Walking with Hel
Following the Path of Shadow with the Norse Goddess of Death…
By Daina Wellumson
Photo Credit: Daina Wellumson
“At the temple there is a poem called Loss carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.”
― Arthur Golden
In the fall of 2017, I received a phone call from my older brother. It was extremely rare for him to ever call me on the phone. I remember my heart jumping for a brief moment before I picked up. Our mother had been sick for a while over the last year or so. She had been in and out of the doctor’s office, but they were never able to pinpoint exactly what was wrong with her. So when my brother called me, I knew it had to be something involving our mother.
“Something’s really wrong with Mom…” he started.
Our mother was a steel trap when it came to her memory. As a child, it was nearly impossible to pull the wool over her eyes because she had this ability to see right through us. My brother continued to explain that while our mother was trying to make dinner that evening—a meal she had made countless times—she froze in the kitchen. Her eyes glazed over, and she seemed stuck in time for a brief moment. She then slammed the spoon down on the counter and said, “I just can’t remember!”
This led to several hospital visits over the weeks ahead. By New Year’s, she had remained there indefinitely.
She never left after that point.
On March 4th, 2018, my mother lost her battle with cancer. That morning, before her passing, I woke up from a dream that shook me. In the dream, I was approaching a beach on the Puget Sound. My grandfather was sitting on a large piece of driftwood with his back to me. I sat down next to him, and he took my hand. His gaze didn’t leave the water in front of us. His hand squeezed mine with a gentle but firm grip. All he said to me was, “You are strong. You can do this.”
I woke up feeling a deep sinking in my chest. I knew exactly what my grandfather meant. What I didn’t know was when or how it would happen.
Heading to the hospital with my youngest son in tow, I couldn’t shake the heaviness that loomed over me. I met my oldest brother and his family in my mother’s hospital room. My mother lay still in the bed. At this point, the cancer had taken her ability to speak. Her hair had all fallen out due to the treatments and attempts we had made to save her life—a decision I would later deeply regret. Her cheeks had sunk in, and she had become barely a shell of the woman who raised me. I sat by her bedside holding my infant son in my arms. With a free hand, I reached over to grab hers.
I hadn’t been able to sit with her for long before my son started to fuss. My attempts to calm him failed, and I knew I needed to step away to care for him. I bent down to my mother and squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry, Mom. Your grandson is fussy, and I need to take him for his nap.” In that moment, when I tried to pull my hand away, I could feel my mother’s grip tighten. Other duties had kept me away from her for most of the day, but the heaviness never wavered.
When I returned later that afternoon to see her, I was alone. I left my children in the care of my mother-in-law so I could turn my attention to the dire situation at hand. As I walked down the hall, the heaviness became overwhelming. It took everything in me not to stop walking. I passed the nurses at their station, and they informed me that my brother had just left a few minutes ago to get my cousin off the ferry and would return shortly.
What I saw next, as I entered my mother’s room, would change me forever. She had gone into distress and was struggling to breathe. I called for the nurses, who came rushing in. They attempted to clear my mother’s airway but were unable to do so. They looked over at me with words that cut right through me.
“She has maybe minutes left. It’s time to say goodbye.”
It was the moment I knew was coming. It was the moment I knew what my grandfather had meant. And it was the moment that would be one of the bravest of my life. I took my mother’s hand, and through my tears I managed to tell her that I needed her to go to my grandfather. I knew he had been waiting for her. Every possible fragment of my being wanted to say, “Please don’t leave me.” But I knew I couldn’t. I watched as the last light left my mother’s eyes, and in that moment, I had never felt more alone.
Photo Credit: Daina Wellumson
“The journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take.”
― Peter Jackson
In the years that followed my mother’s death, I would slowly learn to love myself the way she loved me. It would prove to be one of the most challenging things I would manage, outside of raising my children without my own mother to turn to. Shadows would continue to creep up, and pieces of my soul would die only to be resurrected over and over again. I am no stranger to my own darkness and have walked with it my whole life. So when my connection to working with darker themes in Paganism grew, it felt like coming home. There has always been a certain amount of comfort and familiarity I’ve found in the shadows.
The first time I felt Hel’s presence wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. It was a very subtle and slow burn that came over me from the inside out. She circled me slowly, like a vulture circling a carcass—ever watching—until one day in the late fall of 2020, she stepped out of the shadows. She sat quietly inside my mind, ever-present and subtly calling. My curiosity finally got the better of me, and I sat down to greet her in meditation.
I found myself in North Cascades National Park of all places. It was a place I spent a lot of time camping in during my childhood and felt deeply connected to, so it had become a sacred place I visited frequently during meditation and journeying. A few months before my mother became very sick, I had taken my family there on a camping trip. While hiking among the massive cedars, we found a large rock formation in the woods that had a crack running down the middle. Something struck me about it, so I took a photo.
Photo Credit: Daina Wellumson
In my meditation, I found myself looking upon that very rock. As I approached, the crack in the middle became larger, forming a cave. I walked through, but the cave was extremely tight. While I am not very claustrophobic, this made me uncomfortable. I began to see all sorts of bugs crawling all over the walls as I passed them—spiders, centipedes, all the fun creepy crawlies. This, I was genuinely afraid of. Regardless of my fear, I knew I had to keep going.
As I emerged on the other side, I came to woods filled with tall pine trees. A fog hung over the ground instead of undergrowth. Snow lightly fell, and I could see the cold in my breath, but I did not feel it. A great fire stood before me, beckoning me to come forth. Just beyond it stood a hooded figure. She spoke softly with a stoic demeanor, slowly removing her hood.
“If you come here, you must understand that there is no turning back.”
Hel spoke softly as she walked around the fire, approaching me slowly. She began to tell me how the cave was a symbol of the many moments in my life when I would descend into darkness only to arise again. Reaching out her skeletal hand, she softly brushed my cheek, telling me that this certainly wasn’t the last time I would experience such a descent. In the weeks that followed, I received a very jarring awakening to exactly what she had meant.
Just after Winter Solstice, I switched the medication I was taking to treat my depression and chronic pain. What followed was nothing short of an absolute nightmare. I fell so far down I was certain I would never get back up. It was an all-consuming darkness I hadn’t experienced in quite a long time. I couldn’t function, and I would have stopped at nothing to make the pain go away. But I had a brief moment of bravery and asked for help. This small act would end up saving my life.
I immediately went off the medication and was put back on the proper one. It took me weeks to even out, but the all-consuming pain subsided almost immediately once I had stopped the medication. I had experienced a severe reaction, which resulted in full-blown psychosis. It remains, to this day, one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.
“We all enter into fallow periods in our lives—times of questioning, of crisis, of not-knowing; times of depression, stagnation, terror, and loss. We return from them changed. Later we enter them again. There is no ceasing of this pattern. And it is by attempting to halt the pattern—to avoid the pain/fear/loss part of it—that we cause the greatest damage to ourselves.”
― Jane Meredith
Throughout our lives, we experience so many moments where we are broken down and remade. I strongly believe these moments define who we truly are. The choices we make in our darkest hours reveal the kind of person we are at our very core. I used to think I had to do it all alone. I carried my darkness, my pain, my shame, and my shadow with me at all times. I would lock away my grief in a place so deep and dark no one would ever find it.
But it was those moments of bravery when I reached out that truly showed me I don’t have to do this on my own. Hel has continued to hold me in those moments of darkness where I feel as though I’m coming apart at the seams. She has helped me heal in so many ways that are nothing short of profound. She has taught me authenticity—and to be true to myself at my very core.
If Hel calls to you, I implore you to extend your hand to hers. She is more than a keeper of the dead; she is a guide to the shadows. The one who walks beside you as you traverse the darkness, showing you that it’s not something to fear but to explore. You will feel exhausted and raw to your very bones, but you will heal in ways you never thought possible.
Just know that if you walk this path, you will never be the same again.
Daina Wellumson
Daina is a Fellowship Leader in Minnesota where we hold events every year!
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