The poet, performance artist and activist Andrea Gibson died in July 2025, just a few weeks short of their 50th birthday, from a long battle with ovarian cancer. Their art, for which they were named the Poet Laureate of Colorado in 2023, was direct, cogent, and accessible as a rule of thumb. They insisted on poetry that was easy to digest, the kind of imagery that someone wouldn’t “need a degree to understand.” Why write a poem that goes over someone’s head? Or, even worse, “over their heart?“

In Come See Me in the Good Light, Ryan White documents Gibson as they navigate the uncompromising and ironically life-affirming days of their last months. Its project is one of reclamation. In its focus on Gibson’s uncommonly beautiful relationship with fellow poet and author Megan Falley, the film intrinsically re-frames a common assumption of life lived under the thumb of cancer. This is no death knell, but a liberation. “My story is one about happiness being easier to find once we realize we do not have forever to find it,” they proclaim in a radio interview. And, indeed, Andrea and Meg’s life seems to follow a blissful, if challenging, path towards a kind of rare nirvana.

Poet Andrea Gibson’s Death Created A New Understanding of Life

White’s film is at its best when it allows itself to sit in the ecosystem of their love. Brandon Somerhalder, who shot Ben Proudfoot’s Almost Famous series for the New York Times Op-Docs, employs a similarly intimate approach to access. In the many scenes of the couple lounging, editing each other’s work, or else cuddling with their dogs at their home in Longmont, Colorado, White and Somerhalder perch the camera on the lip of the couch, or at eye-level with the table at which they eat. We are never not an integral part of this couple’s evolving understanding of mortality, art, and partnership.

So much of the footage assembled here is overflowing with emotional impact that it becomes frustrating when White doesn’t trust his own curation of footage. Blake Neely’s score, in particular, is a consistent shot of saccharine that the film doesn’t need. Most frustrating of all is when that music overwhelms Gibson’s poetry itself, a choice which seems to fundamentally misunderstand the embedded musicality in their words. Gibson was a slam poet, and even their work that wasn’t performed live is best when heard on its own.

There’s also just too much footage here, though it’s not necessarily a bad thing to spend a few extra seconds with Gibson. As they ruminate about themself near the end of the film, there’s so much life in even one moment. For many of us in the queer community, Gibson’s light is immortal anyway. One of the first poets to garner enough of a following that they were able to tour, like a rock star, in the 1990s and 2000s, Gibson created poetry that is earthen like Mary Oliver’s and radical like Sonya Renee Taylor, yet entirely their own. Gibson consistently gave voice to both lesbian and trans embodiment in ways previously unheard.

Yet, the documentary is less an overview of their work than it is an image of a relationship navigating an exceptionally hard prognosis together. Falley mentions that, at the time of Gibson’s diagnosis, they were in a rough patch, and they tried to break up with her. “I didn’t want to go through it with her,” Gibson admits, but Falley stuck around regardless, and they eventually got married in 2022. Despite the circumstances of approaching death, the two fought anyway: for Gibson’s health, for their art, and for each other.

While Gibson’s poetry is cogent, Falley’s is more florid. Gibson handles a near-constant bout of anxiety and stage fright; Falley clings to optimism until the event actually happens. Gibson is encouraging of Falley to lean harder into her emotional recall while Falley intellectualizes and edits with efficiency. As artists and as people with wildly divergent approaches to work and to life, they come together in a myriad of inspiring ways, like river paths that meet at the least expected, yet inevitable convergence.

The two reminisce about their meeting and mutual courtship, the wild and deeply sapphic dance they shared in which Gibson licked Falley’s sweat, in public, how Meg was surprised to learn of their crush on her (“That’s the gay James Dean!“) and how their love of her body was a revelation which eventually birthed a healing. “I felt like people had to overcome my body,” she says, and “if Andrea loves my body, can I love my body?” Both Gibson and Falley come to a rare acceptance of life’s ills as gifts and invitations.

In undoubtedly the film’s most stunning section, editor Berenice Chávez cuts together a recording of Gibson’s poem “The Little Things,” a kind of alternative bucket list of smaller, more quotidian items, with Gibson and Falley actually achieving them. They plastered a piano with love poems, they call their mother every night, they fix their perpetually broken mailbox. It is the clearest example the film can give of the power of art to manifest reality, and vice versa, and a clue into how we may already possess the key to true longevity. It’s all in finding that good light.