The Sundance award-winner, now landing on Apple TV+, is a remarkably unvarnished look at a couple dealing with a devastating diagnosis
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t is impossible to talk about cancer without invoking another Big C: cliche. Illness and pain, “journeys” and “battles”, finding appreciation for life while reckoning with death – these are the building blocks of cancer stories, at once uniquely devastating and devastatingly common. The poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley, romantic partners for over a decade, took divergent approaches to the Big C. As a writer and editor, Falley strived to “eradicate” cliche; Gibson, as Falley put it, would instead “double down”.
Diagnosed with incurable ovarian cancer in their late 40s, Gibson, the poet laureate of Colorado thus chose to double down on mantras we often aspire to embody but forget to practice: live fully, laugh more, love harder. Savor it all. “This is the beginning of a nightmare, I thought … my worst fear come true,” they say early in the exquisite new documentary Come See Me In The Good Light. “But stay with me … because my story is about happiness being easier to find once we realize we do not have forever to find it.”
It is cliche. And yet, as told by Gibson and Falley in poetry, prose and whispers in bed at their home in rural Longmont, Colorado, such happiness is tender, hard-won and luminous. Their heart-forward film, directed by Ryan White, sits with plenty of pain in what the couple know will be some of their last months together: doctor visits and chemotherapy, tears and the overwhelming grief of knowing your loved ones will go on without you. The couple live in three-week increments – the time between blood tests that can quantify the spread of Gibson’s cancer and the success, or diminishing returns, of different treatments to keep it in check. A high score: shock, processing, a bruise blooming in real time. A low score: utter joy. A temporary period of lightness. And throughout, the most gutting revelations and sacred connections, often triggered by the most quotidian and profane (for Gibson, it’s one of those novelty iPhone age filters, giving them wrinkles and gray hair they will never see).
