I know I’ve posted a few times, most recently about one of my favorite Performance Poet’s, Andrea Gibson, especially since she died a about a little over a month ago on July 14, 2025. She’s all over YouTube and for me, this most recent post of her’s made over a year ago reminds us what we know, what we know that we know and what we’d bet our own precious lives that we know, but for the LIFE OF US, we don’t act like we know:
Yeah, maybe you can not only see why I like but why I am showing this special spoken-word poet Andrea Gibson, whose performances I have occasionally shared here on The Caring Catalyst, who succumbed to ovarian cancer. Such a terrible loss, and yet what a most powerful GAIN OF INSIGHT even now she continues to share. . .
Andrea’s powerful light continues to surprise, comfort, inspire through texts and videos. Such a tremendous legacy!
In this deeply personal clip, titled “Finding Me,” Andrea reflects on how facing our mortality—right here, right now—can shift our perspective in amazing ways. By welcoming the unthinkable, by “saying yes” to life as it is right now, we can learn to savor the fullness in every moment. Yes, even when life seems all too brief and unbearable.
Let’s not walk by this moment. Let’s not wait to bloom.
(My thanks to the poet and the filmmaker, via Freethink.)
And if you dare, though I like her Performances better than reading her poems, they still shout very loudly at me:
Chuck, thank you. Andrea is amazing. I use the word “is” because she is alive in her writing, discourse on her mortality.
I just received a book from Smazon “Being Mortal” by a physician Atul Gawande. It was recommended by a retired nurse friend. So far so good. It seems a coincidental that your offering today was Andrea. Right now I have 2 friends and a sister-in-law who have cancer. As she said a moment holds more than a decade now. These mortality offerings are to me “shod gift”. At a time I am trying to know what Bob felt and thought before he died. So many questions inside me. Love to you and the Mrs!❤️
You will love BEING MORTAL; it kind of reminds me a little of the book by Paul Kalanithi “WHEN BREATH BECOMES BECOMES AIR, he was a young neurosurgeon who died from lung cancer. . .and you are absolutely right: SO MANY QUESTIONS which I firmly believe is our highest form of FAITH…keep Asking
I wish I had her strength and ability to manage it.
AMAZING to be sure; I’ve noticed after all of these years of being bedside with hospice that there’s a ‘partnering’ an understanding and a peace that comes with the battle of these end of life diseases, that actually has people embracing their end because they’ve walked with it for so long. . .they had two years of not only being diagnosed, but with treatments and finally an embracing of not giving up or even letting go so much as a magnificent eternal NEXT. . .which always has me wondering questioning, WHAT ABOUT ME? Because of witnessing so many others on their journeys, I’m thinking if I have to take that journey I’ll be doing some of that same kind of embracing or. . .’sprinting toward the finish line’ as one guy put it. Still. . .Hmmmmmmmmmmm
Miss Bonnie, some really good thoughts and wonderings here. Even though we’ve been bedside companioning many on the final steps to their NEXT, I’m in awe of how, if we have our own type of journeys will be face it as we have witnessed so many others facing it or. . .the big Hmmmmmmmmmmm of life and living, huh?