On Grief, Hermes, and the Calling of the Psychopomp.

There are moments in life when a door opens, the kind that reveals a deeper truth about who you are and what your journey is meant to hold. I have been standing at one of these thresholds recently, meditating on the sacred role of the Psychopomp and my long, complicated, devoted relationship with Hermes. I have spent years wondering how this archetype moves through my own life. This year especially has challenged me to truly discover who he really is, and how much of me is very much like him. Only now, in the midst of a week I never expected, do I begin to understand.Yesterday my younger cousin, who is basically the little sister I never had, lost her stepfather in a brutal, excruciating way. A disease tore him apart piece by piece until even his breath became torture. Watching the depth of her grief has been like witnessing a soul quake open for the first time. Something has shattered inside her in an irreversible way.

And I know that shattering.

There is a certain flavor of darkness that not everyone has tasted. When you’ve been broken at a soul level from a young age, when the world has stripped you bare in ways you can’t articulate, you don’t return to life the same way others do. You come back different, changed in your core. You walk around carrying knowledge you never asked for but can never forget.

This is where the archetype of the Wounded Healer comes into play. My astrologer has said, again and again, that it is the central architecture of my chart, the backbone of my spiritual work. I always understood it intellectually, but it was only when I saw my cousin collapse into a darkness she didn’t have the map for that it finally clicked into place. I have been there. I survived brokenness. I learned to walk through the shadow without a guide, and in doing so, I became the guide itself.

This is the strange, bittersweet alchemy of suffering: the tools I lacked when I needed them most are the same ones I forged with my own spirit. And now, when someone I love is sinking into a place where instinct alone is not enough, those tools become extremely handy. For the first time, I feel a sense of purpose in the pain I have constantly endured.

The Psychopomp’s Path

What I am beginning to understand is that the role of the psychopomp is not only about guiding souls after death. It is about guiding souls through death, in all its forms. Through the symbolic deaths, the emotional deaths, the identity deaths, the endings that remake us whether we want them to or not. Hermes is the guide of souls because he knows the borderlands. He walks between worlds, unafraid of the brutality, unafraid of the silence, unafraid of what most people refuse to face. And the people who love him, who are marked by him, often find themselves walking those thresholds too. This is not a role that I want to romanticize. It is raw, and heavy, and real. To be a psychopomp in the living world is to sit with others in their confusion without collapsing into it. To witness their pain without making their suffering your own. To hold a lantern steady while someone you love crawls through a landscape where everything hurts.It is a painful role, yes. But it is also a holy one. And maybe that’s why the word “PSYCHOPOMP” is etched on the license plate of my car, a quiet tribute that even I didn’t fully understand until now. Maybe I have been walking this path all along, even when I strongly doubted it.

Being the Lighthouse

It is not a flex. It demands the one thing most people avoid: unwavering presence in the face of chilling darkness. To be a psychopomp is to sit on the edge of someone else’s cavernous grief and refuse to look away. To let their heartbreak exist without rushing to fix it or drown in it. To stand in the eye of their storm and say:

I know this place. I know it like the palm of my hand. You will not walk through it alone.

And there is something profoundly clarifying in realizing that my ability to do this, to sit in darkness without flinching, is not a punishment. It is a gift earned through the wounds I have always resented. A skill shaped by a lifetime of trials that I didn’t deserve but managed to learn from anyway. That is the paradox of the Wounded Healer: the very suffering that nearly destroys us becomes the compass that allows us to guide others home.

A New Chapter in My Spiritual Journey

As I step deeper into this archetype, I feel something shifting, not only in how I see Hermes, but in how I see myself. The psychopomp is not about heroism. It is about presence. Companionship on the hardest path a soul can walk. It is about understanding that the river of death whether literal or symbolic, is not a place to fear when you know how to drift in it. And so, as I walk with my cousin through this unimaginable moment, I feel the ancient role of the guide settling into my bones. Not in some flashy mythical way, but in the intimate truth of:

I know how tired you are but I know the way through. Take my hand.

Maybe that is the truest meaning of being marked by this path. Maybe that is the real work of the psychopomp. Maybe this is where my own darkness truly begins to alchemize into something that is more akin to light.