When Gibson died on Monday, at age 49, those closest to the poet consoled mourning fans by sharing some of Gibson’s last words: “I fucking loved my life.” Accepting their illness and their mortality had transformed Gibson. “You tap into the brevity of something,” they’d told Freethink, “and all of a sudden everything becomes more special.”

As if it were a jump shot from their basketball-obsessed childhood, “soaring towards the rim like a kite,” Andrea Gibson could send a spoken word poem spinning through space and time knowing it would reach its perfect home — swishing to a close in the last lines, nothing but net.

I am more with you than I ever could have imagined,” Gibson says in the poem, written while facing a terminal illness.

Iwasnever formally introduced to Andrea Gibson’s poetry. They just felt like kin from the beginning, like a queer cousin I always knew. Gibson — a queer poet, activist and performance artist who explored identity,