The climax, for those of you who have not actually seen Whoopi Goldberg be sassy with an angel, happens when two women are scrambling away from the murderer. Everything is horrible and hopeless and the bad guy has all the cards. I think I held my breath for three tortured minutes while they raced through the warehouse. 

 

Then he died. It was over. He snapped from being ominous, to becoming the slinking slave of evil minions. He looked like a a gargantuan balloon of a monster, poked by a little girl with a pin.

The intensity of that moment was branded on my heart. Evil has a convincing veneer of authority, able to swallow up goodness like nightfall can confuse a lost traveler. But darkness is actually not real. It is the absence of light. It has no strength of its own. It's impotence is revealed by the illumination of one candle. 

 

Neither does evil have any genuine power. It can chase us through life like a pack of murderers, but when truth falls like a razor there are only lifeless ribbons at our feet.

 

Marriage sometimes looks like a win/lose plot. But the inky lies that plunge us into the blackness disappear when the Real Lights go on.

 

When the guillotine crashes as I take my last scrambling breath, I want the shards to be pieces of myself that I did not really want to go with me.