Pod Insights All There Is with Anderson Cooper ‘Dying is the Opposite of Leaving’: Remembering Andrea Gibson About this episode Is dying really "the opposite of leaving?" Are we "reincarnated in those we love?" Poet Andrea Gibson thought so, and in this moving conversation, Anderson speaks with Andrea's wife Megan Falley, about Andrea's battle with cancer and why she uses the word "alleged" when talking about Andrea's death. For more of “All There Is with Anderson Cooper” visit cnn.com/allthereis.
Host: Anderson Cooper Showrunner: Haley Thomas Producers: Chuck Hadad, Grace Walker, Emily Williams, Madeleine Thompson Associate Producer: Kyra Dahring Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski Technical Director: Dan Dzula Bookers: Kerry Rubin and Kari Pricher
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:14 Anderson Cooper? That's Serena Partridge, a singer and choir director I met in Minneapolis last week, and like so many people I spoke with there, she talked about the grief she's feeling.
0:24 Speaker 01 Our grief needs our attention. It's a really important part of our human experience. And the more we try to quiet it down and not look at it, I think the more insistent and engrossing it can become. And it can be so scary to really turn to it. But our grief and our love are like the same entity. And if you are not making space for the grief and heartbreak, I think you're also dimming down the love. So it feels really a different kind of urgent to find ways to let our grief move in a held container, so we're not going
1:09 Speaker 01 to be completely undone by it. But we're also not going to pretend it's not there, because the heartbreak is really important. And my community deserves my love, which kind of means that my community deserves my grief, too.
1:27 Anderson Cooper? How to let grief move in a held container so as not to be undone by it? Well, that's something I very much still struggle with, and maybe you do, too. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, you're not alone. My guest today is writer, poet Megan Faly, who is married to the poet Andrea Gibson. Andrea died last summer after a years-long battle with cancer. As you'll hear in the interview, Megan says Andrea allegedly to hide, and I kind of love her explanation of why she says that. My interview with her is right after break.
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2:34 Anderson Cooper? Welcome back. My guest today is Megan Falley. She's a writer and poet and the spouse of the late poet Andrea Gibson. Andrea was 49 and died last summer after a long struggle with ovarian cancer. Andrea used the pronouns "they" and "them." And I want to show you a clip from the documentary that was made about Andrea and Megan as they faced Andrea's illness together. It's called "Come See Me in the Good Light."
2:57 Speaker 03 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. How about my power drill? We might need your power drill. There are four squirrels here, and they fight when I bring out nuts.
3:42 Speaker 03 And so I got these houses.
3:46 Speaker 03 To watch a squirrel rebuild her nest in the only pine that survived the storm. 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?
4:10 Speaker 03 To fix the mailbox after the windstorm knocks it down. This seems weird that it comes with the kids thing. Like, is it for children? No, it's an actual mailbox. But look at this. To fix the mailbox after a bear knocks it down and a hundred times again. Gibby had this aesthetically pleasing solution.
4:35 Speaker 03 To say goodnight to my mother every night of the year. All right, Mom, sweet dreams. Bye.
4:42 Anderson Cooper? I spoke to Megan Falley several weeks ago. Thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. A lot of times, people ask the question, how are you doing? But I know that I read what you wrote about that question that you get. And I wonder, can you just talk a little bit about why that question, how are you doing, doesn't feel right?
5:06 Speaker 04 I ended up writing that that question feels like a thimble at the mouth of the river. That it is just this tiny little container asking to hold something that feels so rushing and
5:22 Speaker 04 just that has so much magnitude and it's just an impossible mechanism to hold it all. It's also really unspecific about like, how am I doing when, like in the last four months or this week or right now in this moment? And so I think that a better question to ask somebody in grief is maybe sometimes I just like to share an image of something I'm experiencing and let, and maybe that's as a writer, but and let the person I'm talking to feel the image. And so like, right now, before I got on, I was trying to roll up my sleeves
6:07 Speaker 04 and realized that Andrea would always roll up my sleeves for me and how cumbersome it is to to try to do that by myself.
6:14 Anderson Cooper? Have you noticed the difference of doing things by yourself?
6:20 Anderson Cooper? A lot since Andrea's been gone?
6:24 Speaker 04 Certainly, I think I've I've never lived alone before until now and I do this thing sometimes where I just sort of whisper to Andrea, I just say like, put your arms around me. I just said it before we got on camera together and and then I could feel Andrea at my back too. So I'm hesitant to use the words like alone or without them.
6:50 Anderson Cooper? Is grief different than you thought it would be?
6:54 Speaker 04 Yes, uh, it is. I don't think that I thought that I would be able to
7:07 Speaker 04 have as much joy as I've had. In some ways, I think Andrea's been
7:15 Speaker 04 maybe my magnificent teacher because these last four years, what they've been trying to show the world is how much joy and presence and love they were able to experience uh, with cancer diagnosis. And so I guess if I wasn't able to find joy and laughter now, I would have missed the point of what Andrea
7:40 Speaker 04 of Andrea's messaging. Um,
7:46 Speaker 04 I also feel like I'm in a very unique position because I'm right now like on a tour promoting the documentary about Andrea and our love story. And for a lot of people, you lose somebody unless and less people speak their name. And I'm having the inverse of that experience. More and more people are learning of Andrea and that's unique and really special and a privilege.
8:15 Anderson Cooper? Andrea wrote a love letter from from the afterlife and I'd like to just play part of it.
8:23 Anderson Cooper? My love.
8:25 Speaker 03 I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close, you look past me when wondering where I am. It's okay. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die
9:06 Speaker 03 is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive? Ask me the altitude of heaven and I will answer, how tall are you?
9:19 Anderson Cooper? That idea of to die is to be reincarnated in those we love is so extraordinary to me. I mean, I've never heard it said in that way. And that dying is the opposite of leaving. Do you feel that? Do you believe that's true?
9:40 Speaker 04 It's, it is the most singularly, the most comforting thought that I could have. It's the most, I'm just gonna make up a word, but like warm blanket-y piece of writing.
9:56 Anderson Cooper? I love that.
9:58 Speaker 04 Or thing that I could feel and I, of course, I don't know, but I choose to believe it.
10:08 Anderson Cooper? When I heard it, I, I started crying because I mean, that idea is so, it is so comforting and it's not something I've been able to feel most of my life until recently, feeling like my dad again, which is just one of, I wish there were more people I felt, but it's a start. And, but I love, I just find that so incredibly comforting. What was it about Andrea? Did you know right away, like, this is my person?
10:38 Speaker 04 We were friends for, for a really long time and they felt pretty untouchable to me. We had a thirteen year age difference and I just, I didn't let my brain even go there. And then, once it did go there, it never left. Yeah, we fell in love on a dance floor. Um.
11:02 Anderson Cooper? I mean, I've done that a couple of times, but he often doesn't last past the dance floor.
11:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, it lasted a long time past the dance floor. I think we, we sort of didn't stop dancing. And then we kept, we really started dancing even more throughout their diagnosis. Like, that, that sounds metaphorical, but literally, we, we were always dancing and kind of like two kids putting on a living room show at all times. We just had fun together.
11:33 Anderson Cooper? There's part of the film which is so beautiful. It's something Andrea said about something that happened after you both took a car ride. And a, a feeling that, that Andrea had. And I, let's play that.
11:49 Speaker 03 I feel like I lived so much longer in these last years than I did all the years before.
11:58 Speaker 03 Wow.
12:06 Speaker 03 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.
12:21 Speaker 03 So what happens next? I don't know.
12:28 Speaker 03 I want to live in the mystery, you know?
12:35 Speaker 03 I want my very last second to be like, damn, I wish I had a million more of these.
12:50 Anderson Cooper? Is that what you feel that Andrea's last second was like?
12:54 Speaker 04 One of the few like lucid things that Andrea said was, "I fucking loved my life."
13:02 Speaker 04 They said that to a room, their parents, four ex-girlfriends, Tig. Yeah, so a few people they hadn't made out with. And I think it really stunned everybody in the room. Andrea died over the course of three days and really wanted to live longer. They loved this life. They loved this planet and wanted to be 100 years old, for sure. So yeah, I will say they definitely wanted more, more seconds here.
13:35 Anderson Cooper? Tig said it was a gift to be not only there in that time, but to be and hear Andrea say, "I fucking loved my life."
13:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, there's, I think the way that people navigate their own death or illness experience has a profound impact on the people around them witnessing it. And I will say like, my relationship to death has changed profoundly since watching Andrea die.
14:08 Anderson Cooper? How so?
14:09 Speaker 04 I, I mean, this is going to sound morbid and I don't mean it this way because I also would really like to live a long time, but I don't feel afraid of it because I feel that I will meet Andrea there. And I will just preface, like, I didn't, didn't grow up with any kind of religion or anything, but Andrea was just such a, was so much energy and spirit. And it doesn't feel possible for that to be gone. And so where is that? And I feel like...
14:54 Speaker 04 Dying will be the, the answer to that or the reunion of that. And it just, it intrigues me a bit more, more than I would say it ever had. Again, not, not rushing it in any way.
15:09 Anderson Cooper? You're not afraid of it in the way you might have been before?
15:14 Speaker 04 Yeah. I mean, Andrea died at home. They died in our bed. Um, they, you know, their heartbeats stopped beneath my hand like I, they don't, I don't think there's a way to get, to get closer. And that was my experience.
15:30 Anderson Cooper? Andrea's heartbeat stopped?
15:32 Speaker 04 Yeah. I don't know if I've ever told this story, but the last thing I said to Andrea was, you're, I said, you're a star, you're a comet. And it was seconds after that, that their heart stopped. And my friends who were there told me, I remember that, but they told me that afterward I said to Andrea, you did it. Like, like, congratulations. Like you did it.
16:03 Anderson Cooper? We're going to take a short break. When we come back, more with Megan.
16:07 Speaker 05 I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast. We're going to talk about rethinking how we die. How we think about death in the first place greatly informs how we live. Our guest is Dr. B J Miller. He's a hospice and palliative care physician.
16:25 Speaker 06 We are aging as a people. This is a worldwide phenomenon that we are aging and therefore getting closer to the end of life on some level as a group. It's not at all surprising that you'll see a revving up of interests, services, and also sort of anxiety that pushes us away from the subject. It makes us cling to life.
16:46 Speaker 05 Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts.
16:52 Anderson Cooper? Valley.
16:55 Anderson Cooper? Welcome back. We're talking to writer Megan Falley.
17:00 Anderson Cooper? Living with that diagnosis for four years, did you grieve before Andrea died? Did you feel a form of grief? Or allow yourself to feel a form of grief while Andrea was alive?
17:18 Speaker 04 I think subconsciously,
17:22 Speaker 04 that must have always been going on just to welcome mortality into our home and have conversations. And there was definitely never a day since their diagnosis that I didn't think about cancer.
17:36 Speaker 04 I believed that if anybody in this planet had a chance of being
17:44 Speaker 04 the miracle, or having a radical remission, or anything like that, it would have been Andrea. Because they were so miraculous in so many ways. And I held a lot of hope right through the end, and so did Andrea. I mean, they were in the last week of their life, they were on oxygen, but they were also refusing to eat sugar because they wanted to stay healthy in the very last days. And so I think we're both really
18:17 Speaker 04 made of hope.
18:21 Speaker 04 I'm a very
18:25 Speaker 04 present person. I don't worry.
18:31 Speaker 04 Which is really, really confounds people, but I really don't tend to worry.
18:37 Speaker 04 And so I feel like my grief really came most as it was happening. I wasn't really grieving Andrea before that. I was celebrating Andrea and loving Andrea and living with them.
18:58 Anderson Cooper? I saw something you wrote where you say you started to use the word allegedly when you talk about Andrea's death, which I kind of love. Can you talk about that a little bit?
19:10 Speaker 04 It felt so weird to, to talk with such certainty, to say Andrea died, as if any of us even know what that means.
19:23 Speaker 04 We actually don't know what it means, I don't think.
19:27 Anderson Cooper? No, I mean, it's true.
19:30 Speaker 04 And I, I had felt so many sort of signs and communications that it felt
19:38 Speaker 04 it, it just didn't feel right, and it still doesn't to say Andrea died. There's been a lot of little, just little nods, maybe, or winks.
19:51 Anderson Cooper? You feel that?
19:54 Speaker 04 I do. I really, I do. Um, I mean, there've been some that feel like too wild to ignore, and then there feel like other things where
20:08 Speaker 04 um, maybe I'm like choosing to see it a bit more and
20:16 Speaker 04 and why wouldn't I make that choice? So I, I, I love saying that Andrea allegedly died. Um, to my limited understanding of a body and a spirit, Andrea's
20:32 Speaker 04 yeah, uh, language is very important to me. So if, if I feel like something is not quite getting it right, I'm going to make whatever adjustments I need.
20:45 Anderson Cooper? I think that idea-
20:46 Speaker 04 I invite you to try it, Anderson.
20:47 Anderson Cooper? Well, no, I, I mean, I, I'm, I'm crying because, uh, what you said is so unique and I think true. And, yeah, we have no idea what, what this means. You know, I mean, yeah, we have no idea what death means. I understand you played a, a song by Andrea's bedside. Could you tell us a little bit about the significance of it? And especially playing at that, at that moment?
21:20 Speaker 04 So when the hospice nurses told me that they would sedate Andrea, I didn't actually understand what that meant. I thought that meant Andrea would be sort of like loopy, but feeling, I didn't know it would mean like pretty non-responsive, non-verbal. And I was in tremendous grief because I thought we would have more conversation. Like when that time came, we would just talk about, at least say like, hey, it's gonna happen now and just have whatever our final words would be.
21:57 Speaker 04 And I felt robbed of that.
22:05 Speaker 04 But within an hour or so of having that intense bereft feeling, our friend, the musician Chris Perica, sent me a text message that said,
22:21 Speaker 04 you've never heard this and Andrea's never heard this, but Andrea wrote a love song for you. It's a song about their death and how they will come back to you. And I, I just want to send it to you now. And I, when I first played it and, you know, the hospice nurses tell you they can hear you, keep talking. I, I watched just their, like, I don't remember if it was their smile twitch or their eyebrow raise, but I, I saw some recognition in the face of what it was.
22:59 Anderson Cooper? Let's play some, some of that.
23:07 Speaker 07 Hold down the fort, 'cause I gotta go.
23:14 Speaker 07 Light on the wall and we'll carry me somehow. Don't say goodbye forever's not too far. The other side's just a storm. So from loving you got a great heart. You got a great heart.
24:39 Anderson Cooper? Wow, that's extraordinary. I love, I love those words, "Hold down the fort."
24:46 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:47 Anderson Cooper? Do you feel like you're holding down the fort?
24:52 Speaker 04 Sure, yeah. I feel like I am now...
25:04 Speaker 04 Andrea carried and held so many people through life, through their art, their poetry was a lifeline for a lot of people dealing with mental health struggles, or gender, queerness, or really heartbreak, anything. And now I sort of feel like, in their death, I'm holding hundreds of thousands of people who, who lost Andrea.
25:38 Anderson Cooper? I, I saw on your Instagram, incredible moment between you two with, with an aging filter, an app that does sort of aging. Can you talk a little bit about what it is? And I just, if it's okay, I'd love to show people that.
25:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, Andrea had received really hard news. That they'd had a metastasis on their bone and this was about a year and a half ago. And I ended up on TikTok and saw that there was an aging filter. And I just something lit up in my head, which was like, oh, I need Andrea to see me old. And I need Andrea to see themselves old, but also I think the deeper knowledge that they would likely not see those images in a mirror and get the opportunity to see them somehow.
26:36 Anderson Cooper? Let's take a look.
26:39 Speaker 04 Today would have been your 50th birthday. I wanted you to see this day so badly. So did you. When you were only 48, you told people you were 50. That's how much you wanted to get here. I have a measly wrinkle collection compared to my end goal, you once wrote. Now that you're gone, I see these videos of you and almost lose my mind with grief. Because it's proof of something that has always been true. I would have loved you at 80, at 100, at 142.
27:15 Speaker 04 When our friends complained about the physical evidence of getting older, the age spot, the skin sag, the detritus of living. It stung us both. We knew how unlikely it was that you would live to see your hair turn completely silver. But what is more valuable than silver in a loved one's hair?
27:35 Anderson Cooper? So beautiful.
27:38 Speaker 04 You know, it's so wild because they're so cute. When I look at, when I watch the film, I just think, God, you're so, like, I still have such a crush on them. Which is, which is a weird feeling, you know?
27:52 Anderson Cooper? A love letter from the afterlife. It's one thing to hear it while Andrea was there. I'm wondering, hearing it now that they're...
28:03 Anderson Cooper? Allegedly dead. Do you hear it differently? Do you hear things in it that you didn't hear before?
28:09 Speaker 04 The new line sort of hits me every time, which feels fortunate, but I really love the line. I'm more with you than I ever could have been. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. The day is when I find Andrea hard to find. That that's extremely comforting.
28:31 Speaker 04 That it's me who's missing them, not.
28:37 Speaker 04 Not Andrea not being there.
28:40 Anderson Cooper? Is there something you've learned in your grief that would be helpful for others?
28:44 Speaker 04 I think when I first saw the film again after Andrea died.
28:52 Speaker 04 A lot of people would be like, how can you do that? How can you sit in it? How can you sort of open this thing up again? And for me.
29:06 Speaker 04 I can't imagine another way through, but to keep opening it up, to keep watching it, to keep sitting inside of it and like, it's such a gift to me that I just keep getting to throw myself back into
29:23 Speaker 04 images of them or their words and and hold them in that way. And so.
29:30 Speaker 04 I feel like because I am so fully experiencing Andrea still is the reason that I'm not depressed because I'm not locking it away in the door. And that's obviously I've like snot pouring down my face. So it's not to say I'm not crying, but I'm not numb. Andrea would say that not shutting yourself off to grief or sadness or anger is that you can't shut yourself off to those things and and keep the channel for joy open. That you have to allow yourself to feel every feeling that comes up so that you too can feel joy and feel love.
30:14 Anderson Cooper? That for me has been one of the revelations of my life. And I know that I've only learned, or maybe I'd heard it once before, but I only learned it and feel it in the last year or two of my life because I'm talking about what I've run my whole life from, which is grief and loss. And it's so true that you cannot have one without the other. You can't have joy without allowing yourself to feel sadness. And it's extraordinary to me that so many of us, and I hear from so many people who have run from grief their entire life
30:55 Anderson Cooper? and lived in this kind of middle ground of no high highs and to avoid the low lows, to avoid the pain of feeling the loss of the person they love. They've robbed themselves, and I've robbed myself, of feeling tremendous joy. And yeah, I think that's such an important thing that you bring up, and I'm glad you did. Is there anything else you want people to know about Andrea, about anything?
31:27 Speaker 04 I think what Andrea's main message was,
31:34 Speaker 04 what they most wanted to pass on is the idea that there's not... There are certain circumstances in life where kind of given a prescription of emotion or taught, like you get divorced, or you lose somebody, or you are sick, or something happens, and so you should feel mad at the world, or you should feel like you should come with this bitterness or something. And I think Andrea wanted people to see that there wasn't... That there isn't...
32:10 Speaker 04 That they they found joy in what they did not believe that they could find joy in. Um, and and they want people to know that that's possible.
32:21 Anderson Cooper? Meg, long live Andrea Gibson. Thank you.
32:25 Speaker 04 Long live Andrea Gibson. Thank you so much.
32:30 Anderson Cooper? I'm rooting for you.
32:33 Speaker 04 Do you know that's how I sign all my books?
32:36 Anderson Cooper? Are you kidding? It's so funny you say that because I literally started saying this, I don't say it to everybody, but I started saying it this summer to some people who I am genuinely rooting for. I hadn't heard anybody really saying it, but I just started saying it and the ripple effects of it are really fascinating. I said it to this guy named Jesse Itzler, who is all over Instagram. He's just this like force of of nature. And I've I've met him years ago and I just think he's a lovely guy and and like putting great things out into the world. And I just randomly said, you know, I'm I'm rooting for you. And and he kind of looked at me oddly. And then he came back to me the next day because we were at this conference.
33:19 Anderson Cooper? He came back to me the next day. He said, you know, I've been thinking about what you said about rooting for you. And I think it's like the greatest way. It's the nicest thing to say to somebody like, I'm in your corner. I'm rooting for you. I love that. That's how you sign your books.
33:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, I've had a sign of it in my house. I also the other way I tell people. Yeah.
33:40 Anderson Cooper? Life blows me away like this.
33:42 Speaker 04 Stay tender. Yeah.
33:43 Anderson Cooper? Stay tender. I like that.
33:45 Speaker 04 Yeah.
33:46 Anderson Cooper? That's good.
33:47 Speaker 04 Neither one. It depends.
33:50 Anderson Cooper? Meg, thank you so much.
33:52 Speaker 04 Thank you so much.
33:55 Anderson Cooper? Come See Me in the Good Light is now streaming on Apple TV. Next week on Thursday, February 12, join me at 9:15 PM Eastern for my live streaming show, All There Is Live. To watch, just go to CNN.com/AllThereIs. If you missed the live stream, it'll be posted the following day for a week on the site. If there's something you've learned in your grief that you think would be helpful for others, or you want to tell us about your own grief experiences, feel free to leave us a voicemail at 1-404-827-1805. You can also send us a video message and email it to us at [email protected] , or send it to us on Instagram at AllThereIs. Thanks for listening.
34:36 Speaker 07 Get ready for election night. CNN is available to stream live now with an All Access subscription. Plus, get exclusive content and interactive Q and As with CNN's journalists. Subscribe now. Visit CNN.com/AllAccess.
34:51 Speaker 07 I'm Audie Cornish. I'm Ari Shapiro, and it's Engagement Party. It is Engagement Party. And we get to talk about what we're obsessed with, what we're engaged with, what we need to process with a friend. Rick Steves, what a legend. Rick, as somebody who has traveled the world for many years, do you notice cities looking more and more similar?
35:09 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's becoming more homogenized, especially in cities. If you want diversity, you go to small towns. And it's disappointing, but in a way, it's reality. Everything is mass consumption, everything is efficiency. And when you have a chain, it's hard to compete if you're an individual mom and pop. And more and more people are traveling and people are driving that. So yeah, it's an interesting issue.
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