Thanks for this stupid life, I mean it

“My story is one about happiness being easier to find once we realize we do not have forever to find it.”

I had never heard of Andrea Gibson until she died. I used to be into poetry, but that was a long time ago, back when I thought I might be a poet myself. I wasn't, as it turned out: my poetry was terrible, banal, derivative, somehow both mawkish and too restrained at the same time. I also thought that you had to live a certain kind of life to be a poet, one that was edgy, dramatic, gritty, and glamorous. I just didn't have a talent for finding something profound in the ordinary, as any good poet would.

After hearing of Gibson's death at just 49, I read some of their poetry, and immediately regretted not knowing about them sooner. I think my favorite so far is "Angel of the Get-Through," an ode to friendship, and how we are the sum of both the beautiful and the painful in our lives. When I read lines like "All living is storm-chasing/Every good heart has lost its roof/Let all the walls collapse at your feet," it makes me want to be more open, more uncautious in my writing, without fear of saying too much, or coming off as corny or embarrassing. Who cares? I am corny and embarrassing. But something continues to hold me back in expressing myself, and I wish I had discovered Andrea Gibson sooner.

Last week I watched Come See Me in the Good Light, a documentary about the final year of Gibson's life, as they faced a terminal cancer diagnosis with humor and gratitude, and have since been thinking about my own life in terms of having a life-threatening illness. Now, for the benefit of those who love me and now are suddenly worried that I've been hiding something: I'm fine. Nothing has changed about my condition. While it's serious, and can be fatal, I'm fortunate to remain in stable health. You can keep worrying about me if you like, but no more than you might have already been.

But that's the thing: I don't actually talk about it much. Because I've remained stable since recovering after almost dying at the end of 2020, there isn't much to say, and also I just don't want to. I suppose some of it is denial, although I get up at 5 a.m. three days a week to have two large needles stuck in my bicep, so it's not like I can entirely pretend nothing is wrong. But the gravity of it, I guess that's something I have a hard time talking about. I almost died. It may end up killing me someday. On the other hand, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. President Asswipe might get so upset over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue that he'll order a nuke launched at ABC's headquarters. It's coming for all of us at some point, so why do we still treat it like Voldemort, the thing that can't be named?

I'm a little shocked at my lack of self-pity over the whole thing. Yeah, sometimes it sucks to spend nine hours a week strapped to a chair while my vital juices are drained out of me (they're put back, but I usually lose a little in the process), but it's certainly better than projectile vomiting and shaking like a dog during a thunderstorm. I'm pretty pragmatic about it, which is surprising given my dramatic streak for just about everything else.

I did have one very bad breakdown earlier this year, right after RFK Jr. was approved as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Hope truly felt lost for me then, as the world suddenly became a lot less safe for the sick and disabled, a population I am reluctant to include myself in, because it feels like stolen valor, given how well I feel much of the time. Nevertheless, it does feel like this second round of the Trump Administration is very intent on thinning the herd, whether it's through poverty, reducing medical services, or just making it easier to spread disease. I felt that what I had been putting myself through, and what I would have to put myself through after a kidney transplant, was suddenly pointless.

I wept, I cursed, I railed. I decided, for about a half hour, that not only would I take myself off the transplant list, but possibly even stop dialysis. You can't fire me, I quit! But then I realized that the last fucking thing I wanted to do was let these people win. Just lay down and die for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a sentient Slim Jim? Absolutely fucking not. Listen, every man who has ever loved me will tell you the same thing: that I am really fucking stubborn. There's just no way these people are going to beat me. I won't have it. I'm living long enough to piss on their graves, at minimum.

But anyway, back to Andrea Gibson. Watching Come See Me in the Good Light may have been both the best and the worst thing for me to have watched with a kidney transplant looming on the horizon. Much of it was dedicated to Gibson's appreciation for the small beauties in their life as a distraction from fear and sorrow about their impending death. They wrote about it in the breathtaking poem "The Lifegiving Benefits of Befriending Our Own Mortality."

One of the things I don't talk about publicly is how scared I am of the transplant. Not of the surgery itself, I'm sure that'll be fine. Hell, I'm even looking forward to the anesthesia nap. I mean the unknown afterward. I'm afraid of how rough recovery might be. I'm afraid of what all the anti-rejection medications are going to me. I'm afraid of how unsafe my own country might become for immunocompromised people. Mostly I'm afraid of the next kidney failing too, and having to start all over again, maybe sicker than I am right now.

They say that it gets better after the first year. The chances of rejection sharply decrease, the side effects level off, you feel mostly normal again, and you have less anxiety. But I know me, and I know my anxiety, and I can very much see myself being consumed with fear over every little real and imagined sign of organ rejection. "The doctors will let you know if you need to worry" makes sense in theory, but is difficult in practice. I'm scared that I'm going to be so worried about it that I'll forget to live.

Not even live in the "seeing the Great Pyramid of Giza" sense, my bucket list is pretty reasonable. Just live in the "appreciating being alive" sense. Noticing and being grateful for small beauties. Never growing out of my awe. There's no point in putting myself through all the pain and unpleasantness of surgery to just hide in my house and wait for disaster to happen. Anxiety has stolen enough from me just from imagined scenarios, what a gift to feed it with some very real possibilities. I can't do that, but how do I not do that?

When all is said and done, I want to come away from the transplant with an overwhelming sense of gratitude. It doesn't have to be perfect. I know my life will be irrevocably changed. But I want to be grateful to be around for it, and for the small beauties of being alive. My ex-husband is one of my best friends, and he lives in a house with a big, beautiful backyard, so big that deer just leisurely stroll through it in the middle of the night. Every time that happens, he sends me the Ring camera footage, because we don't get deer in the wilds of Brooklyn. I feel a little sense of awe every time I see them.

I want more of that, and to keep feeling gratitude for it. It doesn't have to be big. We live in a culture that convinces us that only the big moments, the braggable moments, are worth talking about, and lording over the people who can't experience them. I'll take the small, the deer, and the making someone laugh until they're crying, and the birthday candles. Just to be here for them is enough, and I don't want to worry so much about how small beautiful moments I have left that I ignore them. That's not living. That's waiting to die.