What to Do When the Signs Stop

How I learned to talk to Andrea again

Shortly after Andrea left their body, something began to happen. “Signs” is the closest word we have for it, but “signs” feels flimsy, flat. Cosmic Valentines is the more apt phrase.

Andrea, my five-word poet laureate, crossed over and seemingly learned an entirely new language in a matter of days. They found a way to reach me again. Mostly through technology—which felt especially impressive because in life, they were a helpless luddite.

One afternoon, from the other side of an entirely silent and unoccupied house, Alexa came on unprovoked. First: Lean on Me. Then: Stand by Me. Then: I’ll Stand by You.

The songs felt pointed, almost obvious. But also explainable. Same mood, same emotional register. Exactly the kind of tonal consistency one can expect from an Alexa station. I told myself it was just an algorithm doing what it does. Nothing to see here.

But then the playlist pivoted.

A song that had never played in the house before came through. Eminem, chanting: Guess who’s back, guess who’s back, guess who’s back.

Then, a new genre entirely. Disco. The Bee Gees: Stayin’ Alive.

I stood there, shook and obedient to the whims of the music, feeling two things at once: the awe of something reaching beyond this physical plane, and the unmistakable thrill of being flirted with.

It was as if Andrea had made me a playlist in the afterlife. As if they were standing somewhere just out of sight, holding a boombox over their head.

Of course our love could survive anything!

Even death.

[I’ve written extensively about these cosmic valentines here & here.]

But after a few months, the messages stopped. Or maybe I stopped being an open conduit to receive them. It felt easier to assume the error was mine. That I wasn’t paying attention the right way. Not looking up enough. Eyes trained on the wrong thing.

Touring kept me from truly noticing at first. Screening the documentary, the Q&As that followed, the way my whole schedule was built around introducing more and more people to Andrea—I was still steeped in them. They were thirty-feet high, in literal surround sound. It almost passed for presence.

But underneath that, I missed the feeling I’d had in the beginning when it seemed like Andrea was tossing divine pebbles at my window, waiting for me to hear the subtle patter and come running. To part the curtain and find them there, where I could see the look on their face so clearly—already certain I’d let them inside.

Then the tour ended. I came home from the Oscars, from all the applause and flash and attention.

Stef & Meg at The Academy Awards, 2026

I returned to the empty house. The dogs. The quiet.

That’s when the absence got loud.

I had filled our home with relics of Andrea. Photos in every room, urns on every desk, a series of small altars. But it seemed Andrea had become more of a static image than an electrical current. No more Valentines. No more sky-writing. No more certainty.

The loneliness, the lack, the longing, hit me in a place so cliched I felt almost embarrassed: a candlelit yoga studio, folded over in half-pigeon. “Where’d you go?” I whispered in my mind, pretending the wetness on my cheeks was just the heated vinyasa sweat.

The tears stayed with me through Savasana, where the instructor placed a cool, lavender-scented towel over my eyes. In the dark, a sentence arrived, barely louder than a thought: you can find me by writing poems again.

—Who’s to say if the voice in our head is our own or not?

For reasons I won’t go into here that were heartbreaking to Andrea and I both, I had fallen out of love with poetry slam almost a decade prior. I stopped writing poems when the community around them stopped feeling safe. Prose became a place I could create without bracing myself.

So at the time, in that yoga class, the idea of writing poetry was as far from my mind as joining Cirque du Soleil. I had no interest in returning.

But when something taps at the window of grief, even faintly, you don’t ignore it. You go look. You become a little unhinged about it.

Because who am I if not a desperate detective, trying to solve the mystery of where Andrea went when they died? Even if nothing pans out, I can’t risk not following the lead.

So after yoga, I went home and wrote my first poem in ages:

Tornado
for Andrea

I admit, you drove me crazy.

The careless way you’d salt a tomato,
no napkin or plate beneath it.

Just right over the floor,
your summer snow, trusting
someone else would sweep it.

And you never took your boots off.
Only ever used half a stevia packet.
The rest would collect in the crevices
of car doors, divots no vacuum could reach.

There was nothing you couldn’t fix
with duct tape, or shoelaces
stolen from other people’s shoes.

And you broke everything
you borrowed. All those stains
you called heart-shaped.
Plus you lost my heirlooms.

Not because you didn’t care,
but because you moved so fast,
like maybe you always knew
you would leave too soon—

so why waste a minute
screwing the cap back on
the pickle jar? Do you remember
how many times you thought

something was stolen?
That we’d been invaded?
Because you couldn’t wait
that extra breath to look.

You loved me
because I always found everything.
I always assured you:

nothing was taken from us.
Not even time.

It’s all such a mess—
how immaculate
the house is now.

All I want is you
tracking muddy bootprints
across my life.

Come back, fix this
with my missing shoelaces.

Why did I care
that we were walking
on salt?

Come home.
I will call it the beach.

I didn’t find Andrea in that first poem, but I was grateful to have written it. To catch a feeling before it slipped past me. The way a photograph can make a moment important, sometimes a poem can make an emotion important.

The next night, I wrote another. And the next.

April is National Poetry Month. Some poets write a poem a day, an artistic challenge. But I felt less like a poet, more like a hound following a ghost scent. One I didn’t fully believe existed, but couldn’t stop tracking, just in case.

A few nights in, I sat down with nothing. No image. No line. Just the habit of showing up. Stef was over and I invited her to write with me. I equipped us both with a notebook, lit a candle between us.

I glanced at the date. It had been almost nine months since Andrea died. The number startled me. I picked up my pen and wrote:

The facts feel impossible.
Nine months have flown by—
I could have had a baby in that time.

Pushed a new person into the world
so soon after helping you leave it.

Do you remember the first words
I said to you after the nurse
recorded the time of your final breath?
[4:16 AM.]

I said, “Good job. You did it.”

Like you’d crossed some finish line, broken
through the tape between this life
and the next.

How thin is the fabric
between life and death? I know
how desperately you want to tell me.

I know some day you will.

Stef at some point looked up, clocked the tracks of mascara on my cheeks. “I’m okay,” I promised.

And then I wrote a story Olivia had told me the day before:

Olivia babysits a girl who was asked
where she was before she was
in her mommy’s belly.

The girl, who is two,
said “I was waiting to be picked.”

Is Death the same? Waiting to be chosen
for God’s team?

Of course you were drafted
so fast, so young. So promising.

I picture you now, dribbling
stars, dunking Mars
through the hoops of Saturn.

Spinning the ball of earth
on your index finger.

At this point, I was sobbing and laughing at once. A kind of joy I hadn’t felt in months was punching through the grief.

Because I remembered something I had forgotten: That a poem could be a rocket ship. That a poem didn’t need permission. It could take me, and Andrea, and whoever was reading, anywhere at all. It could shrink the world, stretch it, tilt it on its axis, place it inside Andrea’s hands. It could give Andrea hands again.

The poet Billy Collins once said a poem “begins in Kansas and ends in Oz.” This was proof. I began writing about the grayscale hours of that worst July, waiting for my spouse’s heart to stop, and somehow found myself in technicolor again, Andrea whizzing through the cosmos. And it felt so real.

With prose, there’s a bit less permission to completely leave orbit. You have to establish setting, time, place. But with poems, there’s an understanding that anything can happen. That poems might come with jet fuel. That in the process of compressing human emotion into such a small container, the writing doesn’t always go long, but deep. I was falling in love with poetry again.

Stef looked up at one point and said, “I really want to know what is happening to you…” because flashing on my face was a colorwheel of every emotion, rapidly cycling through every shade.

I was, in every visible sense, really entertaining myself…but I wasn’t by myself.

Writing was no longer just a mode of self-expression, a monologue. It was starting to feel like a conversation. A bridge between me and the person I thought I lost.

And then I wrote the following line:

“You’re wearing a jersey
with the number 8
turned sideways
because you are infinite now.
Waiting for me like LeBron James
waited for Bronny.”

Now, I don’t wager that too many people who follow me get that reference, or are basketball fans. I was a theater girl, an art-class queen. Or as Andrea liked to call it, “an indoor kid.”

I played the outfield. The waaaaay outfield.

But Andrea had a bad habit of falling asleep to the TV, and during basketball season, it was SportsCenter. Night after night. Somewhere along the way, I started picking things up—names, narratives, opinions I didn’t form.

One day, a player named Ben Simmons came on the screen. I looked up from my book and said, “Ben Simmons. God. That guy is a major disappointment to the league.”

Andrea just stared at me—and then burst out laughing.

How did their unathletic, Puppy Bowl–watching wife suddenly have hot takes on the NBA?

It became a thing between us. I was parroting what I heard before drifting off to sleep, but it made Andrea laugh, which was my favorite thing in the world to do. Still is.

So I started watching games. Learning the players. Their lore. Andrea, who went to college on a basketball scholarship, was positively gleeful about this new development.

Love & Basketball

LeBron James is the oldest player in the NBA. Part of why he hasn’t retired is that he wanted to play in the league at the same time as his son, Bronny. He stayed long enough to share the court with him—a basketball FIRST.

So when I wrote the line, “Waiting for me like LeBron waited for Bronny,” it was one of the most meaningful lines I’d ever written. Not only because it was a way of imagining Andrea in the afterlife letting me take my time getting to them…but because the line itself would have delighted Andrea to their core. I continued:

I’m only still going with the basketball references
because of how much it would make you laugh—

to hear what I learned about sports
just so I could have another language
to speak to you in.

Wanted as much chemistry with you
as Michael Jordan had with Scotty Pippin.

If you’re in the paint, I’m in the paint.

You used to listen to Sports Center
while I slept and I learned so much
through osmosis

that one time, the sound went out
on our TV during the NBA finals.
You were so upset, until we realized

I could sportscast the whole thing.
We didn’t even know I knew
the words: Lay-up. Crossover. Triple Double.

I don’t remember
who won that game
besides us.

Do you remember
the last thing I said to you
before 4:16AM?

I said, “You are a star.
You are a comet.” And you shot
right out of your body
and proved me right.

You trusted me
to narrate the championship
of your life.

At this point, every emotion is bucking through me. Ache braided with astonishment. Giddiness brushing up against grief. Reverence. Rapture. Devastation. Bliss.

And regret. Sorrowfulness.

I felt so, so sorry.

Because all this time, I’d been thinking the onus was on Andrea to communicate with me. Like some pre-feminist girl in a poodle skirt, staring at a silent rotary phone. As if I was just supposed to wait to be called.

But why should our relationship be so one-sided?

That isn’t fair.

Couldn’t I also pick up the phone?

For me to assume Andrea can read the diary in my brain, know everything I think and feel—and so what, I don’t have to try?

Trying is romantic.

In writing poetry that night, I realized something: I could still make them laugh. Still tickle them pink. Andrea wasn’t the only one of us who could learn a new language to reach the other. I could flirt back.

Through all of this, I felt high. Not metaphorically. High like someone on psychedelics. (Stef, who has actually seen me on psychedelics, can confirm this.)

The fabric between life and death felt thin. So thin.

And the message that came to me in that yoga class—that I could find Andrea again through writing poems—no longer seemed like it could have possibly been my own idea.

there you are.

There is a woman who emails me sometimes with messages from Andrea. I’ve never met her, have no idea what she looks like. She identifies as a medium. And, desperate detective that I am, I follow every lead.

The other day she reached out, and I decided to test her a bit. I wrote back: “I recently found a way to communicate with Andrea myself. Did they say anything to you about that?”

I had not told anyone this story yet.

She responded right away: “There’s a framed print in your house—it looks like a circle, maybe constellations? And there’s writing on the bottom. I think that’s something they’re calling your attention to.”

The writing on the framed print she’s referencing is the words: YOU ARE THE NEVER LOOK BACK.

That line? Is from one of my OWN poems. A poem I wrote about Andrea, years ago, called “Your Bathwater > Wine.”

Andrea answered my question of “how did I learn to communicate back?” by calling my attention to my own poetry.

Are you kidding me?

World record in goosebumps, broken.

Love,
Meg [& Andrea, Forever.]

PS. Here’s some exciting news:

1. We made ANOTHER film. It’s Andrea’s final live performance. We’re going to screen it for the VERY FIRST TIME at the best venue in the whole wide world: Red Rocks Amphitheater on July 5th, 2026. The Colorado Symphony is going to play live that night, accompanying Andrea’s entire set. I’ll also be reading poems and telling stories. There will be some incredible special guests. The Artist Presale begins on April 21st at 10am MT. The Pre-Sale Code is: LIGHTNING. Tickets here.

2. Decided I wanted to be able to wear Andrea’s likeness on my body every day if I so pleased. So we made a new line of t-shirts for exactly that reason. All proceeds go to keeping Andrea’s art + legacy alive, the release of unpublished works, + supporting their family, too. Check them out, here.