The Choreography of Care
On the shift from caregiver to receiver, and learning to be carried.
Given the chance, I would have been Andrea’s caregiver for the rest of my days.
The pre-dawn zoom appointments with doctors I attended alone so Andrea could sleep in. The side effects and reactions I memorized. The vigilance I shouldered so they would not have to. The dairy-free, sugar-free, carb-free desserts I invented so Andrea might taste sweetness again. The way I learned to blink back tears when they could only manage one bite.
All of it. Every hour. Every compromise. I would do it again. To have Andrea back.
I’ve learned that people with chronic illness often feel like a burden, even when no one around them suggests it. I know it pained Andrea to watch my life narrow around theirs. Even though I never said so. Even though I tried to convey nothing but reverence for being the hand on their forehead, monitoring for fever. The one rotating ice mittens and socks during chemotherapy to protect their nerves, their fingernails.
Strange, how even love can feel like a small injury. To receive it when you are not strong enough to return it can be a nick, a paper cut, a bruise.
I wasn’t a perfect caregiver. But even perfection would not have eased their ache. There was still the gravity of what went missing: the classes I stopped teaching, the book I stopped writing, the friends I drifted from, the family I rarely saw. For four years, my entire life reoriented around the desperate goal of keeping theirs going. Which was, in part, a selfish goal. They were my favorite hang, my belly-laugh, my compass and gentle shove toward goodness. My dreamboat.
I wanted to keep them here forever.
What hurt Andrea most, I believe, was a sense of imbalance. They loved me. They wanted me to feel that love in every moment. To give me the world, give me their life, too. Years ago, they’d written, “the hardest thing about having nothing is having nothing to give.”
On the days their symptoms eased up, Andrea would edit my memoir or make a phone call my ADHD had turned into an avalanche, and something in them brightened. A flush came back to their cheeks—that faint, living pink I used to search for. Giving did what the medicine couldn’t.
Once Andrea asked a friend, who had suffered through devastating illness, how to give back when giving costs more energy than you have. Her answer was simple: Love. You give love. Then more love.
In the final three months of Andrea’s life, more people entered our days. Friends came in shifts to clean, to cook, to sit beside them so I could tend to other things. These friends made sure I slept. That I saw daylight. That I remembered I had a body, too.
Opening our circle was also generosity on Andrea’s part. With only me beside them, they could drop the effort it took just to be upright in the world. Letting others into our space meant the quiet work of being with people while sick. They did this for me, so I wouldn’t be alone in it.
Though it might surprise some people, Andrea was a person of deep faith. They left the religion that once told them they were “a crime of nature,” but I would still find them nodding along to sermons about Jesus, or falling asleep to a Buddha documentary on PBS with a small statue of Ganesh by their head, snuggling a crystal.
Andrea used to say that if they were to die, it would mean they were needed somewhere else more than they were needed here. I think articulating this belief out loud was meant to comfort me—a kind of insurance plan they subtly enrolled me in, in case I ever needed to see their death as a greater purpose, not abandonment. Not total, senseless loss.
On their deathbed, even their final sentences felt like an offering. “I fucking loved my life,” they said to everyone in the room, above the sound of the oxygen machine’s hiss.
Hospice workers often tell families to assure the dying person that it is “okay to let go.” But here was Andrea, assuring us it was okay to say goodbye to them.
I am not entirely certain what Andrea’s actual last words were. Time around then is muddled, watercolor. But the last ones I remember hearing were, “Thank you, Meg.”
Perhaps they were thanking me for the water I dabbed their lips with. Or the morphine I squirted in their mouth, knuckling it into their cheek so it would absorb. Or for the way I offered my body as a pillow, the one place they seemed to be comfortable. Home.
But it seemed to me then that they were thanking me for all of it. For walking them as far as I could possibly walk them, knowing I might have followed them further, if I could.
It soothes me that Andrea knew I wasn’t motivated by obligation or martyrdom (not my style), but by an ocean-deep love I never reached the bottom of.
But what I really want to talk about today is not caregiving at all.
I want to talk about what came after. About being the one held now.
What stuns me daily, what brings me to my knees, is how vastly I have oscillated from caregiver to receiver. This doesn’t feel like a role reversal so much as proof: love circulates. We take turns. Offering, accepting. This is the choreography of care. The dance that never ends, only changes partners, changes who leads.
In these last months, a team of people working to promote Come See Me in the Good Light has made sure my flights are covered. My cars. My hotels. My meals. Even some of my clothes. I used to hold every calendar date, medicine name, appointment time, and side effect in my mind. My brain was so many things at once: a calendar, a pharmacist, a nurse, a secretary, a hope chest.
Now someone else tells me where to be and when. I just get in the car. And audiences around the world hold space for me to grieve in public.
There was a stretch after I moved to Colorado when I truly didn’t have friends of my own. There was a long time when Andrea worried that if they died, I would be entirely alone. Later I learned that they actually called friends I’d drifted from, begging them to be there for me should I need them.
But a few weeks ago, scrambling to answer a dozen texts, I said out loud to an invisible Andrea: “Gib, you wouldn’t beLIEVE how many friends I have now.”
I laughed. I felt them laughing too.
It’s true.
When Andrea died, my friend Stef slept in bed with me every night for a week, until I told her I was ready to feel the emptiness. Now she leaves me voice memos every day so the quiet never gets too quiet.
Emily, who Andrea wrote Angel of The Get Through for, made sure I did not spend my birthday or Thanksgiving or Christmas alone. She learned how to play Scrabble and Bananagrams so my life wouldn’t feel so much like a game of solitaire.
Every time I’ve watched the documentary, Jess, our film’s producer, sits in the theatre beside me, watching it probably for the hundredth time, just so I have a hand to hold. She has tissues ready before I even ask, anticipating each tear before it falls.
Ryan, our director, gathers me to his chest every time the credits roll. He takes me to art museums and karaoke past our bedtimes and literal magic castles. He joins me on the dance floor even though he lowkey hates dancing. He keeps me laughing like he was put on the planet to make sure the smile never leaves my face. As if Andrea left him that role in their will.
Glennon took me to get my ears pierced so I could wear lightning bolts every day — so I could see evidence of Andrea’s magic in my own reflection. She has x-ray vision for authenticity and never lets me off the hook of my own truth, a quality so similar to Andrea that sometimes it makes me feel like I’ve not lost them at all. She refers to her children as my children, her dogs as my dogs, her home as mine.
Abby sketched out a plan to weather-proof my mailbox so it could survive the snowplow this year. Sweetheart Abby! She looked at my life and searched for one thing she could fix with her hands. Halfway through her presentation, I realized: I didn’t want an industrial mailbox. I wanted it to be destroyed again and again—a reminder of rebuilding, of continuity, of the running joke Andrea and I will never finish.
But it made me love Abby even more.
There’s a whole community of women who watch my three dogs so I can travel. So I can promote the film. Meet my newborn niece. Go to Mexico for GIRLS JUST WANNA WEEKEND, Brandi Carlile’s four-day mostly-lesbian music festival on the beach.
Trying to write about Girls Just Wanna Weekend and Brandi and Catherine Carlile feels like trying to lasso light. How could I possibly pin it down with language?
From the moment I arrived, Catherine kept a hand at the small of my back, steering me from person to person. “This is my friend Meg,” she kept saying, even though we’d only met that night. Her childhood friends folded me into their circle like I’d known them since I was eleven, too.
Brandi invited me on stage to sing “Still the One,” Andrea and my engagement song. I thought nothing would intimidate me more than singing alongside the person whose voice is basically humanity’s best case against agnosticism. But in the dress rehearsal, I learned that a human pair of eyes could become a parachute. There was no fear anymore, being held in Brandi’s encouraging gaze.
We sang in front of 5000 people while footage from the film flickered on the screen. I’m not a singer. I was off-key, crackling with emotion. But the audience did more than forgive me. They held up their hands in heart shapes and filled in where my voice faltered.
Later that night, at the wildest party I have ever been to, where I sprayed people with champagne and poured tequila into their mouths, Brandi, Catherine, and I were dancing in all of our clothes in the pool. Catherine shouted over the music to ask me, for the fifth time, if I was having fun. As if, with all her responsibilities that weekend, this was her highest priority. Then she laughed. “I don’t know why I keep asking. You should see your face right now.”
I’m starting to believe there is a forcefield of humans tending the small, stubborn flame of my joy.
There are so many other names. So many moments. Friends I am forgetting to list who have already forgiven me.
I have received what I gave, tenfold.
And I know this now:
Love is not a fixed role.
It moves.
It trades hands.
And even wilder—it survives death.
I once wrote about turning Andrea into a god to survive the grief. Maybe I am doing a little of that now. Believing they are somehow orchestrating all of this. That they are somehow responsible for the friends who appear, the experiences that return me to wonder, the moments where I pinch myself for all of this strange luck. For “Come See Me in the Good Light” finding its way into rooms neither of us imagined—all the way to an Oscar nomination.
I certainly know I have a powerful force on the other side. My very own angel-of-the-get through, who now has everything to give.
At that wild pool party, I crowd-surfed on a sea of strangers. Never in my life had I successfully done a trust fall. I’ve always been scared, stumbled, backed out at the last second. But Brandi held my hand, locked me into the safety net of her eyes, counted down—and I let go.
I trusted completely that I would be caught.
Because I had all of this evidence that I would be.
Thank you.
With Love. And More Love.
Meg (+ Andrea, forever)
PS. “Begin Where You Are”, an anthology of the Colorado Poets, which includes previously unpublished poems by Andrea. Use code “COPOETS25” to receive 20% off at checkout. Funds will support future Colorado Poets Laureate.
I leaned on their words, now I lean on yours. Thank you Meg for continuing to inspire us the way that only Andrea could. They would and are so proud of the way you have continued and expounded on their legacy!
This is the choreography of care. The dance that never ends, only changes partners, changes who leads.