About 18 months ago, the Colorado Poet Laureate, Andrea Gibson, started popping up on my Instagram feed, in one of those slow-unfolding mysteries of the algorithmic age. Between the powerful and touching videos of Andrea performing their poetry to camera, there was a story of terminal cancer, oncologists and a partner, Megan Falley, by their side, dealing with all of this as well as impending loss.
Of course I follow Andrea. Their real-time Instgram feed emerges now and then through the clatter of everything else I follow. Then, Andrea dies on 14th July 2025 (“allegedly,” insists Megan, which is the most charming way I’ve seen someone nail how early loss feels) and now there is this Oscar-nominated documentary, Come See Me In The Good Light. Click over to that YouTube video and the blurb begins: “Theirs is a story of happiness.”
The film is beautiful, funny and as much about love and being alive as it is about death. Unlike other films following a person living with a diagnosis of limited time, this one doesn’t feel like there’s a countdown going on behind the scenes.
We don’t follow Andrea all the way to the end, and that’s the right decision. That’s not for us; but we see who they are in the face of the ultimate nightmare, and the choices they decide to make. At every point, it is to live, to do the thing, to put on one last tour, and when that can’t go ahead for health reasons, to put on one last show. It is to just spend quiet time with Megan, or to tease the documentary makers they’ve become close to, or to make memories for a future that soon won’t include them. And yet, it is so goddamn funny and life-affirming! How do they do that? You’ll have to go and see it to find out. I can’t quite put it into words.
The filmmakers, Ryan White and Jessica Hargrave, joined Megan Falley for a Q&A after a screening for WFTV that I saw last week. The film covers January - December 2024, and Andrea did get to see the film, but now the others are on this press tour without them, with that Oscar nomination pending. I asked Megan how she was feeling on this tour, still in that first tender year of grieving, if there was any safeguarding in place for her.
The answer really made me think: I have to paraphrase, but essentially she said that one of the toughest things about the first year of grieving is that after the funeral, people slowly disappear, and fewer and fewer people say the departed person’s name. With this film, more and more people are learning Andrea’s name. The community is building, not shrinking.
And isn’t that everything? That’s what you desperately want in those early, burning days: just to talk about them. To hear other people say their name. To know that they have gone (unbelievable, although one day you will believe, which is the job of grieving) but have not disappeared (because they won’t, really). And I’m not sure that emotion ever truly goes away. Over twenty years after my parents’ deaths, that feeling is still there: calmer, much more gentle, but just as determined to say: “Look, look at them, they were here, and if you know anything about me, you need to know about them.” I don’t have a documentary about them, sadly, but they emerge, and keep emerging, in so much of what I write and perform.
Find Andrea and Megan’s Substack here:
I am so excited to announce that I will be performing my poetry at the first Hayward Gallery Lates on 1st April! I’ll be peforming alongside two wonderful friends from the Southbank Centre New Poets Collective, Suyin Du Bois and Lou Moon - we were all on the 2024-5 cohort.
You’ll find me by the door - yes, the one on the poster! At a few points in the evening, I’ll read three of my own poems that the Hayward’s curatorial team felt connected to the themes in Chiharu Shiota’s incredible work.
The room itself is something else - the red web-like thread and the keys hanging down shorten the room’s height, making it feel muffled, almost-overwhelming, womb-like. The door seems like escape but all it really does is deliver you into two steps into the future.
I’m very excited about the evening and would love to see you there! Then you can come running with me as we go to catch Lou and Suyin’s poems too!!
According to Martyn White, this is Shiota’s first major solo exhibition in a London public institution, and she revisits several of her most celebrated installations, re‑conceived for the Hayward’s distinctive architecture and the emotional tone of 2026.
The Locked Room (2016) returns, enveloping furniture in dense webs as if suspending memories in time.
During Sleep (2026) appears as a new iteration of earlier versions from 2002, activated with live performances on select dates (7 March, 11 April and 2 May). These performances, included with exhibition entry, extend Shiota’s bridging of body, movement and spatial drawing.
Where poetry meets art is fast becoming a favourite of mine. Join me on 1st April!
Here’s a little peek at my poem ‘sewing’:
And here is my vibe when reading:
What, huh, whoopsie, how did that get in there?! I meant this one:
Links I have lunked, sorry, liked:
via The Browser: A short, sweet and thoughtful essay that leaves you wanting more, on parenthood, always being your parents’ child and how well we can ever know each other.
I always see this at Piccadilly Circus station but never take a photo, so here you go, isn’t it a lovely thing:
Bye for now!
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