Am I Being Ghosted?

What to do when the signs stop.

The invitation to attend Hedgebrook arrived like a golden ticket. You’d think I would have said yes immediately.

Two weeks in the wilderness of Whidbey Island, off the coast of Washington State. Two weeks alone in a cottage. My only responsibilities: tend to my wood-burning stove and my writing. Someone else would feed me.

More than just a residency for women writers, Hedgebrook is a corrective, built on the idea of radically caring for a woman so that she can care for her art.

It seemed the perfect opportunity to finally finish my memoir, or at least to discover what it was like to write it in solitude, in quiet, in rain.

I’d always dreamed of something like this. So why did it take weeks to accept?

After years of pouring my life into Andrea’s, it felt unnatural to pivot so sharply from caregiver to care-receiver. What would I do with all that time? All that space? A cookie jar that was always full.

My manuscript had been sleeping in a drawer for months. It simply wasn’t the season to care for a book in the way a book needs caring for. My devotion belonged to Andrea, my living story.

heaven

Back then, we knew how unpromised our time together was. The ticking of cancer’s clock was the metronome of our days. Sometimes it felt strange just to write from home, with Andrea on the other side of the door.

Often my fingertips felt wrong on a keyboard—as if the only place they belonged was on Andrea’s body: rubbing their delicate feet, smoothing the chaos of their enviable hair, tracing the features of my most favorite face.

When Andrea took their last breath, I photographed all of their tattoos and my favorite freckles. I touched every part of them. And then they were carried away, down the stairs, out the door, into the back of a van. One final ride.

After that, all that remained of their body was ash. Ash, that slips so easily through my fingers as I scatter them into the Pacific Ocean where we once tried to surf, or along the aspens of their favorite hikes, or outside the Mercury Café in Denver, the place that inspired them to become a poet.

Since July, my fingertips have mostly belonged to my cell phone. In those first weeks after their death, the internet was wallpapered with Andrea’s name, voice, and poems. Of course I wanted to attend every digital memorial for my love, to read every stranger’s epitaph.

But even when the news cycle shifted—to war, to American evils, to Taylor Swift—I still found myself clutching that brick in my palm. Every Sunday, my screen-time report would inform me how many hours I’d spent staring into its artificial glow, and all I could think was: This? This is what I’ve been doing with my one wild and precious life?

The rumor of no Wi-Fi and no reception was a major factor in my decision to finally say yes to the residency. A few people had suggested I download an app to identify birdsong while I was there. It was a lovely thought. But the idea of looking down at my device instead of up at the sky felt absurd. I wanted to see and hear the birds, not what the internet had to say about them.

But the quiet hope beneath it all was this: without the chatter of the internet, without the distraction of incessant scrolling, without the constant reach toward others to soften the loneliness—I thought I might hear Andrea in the stunning silence. I pictured myself nestled in my hand-built cabin, curled up with coffee beside the heat of the fire, back in endless conversation with my love once more.

We’d name the birds ourselves.

Upon arrival at Hedgebrook, after shunning my phone to a distant drawer, I saw a baby squirrel outside my window. Now listen: I’ve spent years wondering why I’d never seen a baby squirrel before. I’ve Googled it more than once. Minutes after casting my phone aside, I saw my first one. Had they always been there? Had I just been looking at a screen instead of out at the world?

Whidbey Island, October 2025

Here is what else I found at Hedgebrook: one owl, three coyotes, bunnies that never scurried from my approach. I found berries so gorgeous I wanted to paint them—and so I did, watercoloring at night. When was the last time I painted?

I found the art of hand-lettering, of drawing banners and laurels. I found that writing letters and postcards feels infinitely lovelier than sending texts and emails.

I found the woodshed each morning, where I’d gather logs and build myself a fire. I found many ways to keep myself warm—like Liz Gilbert’s All the Way to the River and Mary Oliver’s Blue Horses (highly recommend both).

I found myself waking before the sun each morning, as the color of the changing sky made a fool of paint.

I found friendship in the other women writers gathered for dinner around the farmhouse table strewn with local foliage. I found giant maple leaves to send off in envelopes to people with humbler autumns. I found entries in the cottage journal signed by Gloria Steinem.

Coyotes & Fires & Berries. Oh My.

I found a desk in the forest beneath a canopy of trees that Andrea would have utterly cherished. I imagined them sitting there, penning the words that were always more than language. They were promises and parachutes. Churches and blankets. Valentines and olive branches. They were hope.

Unexpectedly, I found poetry again. I came to work on my memoir—and I did, loads. But in the mornings, I took what I called Mary Oliver walks through the evergreens and pines, and after years of hibernation, the poems somehow emerged, ready to play.

What I did not find was Andrea.

Was it unfair to expect to discover them in a place they’d never been? Was it rude to ask every woodland creature I encountered, “Gibby, is that you?” Was it strange to feel abandoned?

where are you?

It’s wild how quickly shame can pick up an old conversation, as if it’s been sitting patiently on pause, waiting for you to resume. How quickly I could feel rejected by a lover, even a dead one—as if I were no longer worthy of their cosmic flirtation.

Why wasn’t Andrea calling? Had I done something wrong? I felt like a seventh-grade girl again, ignored at the dance, desperate for the one I loved to talk to me as they glided above the room, sparkling and untouchable.

Shame said, Whose fault could it be but yours? Even the dead don’t want to touch you. Even the beings who can be everywhere at once don’t want to be where you are.

It felt exactly like being ghosted.

But by a ghost.

I shared all this with the women at the farmhouse table—whom I’d only met two days earlier. This is just the kind of dinner guest I am. One writer told me that her sister, who’d lost her husband around the same time I lost Andrea, was in constant ethereal communication with him. When she gifted herself a tropical vacation, the communication stopped, and she feared she’d lost him forever. But he was waiting when she got home. It was a kind thing to say.

writers in residence, 2025

What could I do, anyway, but go on? So I continued writing, revising, reading, gathering kindling, striking my matches, letting the colors bleed on the canvas, waltzing through Whidbey’s green heart, and singing Andrea’s favorite songs to the baby squirrels—just in case.

My only solace was imagining Andrea there the whole time, perched on the wood beams, watching over me, waiting for me to realize I hadn’t come to this sacred space to find them.

I’d come to find myself.

This isn’t about me, Baby, I pictured them saying. All the energy you poured into trying to save my life—you didn’t fail; it worked. One day you’ll know what I mean. Until then, pour that care into yourself. You keep asking where I’ve gone. I haven’t gone anywhere. I stepped out of the frame so you could see yourself clearly again. You were always the one carrying the light; you just mistook it for mine. Finish the book, my love. You’ve got a gift here: time.

And so I tried to believe those words were not my own invention, as I sat for days at my writing desk in front of a big window overlooking Useless Bay. Apparently, it earned its name because some sailor once decided it was too shallow to dock. What a masculine thing, I thought—to call something useless because you couldn’t park there.

When the sky was clear, I could see Mount Rainier—majestic, immovable. It struck me how something so monumental could vanish daily behind a wisp of fog. A local told me the common joke in Seattle is to say, “The mountain is out today.” As if it ever disappears.

the mountain was out today

And while I didn’t quite finish the book, I am very close. I would have loved another week (or two) in that fecund, mossy heaven, but I was headed for Los Angeles soon, to begin another leg of touring our documentary, Come See Me in the Good Light. A sort of opposite experience of Hedgebrook, but an incredible one nonetheless.

Even without Andrea on Whidbey Island with me, I did not want to leave. I was finding myself there—the part of me that creates art for art’s sake, not as a product. The person who paints badly, joyfully. The person who writes poems that don’t have to be perfect, only true.

The person who remembered what she loves about poems: how their only role is to make someone feel seen. Something inside the reader that never gets spoken to hears its name. Lifts its head.

I won't quit my day job

The morning of my reluctant departure, I woke early, intent on scattering some of Andrea’s ashes by the desk in the clearing. Every single time I’d gone walking, I’d somehow ended up there. But that morning, I couldn’t find it. I looped the same paths, turning in quiet circles. Soon I’d have to pack my bags, catch the ferry, return to my bustling life.

Where had the desk gone?

Was this another metaphor? To stop looking so precisely for the thing, and let myself stumble upon it instead? To stop searching for Andrea like a detective, and allow them to come to me?

Like Mount Rainier, was Andrea always there, immutable, and it was just my own fog in the way?

I softened my focus, let myself wander, and there it finally was—the desk, waiting. The surface was littered with pine needles and leaves—nature’s pens, nature’s post-its. I spread some of Andrea’s ashes along the tree roots and moss, imagining them fertilizing the poems of other writers who would one day sit there, discovering themselves in these woods.

Maybe it isn’t about finding Andrea in places anymore, I thought, but bringing them with me everywhere I go.

here you are.

---

After Hedgebrook, I flew to Los Angeles for a screening of our film at Vista House. At the end of the night, the moderator asked me to read Love Letter from the Afterlife—the poem Andrea wrote for me. I think of it as the film’s perfect epilogue, a love letter not just for me, but for anyone who’s ever lost someone.

I’ve read it aloud several times now, but that night it undid me. Hearing Andrea’s promises again, reminding me when I needed it most:

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.

When I finally landed back in Denver—a place I associate with falling in love with Andrea, a place that even smells like romance to me—I was walking out the double doors to meet my driver when I was stopped by the Muzak in the threshold: a MIDI cover of Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time.

In the last months of Andrea’s life, we sang to each other constantly. That was the song we sang to each other most. We sang because they could no longer dance. We sang because that’s who we are—people who make art for art’s sake. People who would never call anything beautiful useless.

I placed my hand over my heart. The fog cleared. I didn’t need an app to know the source of that song was a little bird I call Andrea.

Love Meg [+ Andrea, forever.]


Before I go, here’s some important news.
Our film, Come See Me in the Good Light comes to AppleTV on November 14th. It is screening in select cities in the upcoming weeks—including NYC, San Fran, Tucson, Sante Fe, & London! I hope to see you in a theater someday soon. I was recently featured on the NYTimes Modern Love Podcast talking about my love story with Andrea, as well as the UK Observer. I hope to never stop saying Andrea’s name.