Demeter knows her daughter is alive; it is not so easy to kill a god and no mortal below nor god above has the stomach left for it, and besides: she would know, would feel it were they to severe her foolish heart from her frail lungs.

But absence, if not as permanent as death, is equally silent.

Demeter gazes her eye upon a flower and watches it ice-over with her sadness, and moves on, looking again for a daughter who does not answer, in a blizzard that does not cease.