Death

Content warning for parent death. Just some breezy beach reading to pair with these dying days of summer.

I was with my father the night he died. My mother and I had just arrived in his room at the long-term care home where he had been living the last years of his life. Dad’s health had increasingly declined in his final months; he slipped in and out of comatose states towards the end and was less cognizant than usual when he was awake. He had been asleep for days when we arrived that evening early in March. The last days of winter were finally getting longer but it was around dinner time and already dark out. It was just the three of us and he didn’t stir as we entered the room; the only sound the rattle of his laboured breath and some background noise floating in from the TVs in the common area. As I arranged my chair next to his bed and Mom lifted his head to adjust his pillows, he opened his eyes as she laid him back. I think she must have said his name or a soft hello; I remember being distracted with taking off my coat and bag but then suddenly I was paying close attention to him. He looked at her for no longer than ten, maybe twenty seconds, and then closed his eyes once more. His rattling breath went silent.

I ran out of the room to get help, telling the first staff person I saw that my dad had stopped breathing. I was panicking and didn’t understand that something I had dreaded and avoided thinking about for so long was happening so suddenly; forgetting that agreements had been made for when this moment came to pass: that my dad would not spend any more time in the hospital he hated, that there would be no attempt to revive him or to prolong the end of his life any further. That when this time finally came, the only choice we’d have would be to let him go.

I still think about that moment when he opened his eyes to look at my mom one more time, how quiet the room was without his breathing for the few moments before I ran out. I remember later on, Mom said she felt that he really saw her. He wasn’t looking through her, lost in a waking haze from the coma and the dementia. I think about the timing of it, almost as though he knew we were on our way and was waiting for us to arrive. My siblings were all working, but they had been there to sit with him in those final few days and I was the only one who hadn’t been able to visit until that night for silly reasons I can’t even remember. I was often selfish and dreaded having to see my ailing father in his final “home”, where not one person wanted to be and the walls were a sickly yellow-cream like the pages of a book forgotten in a dusty windowsill. It feels significant to me that I avoided this place and the truth of my father dying as much as possible and yet I was there to witness his final breath in the end anyway.

The death of my father is the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced. It impacted me in ways I couldn’t predict and that I am still learning to understand to this day, years later. I don’t believe that everything has a divine purpose or that experiencing one loss of a loved one can ever prepare us for the loss of others to follow, but I do have a strong Sagittarius belief in learning everything I can from my experiences in order to evolve and know the world and people around me on a deeper level. What I’ve learned from death so far – in all its forms, not just the physical – is that we can’t avoid its inevitability or control the uncontrollable, and doing so will only compound our pain and grief; that this will poison us over time if we don’t learn to see that avoidance and grasp for control for what it truly is: a refusal to let go of what we think we know and accept instead what is, to learn how to adapt and live in the space that death leaves behind.

The Death card comes not at the end of the Major Arcana, but in between The Hanged Man and Temperance. If you look at the Major Arcana as the journey of one character, Death falls a bit more than half-way through. It is not the denouement of the story, but an essential, transformative part of it. The Hanged Man exists in a liminal state, the threshold in which we are suspended between what was and what is as the future moves relentlessly towards us. When Death crosses our path, it brings release from that suspension and transformation along with it. It is a painful and disorienting process; we don’t know what will come next, what will move into the space we make when we let go of the old, the familiar. We might be afraid to lose the love of the people who have passed; we might not want to be left or be the one to leave people behind. We mourn the version of our lives and selves that we’ll never be again; but when we hold so tight to the known, the familiar, the limitation that imposes on us becomes unbearable and untenable. Trying to cling to what was becomes as painful as it is frightening to let death and grief break our hold, break us open to whatever comes next.

Temperance follows Death in the deck, and it is what I eventually found to be true in my life as well. Even as I mourned my father, I felt my grief break me open and in the space that followed, I found more love than I ever realized I held: for my family as we mourned together, for the friends who checked in on me and supported me when I needed them, even when I sometimes didn’t know how to ask. I found myself made softer by the waves of grief and love that washed over me in the following months and years. I felt grateful to have loved and been loved by a father whose loss could inspire such grief. It seemed to me that this was the trade off for getting to feel love so deeply, and those emotional highs and lows are better than any previous attempts to numb myself from feeling anything at all. Temperance signifies healing; a need for balance and patience in one’s life, for stepping back and assessing where we are spending our energy and how we might better direct it. Death made my priorities and boundaries so much clearer once the waves of grief spaced out a bit and I could catch my breath: I didn’t want to waste any more time on people who wasted mine, when those who matter most will one day be gone. I didn’t want to spend my life not writing because I was scared of trying something I might fail at. I didn’t want to stay in a city only because it was more comfortable than leaving. Witnessing death illuminated how much I wanted to start living with intent and purpose before it was too late.

There’s no way for me to really know if my dad knew we were going to visit that night, if he sensed it on some innate, cosmic level. I’ll never know for sure if he had any awareness of what was happening. I used to think it was the universe or his way of teaching me a final lesson about running from my fears, but that was self-centred “main character” nonsense. Maybe he was waiting for one last goodbye before letting go and slipping into death’s wake, letting it carry him wherever that leads: another life, star dust, the Void. I like to comfort myself with the idea that souls are energy and if energy can only be transformed, not destroyed, that might mean he still exists in some form and he can feel how much he is loved and missed.

But I don’t know if any of that is true and I probably never will. There’s nothing like witnessing death to remind us how little we know about anything; to put our minuscule existence (and all of our doubts, insecurities, fears) in perspective against the incomprehensible stretch of time and space. Maybe life is all just random moments of pain, grief, and horror interspersed with pleasure, love, and joy and trying to decipher meaning from any of this is a fool’s errand. To paraphrase the bathroom graffiti I happened upon earlier this evening, only death is certain. Once you come to grips with the cosmic horror of that, there’s freedom in remembering that none of us matter in the grand scheme of collective existence, as there is power in knowing we can give our own individual existence meaning if we want. I think holding on to whatever meaning we make out of all this, or even just the perpetual act of seeking it, fills the space left behind when death inevitably comes to break us open once again.