A split second where nothing in the world is dying

Andrea Gibson loved cliches, so they begged for living only when life started coming sealed in emailed blood report, three weeks at a time. Andrea Gibson was a slam poet, a non-conforming poet, the tenth poet laureate of the state of Colorado, USA. I had not known her then, though I had driven along the same highway 36 and then taken the foothills parkway exit to CO-119 that runs towards infinity, but lets you get off at Longmont. Around the middle of this year, when their four year old battle with ovarian cancer was forfeit, and her life's work was getting some attention, A introduced me to some of her performances, like The acceptance speech after setting the world record in goosebumps. With five words, Andrea can make you look rich by showing you what you have got, and what you gonna feel when you spend it.

Ryan White's documentary Come See Me in the Good Light is filmed mostly in the last years of Andrea and their partner Megan's life which circuited around hospitals; where life became more than a borrowed time from death - sequined with phone calls to an eagerly waiting mother, morning songs of a mourning dove, lifting weights and eating without tasting after a chemo or rushing up the stairs of the Paramount theatre in Denver to peek at the roaring crowd one last time, though you must not believe that is the last time.

The story moves on the wheels of Andrea and Megan's narration where the domestic and the poetic merge imperceptibly just as the force of Andrea's voice drains into the sea of Megan's curvy belly and the sweaty dance marathons become the nectar of love. Beautifully shot all through in the diffused light of the dinner table to the glorious Colorado sun, three scenes underpin Andrea's journey for me. The first is the recurrent fixing of the mailboxes that the snow-plows keep knocking over. Then there is Andrea's revisiting of a dumping place for discarded furniture, with her first ex, where Andrea salvages a couple of white chairs and take them back. The third is the watching of a basketball match recording from Andera's high school days.

Andrea says, when the doctors surgically cut the cancer out, it was also the first time that they felt they must have cut out depression too. Folded with two terrific songs by Brandi Carlile, one of which Andrea co-wrote, this is a documentary that shows you how every rage, every failing, every despair can also be named love.