“The Long Road Back” | By Madonna Badger
This article was published in Vogue magazine in 2013, written by Madonna Badger, who lost her parents and three daughters in a house fire in the early hours of Christmas Day. It’s an honest, inspiring story of her life after the tragedy and her journey back, and these lines from it have become two of my favorite quotes:
“Basically, I go to wherever the light is, because anything else is darkness, and it can be a deeply black darkness.”
“At a certain point, you can either be full of hate or full of love—it can go either way.”
I haven’t gone through what Madonna Badger has, I hope I never will, but her story makes me think about what grief, and life, can be like.
I think we all have some kind of darkness we run from, whether it’s a personal struggle, or something that happened to us or someone we love. There’s a lot of darkness in the world, it’s hard to watch so much of it on the news every day—but she reminds us that there is also light to go to. Sometimes we have to look for it, and for me, that’s a lot of what Christmas is: finding the Light, being found by the Light. The daily fight to run to wherever it is. And the decision for love over hatred, when it could go either way.
Photo by Kevin Dooley via Flickr
- Where the Light Is - December 18, 2016
