On the One Year Anniversary of Andrea's Alleged Death

Did we witness a miracle together?

Today marks one year since Andrea allegedly died.

There are a million stories I could tell today, but I want to focus on one: July 5th, 2026. Red Rocks. The premiere of Love Letter from the Afterlife, the film of Andrea Gibson’s final performance.

What many of you have called the most magical night of your lives.

I am forever bonded to the ten thousand weary souls who sat beneath that Colorado sky, that juicy red moon. Hardly a phone out in sight. Just presence.

It is an ongoing grief that language, my beloved medium, will always fail me when I try to describe that evening. But I believe those of us who were there witnessed a miracle.

And how do you explain a miracle to someone who wasn’t there to see it with their own eyes? Words are the best tool I’ve got, though. So I have to try:

All year I’ve carried a secondhand sadness for the hundreds of thousands who discovered Andrea posthumously. Those people who never got to see a live show. Never got to experience the impossible physics of watching someone who stood five foot four and weighed barely one hundred ten pounds somehow become a lighthouse. One whose insistent glow guided so many lost and lonely ships home.

While planning the show at Red Rocks, I had those people in mind. I thought: I’m going to give them the closest thing I possibly can. But all the while I knew: it would only be a consolation prize. Only an approximation of the real deal. Second best.

Every decision became an attempt to answer one question: What would Andrea choose? What order of acts? What opener? What backdrop? Which stories belong? What's the final song? It should feel like a porch light left on.

The thing about creative directing something of that magnitude is that, for months, it doesn’t feel like art. It feels like emails. Zoom calls. Seating charts. Budgets. Choosing one thing because you like it two percent more than another. You hope a thousand tiny choices will somehow become one unforgettable night. But they might not. It could flop entirely.

Then suddenly it’s the morning of the show. You’ve got bags beneath your eyes from not sleeping. You’re doing sound checks in the hot sun. You wonder how all those empty seats could possibly get filled.

And then the doors open. The audience arrives. You can almost feel their hearts beating through their shirts. You know some of them have cancer. Some are caregivers. Some have buried the love of their life. Some are about to. Some of them were best friends with Andrea, even if Andrea never met them. You know poetry has saved many of them before. You know someone is hoping it will save them again.

The merch line snakes halfway up the stairs before the performance even begins. People already want a souvenir. They don’t want to forget what hasn’t even happened yet.

Then Chris Pureka walks onstage. One of Andrea's dearest friends. The musician who was supposed to perform at the shows Andrea had to cancel. Chris takes a breath before singing. Ten thousand people fall almost impossibly silent. You've never seen that happen before for an opening act.

You suspect something sacred is here.

You feel it when Sara Bareilles' fingers strike the first chord. You feel it in the noise of the orchestra warming up, the strange screech a violin makes before it becomes an angel of sound. You feel it in the atmosphere, which is suddenly perfect. (Last week, the weather report predicted rain.)

And then Andrea's face is forty feet tall. That perfect face. Their prophetic words, impossibly crisp, echoing between those two red rocks, that cathedral of stone.

Photos by Kenzie Everitt + Courtney Nicholson-Paine

As I watched the film from the sound booth, with a fistful of Andrea’s ashes in my palm, my good friend Katie leaned in and said she kept seeing Andrea on the giant screen, then instinctively looking back toward the stage, fully expecting to see them standing there in the flesh. I understood exactly what she meant. It was baffling to realize the screen wasn’t magnifying their body in real time, the way it did every other performer that night. That they weren’t really there.

And then something unmoored me. I’m worried what I’m about to say next will get lost in translation. But again, I have to try. The thought came to me then: This isn’t a consolation prize. This is as good as seeing Andrea perform live. Somehow, impossibly, it is better.

Of course nothing could ever be better than Andrea alive and healthy.

And yet…

How else do I explain what happened when ten thousand people realized Andrea had been telling us the truth all along? “I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than you ever could have imagined.”

That they were in the moon that rose red over the stage like a heart, still beating?

In the fingers of wind that rustled through my hair as I spoke their final love poem to the stars.

They were in the tenderness of strangers offering each other tissues. Sleeves. Shoulders.

And in the parking lot traffic. In lines of cars that have never behaved more kindly. Not honking or cutting ahead, but trusting the order of things. Trusting we would all help each other home.

They were e v e r y w h e r e .

There is no part of me that doubts I was watching Andrea perform live that night. That time expanded and collapsed, as it always does and always will, in that psychedelic way none of us can yet comprehend.

I don’t believe they needed ears to hear the applause. Or eyes to see the standing ovations. I don’t even believe they needed a body to break their record in goosebumps as they watched me standing in the spotlight, the bravest I’d ever been, singing the lyrics to a song they wrote. Like they’d passed me the baton of their voice, knowing I would run with it for as long as I could.

I believe they felt it. The way their poems have become a buoy keeping so many spirits afloat at a time when the seas are treacherous and dark.

And maybe it was the awful fact of their death that increased the reach of their words. That the end of their body somehow catapulted their message to as many people as Andrea always dreamed it would reach—not because of ego, but because of love. Maybe death did not arrive to take Andrea away, but to carry them further.

One of those thousand tiny choices was what to call the film. What to call the night. When I chose “Love Letter from the Afterlife,” I didn’t realize how fully I was describing what was about to happen. Every one of us walked into Red Rocks believing we had come to remember Andrea. But we left having heard from them, directly.

On this day, on the one-year anniversary of my life’s greatest loss, when it feels utterly impossible that I’ve been without Andrea for a year, I understand even more fully that I haven’t been without them. Not at all.

Love,

Meg (+ Andrea, forever.)

PS. A year ago today, my love had just been carried down our stairs in a stretcher, wheeled away into the back of a van, driven off to a crematorium. I hadn’t slept at all, but I sat down in the living room at 5AM to write what became my first utterance of this newsletter. It wasn't because I knew what to say. I didn’t. It was because I couldn't imagine not telling the people who had loved Andrea alongside me. You.

It’s been one year since I placed Andrea’s brown boots on my writing desk and tried to fill them. Knowing I never would. But knowing there is something sacred in the trying.

Thank you for being here as I’ve worked to carry forward the spirit of this newsletter. To keep turning our collective attention toward what doesn’t suck.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll begin introducing a few perks for paid subscribers, including early access to tour announcements, presale codes, new publications, merchandise, and other projects before they’re announced publicly.

If this newsletter has meant something to you, and you’re in a position to support it, becoming a paid subscriber helps me continue writing and bringing Andrea's unpublished work into the world.

Thank you for witnessing all these miracles with me.

Here’s to many more.