Andrea Gibson’s Demise Is Reframed As A Beautiful Invitation To Stay

The poet, efficiency artist and activist Andrea Gibson died in July 2025, only a few weeks in need of their fiftieth birthday, from an extended battle with ovarian most cancers. Their artwork, for which they have been named the Poet Laureate of Colorado in 2023, was direct, cogent, and accessible as a rule of thumb. They insisted on poetry that was simple to digest, the type of imagery that somebody would not “want a level to grasp.” Why write a poem that goes over somebody’s head? Or, even worse, “over their coronary heart?“

In Come See Me within the Good Gentle, Ryan White paperwork Gibson as they navigate the uncompromising and mockingly life-affirming days of their final months. Its undertaking is one among reclamation. In its concentrate on Gibson’s uncommonly lovely relationship with fellow poet and creator Megan Falley, the movie intrinsically re-frames a typical assumption of life lived underneath the thumb of most cancers. That is no dying knell, however a liberation. “My story is one about happiness being simpler to search out as soon as we notice we don’t have endlessly to search out it,” they proclaim in a radio interview. And, certainly, Andrea and Meg’s life appears to comply with a blissful, if difficult, path in direction of a type of uncommon nirvana.

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

White’s movie is at its finest when it permits itself to sit down within the ecosystem of their love. Brandon Somerhalder, who shot Ben Proudfoot’s Nearly Well-known sequence for the New York Instances Op-Docs, employs a equally intimate method to entry. Within the many scenes of the couple lounging, enhancing one another’s work, or else cuddling with their canines at their dwelling in Longmont, Colorado, White and Somerhalder perch the digicam on the lip of the sofa, or at eye-level with the desk at which they eat. We’re by no means not an integral a part of this couple’s evolving understanding of mortality, artwork, and partnership.

A lot of the footage assembled right here is overflowing with emotional impression that it turns into irritating when White does not belief his personal curation of footage. Blake Neely’s rating, specifically, is a constant shot of saccharine that the movie does not want. Most irritating of all is when that music overwhelms Gibson’s poetry itself, a selection which appears to basically misunderstand the embedded musicality of their phrases. Gibson was a slam poet, and even their work that wasn’t carried out dwell is finest when heard by itself.

There’s additionally simply an excessive amount of footage right here, although it is not essentially a foul factor to spend a number of further seconds with Gibson. As they ruminate about themself close to the top of the movie, there’s a lot life in even one second. For many people within the queer group, Gibson’s gentle is immortal anyway. One of many first poets to garner sufficient of a following that they have been capable of tour, like a rock star, within the Nineties and 2000s, Gibson created poetry that’s earthen like Mary Oliver’s and radical like Sonya Renee Taylor, but completely their very own. Gibson constantly gave voice to each lesbian and trans embodiment in methods beforehand unheard.

But, the documentary is much less an summary of their work than it’s a picture of a relationship navigating an exceptionally onerous prognosis collectively. Falley mentions that, on the time of Gibson’s analysis, they have been in a tough patch, they usually tried to interrupt up together with her. “I did not need to undergo it together with her,” Gibson admits, however Falley caught round regardless, they usually finally acquired married in 2022. Regardless of the circumstances of approaching dying, the 2 fought anyway: for Gibson’s well being, for his or her artwork, and for one another.

Whereas Gibson’s poetry is cogent, Falley’s is extra florid. Gibson handles a near-constant bout of hysteria and stage fright; Falley clings to optimism till the occasion really occurs. Gibson is encouraging of Falley to lean more durable into her emotional recall whereas Falley intellectualizes and edits with effectivity. As artists and as folks with wildly divergent approaches to work and to life, they arrive collectively in a myriad of inspiring methods, like river paths that meet as a minimum anticipated, but inevitable convergence.

The 2 reminisce about their assembly and mutual courtship, the wild and deeply sapphic dance they shared during which Gibson licked Falley’s sweat, in public, how Meg was stunned to be taught of their crush on her (“That is the homosexual James Dean!“) and the way their love of her physique was a revelation which finally birthed a therapeutic. “I felt like folks needed to overcome my physique,” she says, and “if Andrea loves my physique, can I love my physique?” Each Gibson and Falley come to a uncommon acceptance of life’s ills as presents and invites.

In undoubtedly the movie’s most beautiful part, editor Berenice Chávez cuts collectively a recording of Gibson’s poem “The Little Issues,” a type of different bucket listing of smaller, extra quotidian objects, with Gibson and Falley really attaining them. They plastered a piano with love poems, they name their mom each evening, they repair their perpetually damaged mailbox. It’s the clearest instance the movie can provide of the facility of artwork to manifest actuality, and vice versa, and a clue into how we could already possess the important thing to true longevity. It is all find that good gentle.