Deep Reads: Death

Rather than “rebirth” what this card offers is starker, but also much more sacred.

A sharply featured bird is perched atop a pile of bones. It sits as witness, guardian, and grief-keeper. Behind it, a golden archway–a portal, perhaps. The air feels still here, but not stale; there are flowers finding their way through the decay.

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Let’s start with the obvious: death is difficult. Not just because it ends something, but because it does so completely. It felt like a risk to include a Death card in this deck. But there could not be cards like “emergence” and “gestation” without their sisters “departure” and “death”. There was no way to not include it, no way to bypass the breadth and truth of the lived–and dying–experience. In that spirit, this card does not offer a tidy promise of transformation. It does not dull what is sharp. What it offers instead is space for something has ended, and that you are now living in the after.

There is a new-ish trend, amongst Tarot circles especially, to read the Death card (which Tarot decks all have) as a sign of new beginnings. The bite of the death card is swiftly softened and rebranded into a reading about rebirth. And while there is truth in that arc, there is also danger in skipping ahead. Because to rush past the rawness of loss is to abandon it, and to abandon a part of the one who is grieving: you.

Grief is not a failure to heal. It is the form that love takes when the object of that love is gone. It is real, holy work. And it may arrive not just in tears, but in confusion, numbness, rage, or bone-deep exhaustion. There is no correct way to mourn. There is only the willingness to face what has changed, to feel what needs feeling, and to name what is no longer here.

Rather than “rebirth” what this card offers is starker, but also much more sacred. This card may arrive in moments of rupture, endings, or quiet unravelings. It may accompany the death of an identity, role, hope, or a season of life. It asks nothing of you but this: to stay. To stay with what was, and what is, and to witness the silence. In Buddhist teachings, we are asked to remember that everything we love, we will lose. This is not a threat. It is an invitation to love more fully while we can, and to grieve honestly when we must.

Let Death be what it is: not a punishment, not a metaphor, but a threshold. And though you may not yet feel it, the soil of this ending is not barren. In time (when it is time) something living may find its way through the bones. Not as a sign that the grief has passed, but that it has been honored.