So, there’s the facts. I want to write about all the spiritual lessons my mom taught me, but I don’t know how. I’m not sure I’m ready. She believed in God, but she didn’t believe God controlled everything. She experienced God as a loving presence guiding you, crying with you during dark times and cheering you on during good times.
I want to talk about how brave she was, even though in the months before her passing she wrote me a note (because this disease took away her ability to speak) about how it’s actually kind of annoying when people say someone going through a terrible illness is brave. But there’s no other way to say it, she WAS brave. She was scared, but she kept going. She tried to keep life as normal as possible for as long as possible.
And I want to convey the empathy she had for all of humanity even as she went through something so devastating. As the crisis continued in Gaza, she donated to Doctors Without Borders and told me how lucky she felt compared to how much others are suffering.
I want to talk about what an honor it was to spend so much time with her these past few months, but also how it was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Don’t know how to describe that either, though.
I don’t have the words for any of this. I’m still processing. I’ll probably still be processing for months, years, the rest of my life – however long that may be. That’s something this experience reminded me of – none of us know how long we have.
I want to tell you that I miss writing about tarot, and I’ll be doing that again soon. Throughout this massive life event, I have continued to turn to tarot. Even when I’m not physically pulling cards, I am connecting them to my inner and outer life. And that, for me, has always been one of the greatest appeals of tarot: it gives us something to contextualize our personal lived experiences within the greater web of existence.
I’m not sure what else to say. Thank you for being here and I’ll talk to you again before long.
”We make it comfortable and safe when we assure ourselves that Death means a wonderful liberation of our best qualities. Death does come easily to the person who truly has opened the heart. But most of us have not gone through these deep experiences of release and connection. And while death liberates, it also frightens.
To fully open the heart, we must embrace death – not as an idea but as an experience. …We cannot embrace Death only to get the good stuff afterward. We must love Death and join with it.” -Rachel Pollack, Forest of Souls
“And if Death spoke: ‘I am the one with whom you share your life – if you refuse this, you will not be living in the truth. I make destruction a process of extreme splendor. I wait for life to display its most supreme beauty, that is when I appear to eliminate it with the same beauty. What immeasurable joy! My destruction opens the way to creation.” – Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of Tarot
“All loss needs to be honored through engagement with grief. Besides sadness, there can be anger, shock, disappointment, regret, confusion, numbness, guilt, blame, yearning, gratitude…these can shift from minute to minute. We can have multiple conflicting feelings at the same time as we attempt to process everything that a loss encompasses.” – Dreya Blume, Tarot for Transformation
“Death is always in the second act of the story, not the last. It is not even the final trump in the second act.” -Robert M Place