Death-Card Stalker: Walking with Grief & the Grim Reaper
By Annar Veröld
I can’t stop pulling the Death card, and I’m exhausted at the thought of what accepting its medicine entails. What more is there to lose? Clogging the drain, my hair. At the graveyard, my late friend Joe. All my remaining friendships, distant. Maybe it’s I who am untethered, afloat in the cosmos, devoid of blood and motion in my cells. I haven’t anything left to surrender.
***
How many times do you pull the same card before it makes itself an important fixture of your altar?
My altar now holds a photo of Joe, a white quartz gifted by my friend Claire, and now — finally — the Death card. It is Leonora Carrington’s Death — a grinning skeleton nonchalantly moving through a field with a scythe in hand. Why is it grinning? Doesn’t it know that we are miserable? Does it relish in our agony? Is there joy somewhere in this medicine? Surely, putting the Death card on display will appease the deck and my overbearing ancestors.
The Death Card from the Leonora Carrington Tarot deck.
I hold the Death Card in my hands, and I think about the skeletons lying beneath the headstones at the cemetery. Are the crevices between their joints covered in dirt? Are the worms and beetles doing their work?
I wonder about Joe’s skeleton and the metal pins in his leg that set off the metal detectors at the airport, and I feel ashamed of my curiosity. I am so far from enjoying a ghost story, so far from eating the rib of an animal and not being reminded it was once coated in flesh and fur, that blood pulsed through its body. Maybe a little idiot loved that animal, and now that little idiot’s entire life is falling apart, and to add to this little idiot’s living terror, she’s constantly pulling the Death card from every Tarot deck.
***
I’m unsure where the expectation originated — that, at the year mark, the grief that consumed me would dissipate like the mist of a cheap perfume — but I felt my patience and the patience of those around me rapidly waning the closer we came to the anniversary of Joe’s death.
To my collection of anxieties, I acquired a new one when I saw a friend’s eyes glaze over after they asked me how I was doing and I talked about Joe. I could see myself, outside myself, and it felt glaringly obvious: I am annoying. But I could not stop. In my grief, I felt like I’d unspooled and discovered there’s nothing at the core of me — not joy, not talent, not light.
***
For the first time in a very long time, someone asked me (okay, it was my therapist), “Well, what do you want?” And I truly didn’t know what I meant by this at the time, but I responded, “Do I sound like a witch if I say youth?”
In the months that followed, I thought about this answer again and again — youth. And now I’d add: “Not youth, like wrinkle-free. But youth, like enthusiasm. Youth, like joy.” I want to be happy for others. I want to be happy for myself. I want to see the world move forward and not feel left behind. I can feel the bitterness of grief soften in my body when I say it out loud.
Bitterness is unbecoming and foreign to my natural disposition, but it grew alongside my grief as I watched the world move on. I took each moment as it came: the first sunset without Joe. The first Christmas. A million brutal firsts. But when two new bookstores opened in my neighborhood this summer, it felt like too much. I couldn’t stop thinking about bones, and then the bones of these buildings — one replacing our beloved neighborhood post office, the other replacing Malvern Books (a bookstore Joe built).
On the patio of one of these new bookstores, I sat down to read Mary Ruefle’s collection of essays Madness, Rack, and Honey. In her essay, “On Beginnings,” Ruefle writes, “In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings.” This is such a simple statement, but it brought me a lot of comfort. I thought about the Death card. I thought less about bones and more about sprouts of grass and blooming flowers. With all these endings, perhaps somewhere there is a beginning for me that maybe isn’t so awful.
***
Weeks later, I pulled Death again — but this time from Uusi’s Pagan Otherworlds Deck. Now this is a Death card I can get behind! A skeleton draped in a silky black cloak, a stole of arrows as armor, their scythe swinging high. To add to his man-on-a-mission energy, he’s even stepping on a woman’s head (awesome!?). This Death is on a killing spree, fed up, and I am inspired.
The Death card from the Pagan Otherworlds Tarot deck by Uusi.
One of the things about the passing of a loved one is that sometimes you are gifted items from their home that they no longer need and no one else wants — a true Death card metaphor, when I really think about it!— and after Joe’s passing, I ended up with his teaching copy of The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. The medicine of the Death card haunting me, I read the poem “Death.”
Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times he rose again.
A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Supersession of breath;
He knows death to the bone—
Man has created death.
“Many times he died, many times he rose again.” Okay, Death, I’m listening. I reframe my thoughts about the Death card. Mushrooms. Fertilization. Decomposition. I’m impatient, but listening and wanting.
***
Joe’s been dead for exactly a year, and considering the previous sentence I wrote (impatient but listening), you might presume I would say he rose again, but I can assure you he has not. At least I can say the word “dead” now, which I couldn’t for the longest time without it feeling hostile and sharp, cold and cruel.
***
I dream of visiting Joe, and in these dreams I am small, a child even.
The Death card from The Modern Witch Tarot.
In my waking life, my therapist suggests that I embrace my child self. I figured that if child me is showing up in my dreams, listening to her might be pivotal in healing my unmanageable grief. But how do you listen to your child self? It felt like hunting a shadow.
I looked through childhood photos. I ate my favorite childhood fruits. I revisited my favorite poems and songs. I gave myself more structure with my meals and bedtime routines. I exhausted my body. I let curiosity know no bounds. I pared my daily life down to what my child self felt nurtured by: music, friendship, poetry, movement, blueberries.
I spent over a year not knowing what I wanted because I was so blinded by grief. But I suppose there’s something about paring down your inner life, your social life, and your material life that helps you decide between what you want, what you don’t want, and what just is.
I hadn’t recognized any agency for myself or felt strongly about anything in a long time, but when I came across my french horn while weeding out my closet, I felt adamant — it’s the one object in my home I’d like to hold on to for the rest of my life. I hadn’t been part of an orchestra in almost a decade, but I suddenly remembered how important it was for my personal development after having been a devoted musician almost every single day for thirteen years.
After expressing curiosity about what music looks like in adulthood, my friend Kirsty invited me to join her in our community orchestra, and I returned to joy (and wrong notes!), to the cool feeling of brass, to rhythm, to motion, to the delightful personality stereotypes of each section, to playing a requiem with a 100-piece band and hoping Joe could hear it wherever he was and know it was for him.
I didn’t set out to play music with Joe in mind, but I do feel closer to him when I’m making noise that floats upwards towards the sky, playing the sad notes that are otherwise trapped in my body, and giving Joe (a famously generous patron of the arts) a gift I know he would have loved.
***
I started this musing without any clue as to how it would end, only a desperate desire that I’d move my way through grief a bit more, that maybe I’d learn something new, that life would give in and I’d catch a break. I spent months searching for the edges of Death, for some resolution to my grief and the destruction it has done.
The Death card from The Fyodor Pavlov Tarot.
Then, one night, it struck.
Claire and I had an evening of misadventures, then found our way to a poetry reading at the new bookstore that was formerly Malvern Books. The reading was so lukewarm that I could sense the heat of my former self beside me. I saw a decade of my phantom-self trapeze about a room where I had built a life, and part of my life’s work as a bookseller, community-builder, and artist.
But I also became aware of my glaring desire for acceptance and love and connection, and the not-so-kind ways I tore myself down to fit in. This all suddenly became obvious to me in a way it hadn’t been before. I had been an inauthentic self, padding the blows of insecurity by bending over backwards to please, to laugh at jokes I maybe didn’t understand, to make small talk I wasn’t interested in having. I realized I no longer had much tolerance for sacrificing a moment of my life any longer and hadn’t the energy to even pretend.
Later that night, upside down on my couch, I told my husband, “I don’t think I enjoyed that at all,” to which he responded, “Well, you’re a completely different person now.”
Grief is a beast, and I look back now at how I resisted, in every way, the terribly uncomfortable process of change, surrender, and letting go. There was this twisted urge to leave everything as it was before Joe passed. I wanted Joe to recognize me forever, for him to find me where he left me, and I wanted everything to be as great as it almost was.
I still grieve and miss my late friend, but I’m rebuilding my life without him by doing little things each day that bring me joy — like practicing my horn with my friend Kirsty, going down the rabbit hole reading about my favorite occult artists, or jostling my body on the patio to let out all the big feelings. The grief isn’t getting any smaller, but I’m getting a little bigger with each passing day, and now I have space to hold my grief and my newfound curiosity — one certainly influencing the other as the sun continues to rise and set.
Can I be a completely different person now and trust that Joe will recognize me in the Otherworld someday, and even, perhaps, be proud of me? I glance over at the altar and look at my new Tarot haunt: The Fool — beneath a lamp where Death used to sit.
The Death cards shown in this post come from the following Tarot decks, in order of appearance — Leonora Carrington’s Tarot deck, the Pagan Otherworlds deck by Uusi, the Modern Witch Tarot, and the Fyodor Pavlov Tarot deck.
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about Annar Veröld
Annar Veröld is a Honduran-American writer and filmmaker living in Austin. She serves as managing editor for Host Publications, and co-hosts the literary podcast “The Host Dispatch.”