Goodbye, Persephone.

You’ve heard of her—Persephone, gone to the depths of what we usually call Hell, but which is more accurately the Underworld. Here is her story, briefly and adaquetely outlined in the Oxford Companion to World Mythology:

“Demeter was the goddess of crops and the fertile earth. By her brother and chief Olympian, Zeus, she gave birth to the beautiful Persephone. Demeter did not know that Zeus had promised their daughter to their brother Hades, the ruler of the underworld. This terrifying god took by force what he had been promised. The girl was innocently picking flowers one spring when the earth opened up and Hades sprang up from below and carried her off.” (Leeming, 97)

Well damn. That sucks. Poor Perseph. Minding her own business with the flowers when out of nowhere WOOSH—Kidnapped. Captured. Snatched up. Gone, girl.

I mean. I don’t doubt it. Gods of the Underworld are not to be trifled with and they will—and this does really suck—”take by force what they have been promised.” Which is, broadly speaking, beyond Persephone’s youth and sex, beyond the fecundity that is spring, beyond the multiple interpretations of this great and guiding myth, simply us, right? Us. The humans. All of us, so innocent (haha) and sweet, trying to live our best lives here in the middle world, the regular world of everyday, when Nope!, instead, catastrophe. What a betrayal.

We look cute; Hades wants us. Hardly our goddamn fault.

That is what it felt like to be told I had stage-three ovarian cancer at 36. There I was, picking my flowers, when he yanked me down to Hell. I wasn’t a maiden anymore, as I was married and had two children, but it’s modern times and so I felt, you know, maidenish. I was teaching college, publishing poetry, potty training a toddler. Not prepared to face down death, at any rate.

That was some time ago, now, and I’ll describe my own Underworld journeys in detail later, but suffice it to say I wasn’t the first one to be doing everything right when suddenly everything goes wrong.

I wrote Descent after a cancer-diagnosed friend asked if I had any wisdom to share. I blathered on about Persephone and other goddesses who famously went to the Underworld (Inanna, chief among them, and I CANNOT WAIT to talk about her) but didn’t feel it was very helpful.

Later, however, out on a night walk (I like the world best when it’s wrapped in its blankets), a voice told me something. It said:

Sometimes you have to go to the Underworld.

You don’t want to go. (It said.)

But you have to.

Why. (I demanded.)

Because that is part of being in the world.

Dammit.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Poets, unlike the Oxford Companion, often imagine Persephone into having some agency in her descent. This isn’t, I don’t think, the same as blame. The poet Ann Carson reminds us that Persephone doesn’t have to be cardboard-cutout good in order for it to be horrific what happens to her. And she doesn’t have to have hated every second while she was down there. She is not simply an object upon whom trauma is enacted. She has nuance. A rich full life and deep and conflicted response to her own narrative.

Carson wrote Hades as a motorcycle lad. Handsome and strong. He rides up from below and entices Persephone down.

Perhaps Persephone, bored witless with her flowers, was secretly wishing for more. Maybe didn’t bargain on all that came with it, of course. But who among us did bargain on all that came with it, no matter what it was?

I wracked my brain trying to determine what I’d done to cause my cancer. Too much coffee and chocolate. Or, farther back, that time I licked yellow paint (cadmium!) from the paintbrush. Or the strychnine from the few times I did acid. On and on I wheeled through the list of imbibings, on through the stressors—lifelong insomnia, procrastination, people pleasing, striving—(yes, I’ve read the studies). Or was it a classic slapdown for the success I’d begun to garner? Teaching college, publishing poems. Not so fast, girl. Not so fast.

Turns out—two things may have sealed my fate. One, I have a BRCA gene deletion that makes my little cells much more susceptible to mutation. Two, I lived in an area where lay in wait a passel of nuclear waste to which I and many others were exposed.

It was fated.

Was it fated?

Does it matter how Persephone got to the Underworld? She had to get there.

Why.

Because that is part of being in the world.

Was Persephone played, and/or did Hades play upon her (secret, oh so secret) desire?

But enough about her. Enough about me.

What about you? When you went to the Underworld? Why did it happen? (What an unanswerable question, layer upon layers.)

What have you told yourself about why it happened?

Did you let greed or pride or lust or jealousy overtake you and did you do things that led to other things that led to you ending up in the Underworld, because how could you know it would end that way?

Or were you innocently picking flowers when from the bowels of the earth a hand tore through and pulled you down into sorrow, into grief, into rather-be-dead-flattened-nothingness.

There is an Underworld, and sometimes we have to go there. That is what matters.

Persephone—she’s gone.

But don’t worry.

If the myth has told us anything, it’s that she will be, some day, returning.