Please help me as I stumble my way through grief.
I've read that people turn to Hel for this, as the Goddess of the dead knows death, and dying, and leaving; having to leave a place before you will it. Pulled away from siblings and parents, she must understand the pain of separation.
No, I say. She is a child of Loki, and as such, I have nothing if not kind regard and respect for her. But I turn to Sigyn.
Don't they know what happened to you. Focusing on Loki, yes, they know the fate of his children, and your life long task to keep torture away from his face. But what about you?
They were your children too. Your children, whom you felt first. Torn from you and used against your husband, no regard to you or them.
I wish people would know of your pain, your strength, your love. Yours is not a small name, not merely a mention in a long tale, but the centre of it. The secret power of it.
No hall or realm needed to shelter you and bring you honour, but a cave, and a rock, and a bowl. Never sought, but yours the same. These, and your choice to stay.
Yours are the feet that balance on rocks, yours the arms that hold steady a heavy bowl. No obligation to keep you there, but love.
It's your love that's stronger than anyone's.
And so I approach you, my mourning mother, and ask, please, reach down into my chest and hold my weeping heart because it hurts too much for me to carry. Every beat it takes, which my beloved's heart can no longer, shrieks that it's so wrong, and useless. And full of searing pain.
I never thought she would die.
Doctors, nurses, hospitals, they are meant to heal, to save. She wasn't even very ill, till they made her so. No one will share my pain, no one will hear me, will you? I know you know about deaths that weren't necessary. That weren't inevitable. That weren't fair.
Could I use my pain to steer close to you? If I reach into it, will I find your heart weeping there too?
But so. I sit here near the shrine I built for you and your family, its crystals and stones, feathers and lights and pictures and runes; and I listen for you.
But all I hear today are the rasps of my own breathing, and all I see in my mind is my mother in her coffin, alone, buried deep in the cold and the dark.
