Mary as Crone is the Pieta, the grieving mother who holds in her arms the broken body of her beloved son. She is the Mother of Compassion, for she has known such pain that now she can hold the world's pain in her arms as well. Over the millennia, millions of prayers and entreaties to Mary have brought comfort and a sense of acceptance of life's inevitable losses. It is as the Queen of Sorrows that Mary is perhaps at her strongest, combining motherliness with the ancient power of the death goddess, and guiding us through to a place of peace.