Why 2% of Me Wants to be Sick Again

A love song for Andrea Gibson.

Photo Credit: Annie Spratt

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Why 2% of Me Wants to Be Sick Again

A love song for Andrea Gibson

by Garrett Kamps

Not long ago, we had a bit of a scare. While my cancer is in remission, it’s not considered “cured” until it’s been gone for five years; every few months I get scans to check the status. Back in the spring, we got some results that showed one of the lymph nodes in my gut was a millimeter larger than normal. It was probably nothing, my oncologist told me.

“Sometimes it’s just inflammation caused by eating something spicy,” he explained. I do eat a lot of Mexican food…

My oncologist, Dr. K., recommended we wait a few months then retest with a more detailed PET scan. I was unnerved and confused, but after a long discussion with my therapist we decided I could “give myself permission” not to worry about it, which actually worked: For the next couple months, I didn’t think about it. But as the test got closer, it started to loom. We got dinner across the street from the hospital one night (Mexican food again), and I looked up at the window I used to stare out of during the days and nights when everything felt grim and impossible. A few days later I got the tests, and returned to Dr. K.’s office to learn the results.

My wife and daughter came with me for moral support. It was the first time Dr. K. had met our baby, who was now 18 months old. During the second and third trimester of Danielle’s pregnancy, we saw him every few days, then every few weeks, as my condition was at first very dire and then steadily improved. His bedside manner includes bursting into the exam room to deliver news, even when it’s bad. I recorded most of those early conversations on my phone, to keep track of all the information. Whenever I want a real jolt, I can listen to them: Dr. K. regaling us with facts and next steps, me sounding frail and scared, like Yoda talking through a toilet paper tube.

The checkup was anticlimactic: Dr. K. cooed to the baby as she turned shyly into her mom. I was expecting something like that scene in Die Hard when John McClane meets Al for the first time—some big moment of recognition, a hug maybe (This man saved daddy’s life!)—but the moment came and went. Then Dr. K. got down to business: The scans came back negative; the radiologist determined there was nothing to worry about. We could return to our normal cadence of quarterly tests. Everything was fine.

“You’re doing great!” said Dr. K., then bounded out of the room.

Obviously, this was a relief. Obviously, I was dreading the alternative, which would have involved a surgical biopsy at a minimum, and who knows what else from there—more chemo, more dread. I can say with 98% certainty I did not want that. This is a post about that other 2%.

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The poet and activist Andrea Gibson died of ovarian cancer on Monday, July 14. The news hit me hard: tears, YouTube binging, texts to mutual admirers. I wasn’t the most devout or longstanding fan—Gibson is one of the most prolific and celebrated spoken word poets of their generation, with a career stretching back decades, as evidenced by the high-profile obits—but their work found me when I needed it most, and burrowed deep.

The thing they feared most happened. Instead of crumbling, they rode it like a rocket.

“I was tough in the husk,” they write in the poem “Acceptance Speech after Setting the World Record in Goosebumps,” which I first heard sometime in the middle of my 18 week stretch of chemo. The poem was written before Gibson’s diagnosis, but presages what would come after it—this borderline supernatural availing of oneself to joy, which I related to and was also desperate for.

In the poem, they describe being overtaken by that slippery and indescribable feeling—goosebumps—first during a Maya Angelou reading, then while watching Allen Iverson, then marveling at their sister’s newfound sobriety. Then: a Prince concert, Christmas carols, “the moon rising over the continental divide.”

“There is 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,
and they will break it after me
I will love that so much
That without even trying

I will break it again.”

I must have watched the clip of Gibson reading this poem fifty times that summer. It was eventually unseated by the even more flooring (for me at least) “MAGA Hat in the Chemo Room.” Some folks might struggle with Gibson’s reluctant empathy toward the titular Trumper of the poem; I didn’t. I knew what it felt like to sit across from strangers for hours at a time, and know that no matter how little you had in common—and it’s hard to imagine two less ideologically aligned people than a MAGA dude and a nonbinary slam poet—you shared this experience. You were both hooked up to these machines, pumped full of these poisons that were laying waste to your insides in an attempt to save your life. You were both battling cancer. You both might lose.

But I should clarify: Like me, Gibson didn’t care for the idea of framing one’s cancer as a battle, and specifically didn’t want anyone saying that they “lost” something when their time finally came. “Andrea was a winner today,” wrote Gibson’s wife Meg Falley on the post announcing their death.

It’s not that they didn’t appreciate a good fight, or that they planned to roll over to the disease. It’s that resistance, battling, was, to them, simply the wrong framing. To become obsessed with it—as so many with cancer do—is to potentially miss one of the greatest gifts the experience has to offer.

“Saying yes in a moment when everything else is telling you not to say yes,” Gibson explains on the podcast Sounds True, describing the softening they experienced upon first hearing their diagnosis. “Everything in your being is resisting it—but if you can manage to actually surrender to it and say yes, it is a portal to bliss.”

As Falley recounts, Gibson started their newsletter, Things That Don’t Suck, in 2021, then received their diagnosis just a few weeks later. “At first, Andrea said, ‘What a terrible time to be committed to writing about what doesn’t suck,’” Falley writes in the first posthumous installment of the newsletter, which she also helped edit and has continued posting. “Then, almost immediately, they shifted their perspective and said, ‘What a perfect time.’”

What a perfect time.

This brings me back to that 2%. I won’t belabor the point. I trust you get it. For the Stoics and later the Christians, it’s memento mori. In Buddhism, the practice is Maranasati, or mindfulness of death. It’s a cliche that I and Gibson and anyone else who’s gone through something like this (let alone tried to write about it) can’t help but wrestle with: Yes, yes, facing down death makes you more appreciative of life. But knowing it’s a cliche doesn’t make the appreciation any less vivid, or the need to express it any less urgent. I got a taste of it, was lucky enough to make it out the other side, and it changed my life. After years of remission and recurrence, Gibson learned their cancer was incurable, and they became joy incarnate.

There’s more I want to mention. Gibson loved dogs (Squash!), and nature, loved to collect mindblowing facts about the natural world (“it rains diamonds on Jupiter”). They suffered from panic attacks, stage fright, and various anxieties, one of the loudest of which was getting cancer, because their aunt had died from ovarian cancer. They’d also “battled” Lyme disease earlier in life, and so harbored a great fear about illness generally. Then they got sick—really sick, as sick as a person can get, practically. The thing they feared most happened. Instead of crumbling, they rode it like a rocket.

I discovered their work right in the middle of that ride, as Gibson was publishing, posting, and doing interviews at what seemed like a furious clip, especially for someone with a terminal diagnosis. There are endless posts of them on YouTube, thin and bald from chemo, saying things like, “I got nothing on my to-do list except to know how to die with an open heart, to know how to go through any hard challenge with an open heart.”

Whatever you call that force that lights us up when we’re gobsmacked by life—love, awe, wonder, spirit—there’s 2% of me that thinks having ready access to it might be worth another spin cycle through the hospital, another 18 weeks of chemo. It’s a soft voice, it’s not saying that exactly—but it’s saying something. Cancer was a cheat code to experiencing it. Perhaps the voice is trying to remind that this force is not as elusive as I think.

That’s what Andrea Gibson wanted us to know, especially these last several years.

I’m certain it wasn’t all bliss—that there was also so much pain, darkness, fear—but in what they chose to share, in what they devoted so much of their limited energy toward channeling and creating and talking about and posting, Gibson showed us what it was like to live with an open heart, to thrive in that space of awe and joy. They make me want to live in that space the way Jimi Hendrix makes me want to learn guitar. To watch them just shred…how else to describe it except simply: Goosebumps.

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