Grief comes in many shapes and forms. It is a human right of passage that some encounter early on their path, some later, and for some it is a constant companion. When you are surrounded by grief as much as I have been in my life, you begin to expect it around every corner, in every crack. Its arrival is not always anticipated and, yet, sometimes, it is a slow and steady companion bound in anticipation and helplessness; like watching your favorite team lose the championship game while crossing your fingers behind your back hoping they will pull out the unimaginable win. But grief – it’s a funny traveler. Whether it shows up on your doorstep unexpectedly or you see it walking down the road to you, it always stays. It always leaves a piece of itself behind. We should want to welcome it, as after all, it is the changes in life that are something we can consistently count on. Yet, we fight. We fight it with every ounce left in us. Not because we don’t know it’s out there, not because we don’t expect it to never pay us a visit, but rather because every time it shows up, it takes a piece of our soul and leaves a bit of itself behind in its place.

I don’t sleep much – typically 4 hours of solid sleep. If I wake up in the middle of the night never to be able to fall back to sleep, it is inevitably between 3:00 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. This morning, I was awake around 2:30 a.m. Not groggy, not annoyed, just awake. At 3:30 a.m. I was up and in the shower. By 4:00 a.m. I was taking apart my coffee maker and giving it a detailed clean. Isn’t that what everyone does at 4:00 a.m. when they can’t sleep? At 4:20 a.m., I received a text informing me that a woman I had recently met had passed this morning around 2:30 a.m. Ironic? Kismet? Who knows. I’ll leave that decision to the reader. The woman was a close friend of a close friend, and she was a client. We were working on her estate planning as she recently received a terminal diagnosis. Is this the first client I have worked with who has died? Clearly not. I do estate planning and probate work. I joke that I work for dead people. This hit differently though. Maybe because her daughter and her mother were by her side when she passed, keeping vigil since yesterday when she started down her last path in this world. With this, my old companion, Grief, decided to remind me of the pieces it has left behind in my soul. The immeasurable losses over the years. Mainly though, the hours that my cousins and I sat with my dad the before he passed, parked on the windowsill of the VA hospital room, googling states that have assisted dying laws so that none of us would have to go through what we were watching, or put our families through the gut wrenching, soul etching experience of watching a loved one waste and take their last breaths. A scenario my sweet client’s daughter had just lived in real time.

As I paced my kitchen holding back the gut-wrenching waves of memories from a well of my own accumulated grief and loss, the name Persephone popped in my head. Now, I could not tell you one Greek god from one Roman one. Where that thought came from, I have no idea. Likely the only easily accessible references I have in my head to the gods of ancient lore are the ancient Sicilian roots that from whence I come where the head of Medusa is prominent (and where I later discover Persephone has ties). I’m sure in the back of my head there are probably some long-lost files of cartoon representations or Percy Jackson adventures. Greek and Roman gods are not a talking point for me. So, Persephone? Really? Cue: me, my phone, and professor google.

Persephone. Queen of the Underworld, wife of Hades, Goddess of Spring. The embodiment of grief and renewal. A goddess, kidnapped by her uncle, Hades (yes, the same one to whom she was later married), became a walker between worlds. Struck by the grief of her missing daughter, the tale goes that her mother, Demeter, while on quest to find her daughter, neglected her godly duties as the goddess of agriculture. As a result, nothing would grow, and famine ensued. As a compromise, it was decided (or Hades forced everyone’s hand), that Persephone would spend part of the year in the underworld as Hades’ Queen and the other part of the year topside. My mentor used to say that a good settlement agreement is one in which neither party is fully happy. As settlement agreements go, this would qualify. And so – Demeter allows things to grow starting in spring when her daughter returns to her, and plunges the mortal world into hibernation due to her grief at her daughter’s absence while Persephone is in residence in the underworld. The mythology and storytelling around the drama that is Persephone’s fate is much more complex that my oversimplification here, but you get the idea.

Persephone. The one who straddles both life and death. It is not lost on me that those of us who work in the realm of drafting wills and planning for a client’s last days and the thereafter, are also the ones who are there on the other side of death to carry out what a departed cannot do from the afterlife or underworld or just absence of existence (whatever you believe in). We are not the ferrymen. We are those who live and work on both sides of grief, both sides of loss, the before and the after.

Persephone reminds us that a mother’s love runs deep, that loss and grief cut deep and lead to despair, but also lead to periods of renewal, and that even when “spring” comes, when we start to see the other side, those pieces of Grief that it has so unkindly left behind with us will creep up, often when we least expect it. We can consistently count on that much.