Andrea Gibson in a scene from Come See Me in the Good Light.Apple TV via AP
“Welcome to my home. I guess you’re going to be with me when I die.”
That’s how Andrea Gibson, standing in their driveway in rural Longmont, Colorado, met the film crew who were just arriving to make a documentary about how Gibson, a spoken-word poet with a rock-star-level following, and their wife, Megan Falley, also a poet, were living with Gibson’s stage-four ovarian cancer. With that sentence, Gibson, who used they/them pronouns, set the tone for the project: open, inclusive, nothing held back.
Gibson died in July, one month before their 50th birthday. But they lived long enough to see the finished film, Come See Me in the Good Light, win the audience award at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, and play to rapturous applause on the festival circuit. (It’s now on Apple TV+.) And because of the way Gibson and Falley revelled in the days they had together, they transformed what could have been a story about dying into a story of how to live: shimmering with radical amazement at the beauty and preciousness of time.
The comedian Tig Notaro and her wife, the writer and artist Stef Willen, produced the film. As longtime friends of Gibson and Falley, they knew the couple “would not hold back any depth, devastation, comedy – anything goes,” Notaro said last week in a video interview. “I had my own invasive cancer in 2012,” and made it into some pretty incendiary comedy. “But when people call me brave, it was nothing compared to Andrea and Meg.” Notaro gave the director, Ryan White (Good Night Oppy), only one instruction: The work had to be driven by love.
Gibson in a scene from Come See Me in the Good Light.Uncredited/Apple TV via AP
“I’ve been in the industry for 30 years,” Notaro says. “It’s impossible to get through most projects without finding some weirdo rattling around in there who’s trying to ruin it. But I’m telling you, this one was all love. Even after the movie was finished, the crew continued to fly to Colorado to spend time with Andrea and Meg.”
“When Tig pitched me the idea – my friend the non-binary poet with incurable cancer – it sounded terrible, the opposite of something funny or enjoyable,” White says in a separate interview. “Then the very first night we met, we filmed them having a raucous conversation about sex. They were so cracked open, we got right away to the real stuff, the good stuff. As a filmmaker, I don’t believe in arms-length distance from my subjects. But I’ve never had this level of intimacy. They gave me this gift, to be inside their relationship for a year and a half, and I hope that’s what we bottled up for people who see it.”
On the second day of filming, Gibson got the news that their cancer had metastasized to their pelvic bone; that’s also on camera. “It might sound odd, but we felt it was divine timing,” Falley says in a separate interview. “We knew things would get harder, and we felt the witnessing of the camera would reinforce how we were already living, with hope and humour and dancing.” A side effect of one of Gibson’s treatments compromised their eyesight, so writing was challenging; the idea of letting other people make art from them appealed to them. “Just being witnessed can be art, yes,” Falley says wryly. “When you’re Andrea.”
Gibson, who published seven books of poetry, released seven albums and was named Colorado’s poet laureate in 2023, had fervid followers who mouthed along as Gibson performed poems about love, queerness, activism, environmentalism and their cancer; their titles include “Photoshopping My Sister’s Mugshot,” “MAGA Hat in the Chemo Room,” and the poem from which the film’s title comes, “Good Light” (“I know how much the pain of this world weighs but I can still tip the scales in light’s direction”).
“I think Andrea listened for what the world needed, and often it was what they needed in themselves,” says Falley, who often edited Gibson’s work, and vice-versa. “They were a mouthpiece for the world’s suffering, and the antidote for it.”
Gibson, left, and their wife Megan Falley, during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, on Jan. 25.Chris Pizzello/The Associated Press
Falley used to tease Gibson – “You can’t use ‘moon’ and ‘firefly’ in every poem!” – but Gibson believed in never writing above anyone’s head, or anyone’s heart. “Andrea’s poetry is for everybody,” Notaro says. “You hear it and go, ‘Yes, I feel that, I noticed that, I didn’t know I did, I didn’t know how to explain it.’” When Notaro read part of Gibson’s “Tincture” on Stephen Colbert’s show recently, about how the soul misses the body after death, she choked up on the line “What else could hear the chain of a swing set and fall to its knees?”
As Gibson’s health seesawed up and down, they decided to do one final live performance, to which the documentary builds, and the outpouring of love is palpable. Notaro, who was the opening act, says, “It felt like the Beatles were about to walk onto that stage.” White and his crew filmed the entire performance; he’ll release it as its own concert film.
The life lessons Gibson and Falley embody aren’t new. We’ve all heard them: Only connect. Appreciate the small moments. Wonder at every leaf on every tree. Whatever pain or grief you’re feeling, name it love. But watching them walk the walk, you feel thunderstruck. “When I accept what’s happening, I get to be with life,” Gibson says.
As a caregiver, Falley is equally inspiring. “I think it’s gorgeous that caregivers give their resources to someone else,” she says. “Often caregivers can feel or act martyred. But to remain present to the fact that it’s a choice, a beautiful gift, is a mental reframe that can be really powerful.”
The lessons are resonating. Viewers thank the filmmakers at every screening; online comments are ecstatic; a friend of Notaro’s even restarted a relationship with a Trump-supporting brother they’d given up on. Notaro herself downgraded her role on Star Trek: Discovery from lead to recurring because she realized she didn’t want to spend six months filming in Toronto when her family is in Los Angeles. “I’m taking actual steps to be more available to my life,” she says. And White is challenging himself “to keep reminding myself of the ways that being around Andrea and Meg changed me, and bring that to all my future films.”
Gibson was a lifelong hypochondriac, Falley says, “but when the thing they feared the most happened, they had a kind of enlightenment, an experience of awakened grace and bliss. When they’d slip into fear, they always knew the place they wanted to get back to. For me to not get on the train with them would have been such a disservice.
“Now, widowed at 36, it’s almost like I inherited their assignment,” Falley continues. “It feels like a gift. To be doing anything else right now would be to profoundly miss the point of what Andrea was trying to teach us. It would be willfully ignoring and throwing away the richest inheritance that a person could ever be bequeathed.”