“Death and life go hand in hand, as gentle and constant companions. The circle of life and death, of beginnings and endings, is in everything we do. We have seasons, just as the beautiful earth around us does. Everything dies and my father was no exception, just as my mother before him.
But there is beauty here. Life is supported and continues, the wheel of time keeps turning. Wherever there appears to be an ending, a beginning is already entwined.”
The text above is part of the eulogy I wrote for my father, which I delivered four months ago at his funeral. This last year was a year of Death for me. It was a year of change. The journey from knowing his death was inevitable to settling into the quiet navigation of my own grief has taken most of the year. The change in him was obvious - he changed from a man smoking a cigar on his front porch to ash in a wooden box buried beneath a cherry tree. The change in him was also subtle - he changed from a love I could touch into a love I can only feel. And of course part of him never changed. He was the love of my life. And so he remains.
The artwork in my tarot decks is based on my firm belief that death is a change rather than an end. A candle, a butterfly, mushrooms. These were all images I drew because they matched how I feel about dying… that it comes with growth and change and its own kind of transformative energy. That it is not something to fear or ignore, but something to expect, respect, and learn from.
Grieving in winter has been particularly clarifying for me, with bare branches and cold wind and long nights often making a difficult time seem even harder. But winter has always been my favourite time of year, and our long love-affair means I can feel deeply comforted by those very same things. The branches aren’t actually bare, for instance. A slow, quiet, intimate look at almost any leafless tree will show you buds in abundance. Growth is there, it is just quiet and unassuming. The cold wind clears landscapes to make space for saplings, as it bends and strengthens tree trunks. The long nights encourage rest we are so often conditioned to resist. They give us space to turn inward, to reflect, and to embrace comforts. The comfort, wisdom, rest, and peace I find in nature is never ending. She has held my hand, these last few difficult months.
All the photos posted here were taken on cold wet days that, in a different time of my life, I'd have considered bad weather. Age and nature have softened me and given me new perspective, and I see beauty here now. Indeed, I go out of my way to look for it.
Before he died, my father asked me about my book. I know he’d wanted to hold a book that I’d written before he died, and he knew I’d been working on one of them. As it turns out, the book he knew about was about death and grief. It was unfinished in a way I couldn’t quite figure out though, and remained that way for quite some time… until I realised that his death belonged in it. That his death was the final stop in its journey. And so this book will be coming to life this year somehow. As shown in the image below, it is an unusual, hand written, illustration-heavy graphic novel of a book. Also shown is the start of a new tarot deck I’m working on which I’m initially calling A Grieving Tarot. It will come with a larger book in which I explain how the energy of these cards feel to me through this lens of loss.
My losses inform my growth. There is no life without decay. And so my creativity continues… as does my love, my life, the world around me. There are no ends here.
I will be writing more this year, and I will begin sharing more of it here. But for now, I am tired and I am taking my rest very seriously. So as I retreat back into a few more quiet days during the holiday season, I’ll leave you with these final words from my father’s eulogy. Be well, whoever and wherever you are.
“And then we will carry on, because that is what we do. That is how this works. We will be strong, we will be soft, and we will carry him with us always. We will keep loving him, and he will keep loving us. This isn’t an end, because there is no such thing.”