Runes and Grief 10: Eihwaz

Tonight's randomly-selected Rune is Eihwaz. Yew tree, spine, death, communication between realms.

I have taken to visiting Helheim by way of trance and meditation. I am not visiting anyone in particular, but the idea of Death itself. Hel is one of my main entities, and I look to her as a (much bigger and very powerful) sister. As such I am not afraid of the idea of dying. I am not rushing it, but I am not afraid.

A lot of what we feel when we lose a person to death is not just grief, but fear. Our own mortality is thrown into sharp focus, especially if the person dying is near to our age or younger. When we think about when our parents died, we might wonder if we will be that same age - denying the joy of birthdays that bring us closer to that number.

When our parents are gone, we might also feel an extra dose of fear at the idea of being The Grownup Now. We cannot look to the people we need to ask questions of. The phone does not work for them any more. We realize we haven't had a chance to gain enough experience to even know what questions we should be asking sometimes, and now, all of a sudden, it is up to us to be the Answerers to our children or other young people. It is a heavy weight. What if we answer wrong? It is a fear.

Finding your footing as The Grownup Now is not always easy. We will trip, sometimes fall. But we can learn to ground ourselves, toes metaphorically digging into the earth as we stand tall, stretching ourselves toward the stars and taking a different view to gather Answers for ourselves and those who depend on us.

Eihwaz is often seen as a sort of ladder we can climb to travel up and down the Tree of Life, or Yggdrasil, as it is known in our terms. When we are properly grounded, it is the means through which we can move between the realms, gathering wisdom from the various worlds connected to our own. The multiverse opens to us.

We become our own grownups, and part of that involves accepting our mortality and being at peace with it, cleaning up whatever messes we can to make the process easier for those who come after. Grief transforms into an energy, moving us forward into a place of strength from which we can take necessary actions.