Death (XIII) is the 13th trump or Major Arcana card in most traditional Tarot decks. The Death card signals that one major phase in your life is ending, and a new one is going to start.
“For Life and Death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.” – Khalil Gibran
Helen Callanan is a death doula who established an organisation called Preparing the Way. A death doula is a companion, advocate and educator for the dying and their family through the process of death. They nurture and support the dying and their family in a practical and empathetic way with the ability to tailor their approach to each person’s needs.
Pragmatic Approaches to Death
Let’s get real! Denial does not protect any of us. No one gets off this planet alive and unless we head off first we inevitably face the deaths of those close to us. It makes complete sense to stop with the frightened stuff and be prepared. To be prepared is actually life affirming.
When my husband died in 2007, we didn’t use the traditional funeral parlour. It was news to me that you could have a funeral in the back yard or a park if you wanted to. Syd Peak and Daughter enabled us to have a ‘transformative’ funeral in the park opposite our home, of the kind that Natural Grace Funerals, Tender Funerals and Zenith Virago are now offering. Perhaps the most moving aspect of what we did at the time is that his biking community took his ashes, sewn into a toy bear, on the biking trip to Queensland that he had so wanted to do.
Making Descansos
In my experience it is the living, rather than the dead that need to find a way to RIP! After all, the dead are dead aren’t they? It is the living who have to manage to go on living!
All cultures have ways of dealing with and managing grief. I first learned about the concept of Descansos when I read Clarissa Pinkola Estes ‘Women Who Run With Wolves’. Estes describes how when you travel in Old Mexico, New Mexico, southern Colorado, Arizona, or parts of the South, you will see little white crosses by the roadside. These are descansos mark resting places and formally marking these resting places with crosses, memorabilia and flowers offers some solace to those left behind. The concept of marking resting places is not confined to the United States or Mexico. They may be found in Greece, Italy and many other countries, including Australia.
Over the years I have encouraged participants in my writing classes to address their losses by making Descansos in their journals or on a website. When I made a site after the death of my husband I was applying the concept of Descansos to mark the loss. Making Descansos is a wonderful way to honour all the big and little deaths, the endings, the transformative events that we have experienced.
Death Signalling the Need to Adapt
The Death card is the number 13 card of the Major Arcana. It’s astrologically associated with the sign of Scorpio, the sign representing “sex, death, and taxes.” Seeing the Death card in a reading is not a foreboding omen. It does not foretell the death of the person being read, or anyone else for that matter. Rather, it symbolizes the ending of a cycle and the transition into a new one.
Of course, faced with actual death we inevitably end one cycle and move into another. Unless we end one phase of our life, we cannot begin a new one. Children move out of home, we change jobs, relationships end, we move houses, states and countries.
The Northern Animal Tarot reminds us to look at nature and to learn from the cycles she goes through. Another option is to go online and learn about how different cultures deal with death and dying.
Pull out your journal and consider some of the following.
1. What things have changed in your life?
2. Faced with death, will you have any regrets about choices you have made?
3. In order to make the most out of life, is there something you feel you need to change?
4. Has something blocked you from making this change? What have you never done that you want to do before you die?
5. Is there something you need to walk away from now?
6. What are the barriers to making the changes you need in your life?
8. What makes you frightened of, or threatened by, change?
9. What will you lose if you make the changes that you want to make?
10. What support would help you to make these changes?
11. How do you see your life after making the changes that you need to make?
12. How can you help others to accept the changes that you have to make?
13. Is it time for you to put the old ways of thinking behind you; to finally free yourself from a past which no longer serves you?
Waltzing With Matilda's 