by Elia Lawatsch, Managing Director
Oscar nominations season is one of my favorite times of year. I keep a running list on my phone, slowly working through each film, and every so often, a film stops feeling like entertainment and instead becomes an experience.
That was the case with Come See Me in the Good Light, the deeply intimate documentary about Andrea Gibson, Colorado Poet Laureate, activist, and epic performer, who died in 2025 from ovarian cancer. Streaming now on Apple TV+, the film feels less like a documentary and more like an invitation into sacred space.
While the film chronicles Andrea’s terminal illness, its true subject is love—honest, extraordinary love—and what becomes possible when people are brave enough to face mortality together.
A Story About Knowing, Not Denial
The documentary follows Andrea and their wife, Megan Falley, as they navigate diagnosis, caregiving, and the emotional reality of impending loss.
What makes the film so powerful is its honesty. Andrea knows they are dying. Megan knows she will lose her wife. Their community knows. Instead of shrinking from that truth, they move toward it, creating space for connection rather than isolation.
We see quiet moments of caregiving alongside laughter. Friends gather. Meals are shared. Andrea prepares and performs a final show in a sold-out theatre, a reminder that creativity, expression, and doing what we love most can still flourish up until our last breath. Fear is spoken aloud without being allowed to dominate the room. The ordinary rhythms of life continue, but they feel heightened, more intentional, more tender.
Andrea’s experience is not defined by dying. It is defined by how intentionally they lived during the final weeks and months of their life, and by the community that surrounded them in that living.
Anticipatory Grief: Love Before the Goodbye
In my work with Death with Dignity, I speak every day with patients, caregivers, and loved ones navigating serious illness and death. One of the most profound emotional landscapes I encounter is anticipatory grief, the grief that begins long before death arrives.
It can be heavy and disorienting. It can feel like loving someone while simultaneously preparing to lose them. It can mean planning, reminiscing, fearing, and cherishing everything all at once.
This film captures that emotional duality with remarkable tenderness. Grief is present, but so is humor. Fear exists alongside gratitude. Love becomes both more fragile and more expansive. We see Andrea and Megan hosting small dinners with friends, moments of shared laughter and quiet reflection, ordinary acts made extraordinary by the awareness and acceptance of the looming truth that Andrea’s death is approaching.
Andrea describes this awakening with striking clarity:
”Understanding that we are all mortal, that we are all going to say goodbye to this world and to each other in some ways, and goodbye to our bodies eventually, it wakes you up. Immediately, it’s like your eyes are wide, and you are kind of awestruck to the brevity of it all. You don’t want to waste a second, and I was wasting a lot of seconds.“
That awareness, heartbreaking and clarifying at once, is the emotional center of the film. Mortality does not diminish love. If anything, it intensifies it.
Anticipatory grief is not simply sorrow. It is a strange and sacred in-between space. It asks us to stay present when it would be easier to look away. It demands honesty and it can make ordinary moments feel luminous.
Why Stories of Grief Matter
In my work, I help people put words to these experiences, the anticipatory grief, the complicated grief, the gratitude, the guilt, the relief, the love. Naming these emotions matters. When we speak openly about dying, we reduce isolation. We normalize the complexity. We remind people they are not alone in what they are feeling.
Films like Come See Me in the Good Light do this beautifully. They show that conversations about death are not morbid, but something deeply human. They show that community, creativity, humor, and devotion can coexist with fear and loss.
Honest conversations give language to the in-between.
Your Story Matters
If you have loved someone through serious illness, lived inside anticipatory grief, or walked alongside someone in their final chapter, your story matters.
Stories are how we honor the people we love. They are how we transform grief into connection. They are how we help others feel seen in experiences that can otherwise feel isolating.
This year, I hope to elevate voices from every corner of our community: patients, caregivers, partners, adult children, friends. If you are willing, I invite you to share your experience. Your words may be exactly what someone else needs to feel less alone.