Darkness is not the absence of light; that would be too simple. It’s more uncontrollable and sinister. Not a place but a void. I was there once. More than once. And although I could not see or hear you, you were there, waiting. Because the darkness is not dark to you, at least, isn’t always. You wept, not because your friend was dead, but because soon you would be and because we couldn’t understand it, or didn’t want to, or both. The coming darkness was too deep for us to grasp.
But then, so is the light. One had to come before the other. It was always that way with you. It still is. Tears fell from your eyes and then ours. Before every light in the world went out, and time itself went to die with you. I go back to that place sometimes, or rather, it comes back to me, uninvited. The night it was eternal, until it wasn’t. Bitter, and then sweet. But somehow the bitter remained in the sweet and has never gone away.
You told us it would be like that, not with your words but with how you lived. The man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. That grief wasn’t what we wanted to see. So, we tried to look away, and in so doing, fulfilled your very essence, one from whom people hide their faces. But soon, we couldn’t hide from it any more than we could stop the sun from setting. Or rising. I remember you wishing there could be another way, and looking back, I do, too. I still don’t know why it has to be this way, the bitter often mingled with the sweet. Maybe I never will. At least, not this side of…
--Elizabeth Tabish
as Mary Magdalene
in “The Chosen,”
Season 4, Episode 7
Image source: https://aleteia.org/2024/02/07/mary-magdalene-of-the-chosen-opens-up-about-season-4/
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