “You, are the best thing, that has ever happened, to you.” Imagine if that could be true? I’d recently been laid off from my hard-earned role as a Creative Director, and I felt equal parts lost and free. I remember excitedly telling Dave, I want to do this!

I gave serious thought to how I would court myself, which I now understand to be a reflection on what matters to me. (I’d present a pebble to remind myself of the bay where I grew up, and shakily read a handwritten poem, in case you were wondering.) Paying attention to those things was a sign that I do, in fact, matter to me. Andrea not only inspired me to write, but helped me realize I was worth writing about. I started drafting my first personal essay the next month, and shared it here in May.

Two versions of “Feeling safe enough to fail” in my Notes app.

I was digging through my saved posts recently, and came across another gem from last August, Andrea’s last August in human form:

This was over two years into my Long COVID, and four months into My Long Pause on Substack and Instagram. I had many tools to manage my condition and, some days were still really really hard. This post resonated and broke me open—Andrea’s idea of imagining they were lessening the pain for someone else through their experience. It’s one of the many things they’ve said that have helped melt the iceberg around my heart and gently orient it back towards compassion.

When life is hard and painful, and I can’t feel the light, I try to imagine all of us connected by the thread of existence. I think that thread is love.

“Rooting for each others’ joy, longing for each other to thrive. It’s what I cherish most about this existence, the love that connects us. The care that we have for each other. To me that’s the main reason why the world is worth saving.”

—Andrea Gibson, August 13, 1975 - July 14, 2025

Sending a thank you into the ether,
Lisa