Mercy and Unmercy
by Raven Kaldera
There were a lot of deaths in my life this year, and in the lives of my friends and loved ones. As I write this, the year is little more than half over, and I can foresee more to come. Some deaths we are sure of, and simply waiting for the end. Some are unsure, and we can pray for them to be avoided, if it is the right thing to do. As a Hel’s man, as Her priest and shaman, it’s been a busy year for me.
The first death, early in the year, was of a dear friend who had been suffering from an illness for some time. Her death came as no surprise, nor did the request — from both herself and her daughter — sometime before she passed on, for me to be there in spirit when the time came. They asked me in my capacity as Hel’s Own to make sure that she passed on quickly. My friend was unsure about Hela’s willingness to grant this boon, because in all the years that she had been staring her eventual death in the face (and working with other Norse gods, specifically Loki, Hela’s father, and his wife Sigyn), Hela had never responded to her. She had only found dead silence from that quarter, and she feared that Lady Death was angry with her.
While I won’t say that Hela never becomes angry — and you should thank your lucky stars if you never see it yourself, because it resembles a glacier descending on your hapless head — She is never petty, and never toys with people or dicks them around. If She does something unpleasant, it’s because She believes that it is for everyone’s long-term good, even if we on the receiving end don’t like it. She is one of the least selfish Gods I know, even in Her most human form. I knew why She would not speak to my friend (although She allowed her to attend Her rituals), and I knew why She would not allow me to tell my friend why that silence was important.
If she comes close to Me, she will fall in love with Me, and she will want to come into My realm even when it is not her time. And there are things that she still needs to learn, and needs life to learn them in. She will not see me until the Time is here.
Afterwards, I ask: Did she learn those things?
No, came the answer. But that was of her own will. I gave her the gift of her own will all the way to the end. And then I was there for her.
That was certainly true. When I received the call from another friend who was keeping watch with the woman’s daughter — “It’s time…” — I went alone with my drum and a candle to an empty upstairs room. I prayed to Hela, said Her rosary, and then I smudged the room with mugwort, lit the candle — the flickering flame was a token to Loki, her patron — and drummed. I could feel Her with me in that empty room, and I could also feel Her present hundreds of miles away where my friend was getting ready to pass over the threshold into Death. Through Her, I linked with my friend, reaching into her and touching her heart. (I had been compelled to ask her, when we last spoke, “How’s your heart?” “Not so good,” she said, and now I knew why I had asked.)
I followed the instructions Hela gave me, and I pulled the energy out of her heart, and her body. All that was holding her to this side, keeping her from a quick, clean end, was the last life-energy in her flesh that was clinging to life. I sucked it out through Hela’s channel, but it did not stay with me. I could feel it passing through me and out the other side, toward the flame that burned brighter and brighter in the corner. It seemed that Loki was taking it from me. Faster, She said, and I pulled harder, one link in a chain, feeding and passing it through. At the same time, my hands were beating a heartbeat on the drum that grew slower and slower.
And then the drumbeat came to a stop, and my aching hands refused to strike it one more time. When I sucked in air, that was all I felt — the air that comes through a straw when the drink is gone. There was a sudden complete and utter silence in the room. I looked up and the candle had gone out, as had the smoking stick of mugwort. Hela’s presence had gone out as well, like a phone hung up. That deathly silence is Her equivalent of the dial tone.
I staggered downstairs, drum in hand. “It’s over,” I said to the waiting people in my kitchen. The clock said four forty-five. Later, I would receive the call from her daughter, who had come down at the same time I had. She had passed, quickly and cleanly as had been hoped for.
What’s the definition of mercy? I ask.
Being given the gift even when you do not deserve it, when none of your deeds have led to it as a natural pathway, She says.
Are you ever merciful? I ask.
She does not answer.
This morning I received a call from another dear friend, who is in distress. Earlier in her life, she watched her grandmother go through a painful and lingering decline and death from Alzheimer’s disease. When her mother began to develop symptoms of Alzheimer’s, both her parents chose to ignore it and pretend that it wasn’t happening. They settled into a habit of denial, and eventually her mother was unable to make her own decisions about the matter. She forgot people, was frightened of everyone, and terrified of her own decline. Later, she would escape from her husband’s care and wander the streets until the police would bring her home. Finally she got so bad that her husband could no longer take care of her, and she landed in the hospital. When my friend called, she and her siblings were trying to convince her father that he — in his 80s — could not take care of a woman who was largely bedridden, could do nothing herself, and could no longer speak or recognize anyone. He was unable to make any decisions — about whether to put her in a nursing home and if so, where; about whether to resuscitate her should her heart give out; about what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He sat at home and cried, and meanwhile the doctors were waiting for answers. My friend asked me if there was any way I could broker a deal with Hela to give her suffering mother a painless death, as soon as possible. She would pay whatever was necessary, she said.
I went to Hela, prayed, and asked. Her answer was swift.
No. I will not interfere.
Why not?
She made her decision, in the face of all evidence. He made his decision, in the face of all evidence. They must both live with their decisions.
But what good does this do? They won’t learn from this lesson — she is beyond reason, and he is old and will die soon. What’s the point?
Hela disagreed with me on the above point, including that there was nothing left for the old woman to learn, and I suppose She may know better than I do on that subject. But She also said, ominously, They have three children. Those children need to see, to know that you cannot count on divine mercy to save you from your decisions.
Tonight, I will be calling my friend back to tell her this news. It will be one of the hardest calls I have ever had to make as Her Own.
It’s been popular, recently, among some Northern Tradition people who respect Hela and don’t like the bad press She’s gotten, to try to rehabilitate her reputation. They characterize Her as merciful, as the one who brings the kindly Death, as a healing and nurturing goddess. While it is true that She does not believe in needless suffering, and that She will sometimes bring that kindly Death — as is obvious from the first anecdote I wrote here — I would not characterize Her as a merciful goddess. She can seem to be merciful, certainly — except when She’s not. She heals, yes, in the way that the surgeon cutting out the cancerous tumor can be said to be a healing force. She nurtures her Dead — Her care for them is unstinting, and full of compassionate, unconditional love — but if you are living, Her job toward you is often the hard lessons.
But attempting to pretty up Her reputation, or any part of Her, is entirely against everything She is. She appears as She does to living humans for a reason.
Death is ambivalent. Learn to accept that. It will always have more than one side. It is neither good nor evil — it simply is — but no matter how much you may see it as ugly, it has its beauty, its relief from pain and suffering. And no matter how much you may want to see it as kindly, there will always be the side that makes you scream and writhe and curse My name. I will not be the beautiful Death Maiden for you. If you want beauty, find beauty in what I give you, even the pain and the loss.
When everyone is wringing their hands intellectually over the moral issues and emotionally over the intense feelings that a situation evokes in them, Hela is the force that steps calmly in and does what must be done regardless of apparent morals or emotions. My first experience with being Her hands was the day I found my schoolmates standing in a circle and squealing in horror at a wounded, flopping, dying pigeon. To this day I don’t know if it was mortally wounded by accident, by a cat, or by the actions of one of them. All I know is what I knew then: pick up a brick and smash its head in, without fear, without trepidation, without hand-flapping, without ego, without pride, without weeping. You just do it, because it must be done, even when the eyes around you look at you with that horror. For one moment, I was half rotting flesh, and they saw it. But She would rather people look with horror on what actually is that not see what actually is. Unlike Her beloved father Loki, whose divine Achilles heel is wanting to be liked and admired by others, Hela does not care what others think of Her. We do what has to be done. We go on. She is the Goddess of Dire Necessity.
We have no word, in this English language, for the opposite of Mercy. Oh, we have a word, Unmerciful, which is wholly negative and implies evil, or at least an utter coldheartedness that we assume is evil. We have no word for the state of having to say, “I cannot give you Mercy because it is important — to you, to your fate, to your growth, to those watching, to the world, to future generations — that you see this, that you do this, that you experience this. To give you Mercy would be a sin against all these things in the long run, a sin so great that it cannot be borne. You must do this. I must make you do this. It must be done. You must go on.” Some might call that Justice, but it is more specific than that broad term. The modern “tough-love” does not do it credit, either.
Perhaps we have no word for this concept because we as humans so rarely find a human being who is so lacking in hubris as to be able to make that decision cleanly. This may also be true to some extent among the Gods, for many reasons, but one thing is clear: Hela is that one. This is Her job for us, the living. This is the gift that the Goddess of Dire Necessity brings to our shrinking world.
