On a winters day, we are subject to bare trees, dark days, and frozen nights. In San Francisco though, the magnolia trees are starting to bloom. The rest of the world drums on about how awful January is. How it just won’t end. I love January. It is a fresh start. The end of one year has passed, and the beginning of the new year promises hope as the days get longer everyday.

Yesterday morning I pulled the death card as the general feel of the day. At dinner with a friend, I noticed he had a Marseille deck of tarot cards. Once more, I picked up the deck, and asked what I could expect this year. I pulled the death card once more. He asked what it meant. I explained how it is the end of one cycle making way for something new. Kind of appropriate as I say goodbye to another year while starting my next trip around the sun.

Death comes in the natural cycle for all of us. Just as autumn comes every year, the leaves change, and inevitably with winter they fall to the ground leaving the branches bare for a new state of welcoming a breath of fresh air in the spring for newly budding leaves. It is one door closing, so another door can open in the tarot sense. It doesn’t mean that you are actually going to die.

This morning, I started to think about how taboo the topic of death is in America. We live in a save, save, save culture. We hate talking about death. Most of us in America would rather chew our arm off than talk about the fact that we are mere mortals, while full well knowing that we all have an expiration date. Being born is widely accepted in comparison to dying. The innocence of a child. The thought of what could be. The many positive examples of the paths they may take. In general, people gather around new life and celebrate. After all, clinically speaking there is only one way to be born. We know what happens after we are born.

Yet, when it comes to death we are stumped on what comes next. We are scared. I have seen multiple cases as a nurse working in trauma, emergency, and general medicine where people meet a slow or sometimes rapid death with feelings of fear and denial. It can be traumatic for some because it was never talked about. It is the unknown. When death greets them, they aren’t ready.

Many of us are left with the question of what happens after we die? It can range from everything turning black. Lights out. The eternal end resulting in nothingness. We can go to heaven, or we go to hell. We can get stuck in purgatory as prisoners forever. We can move on to another life. Maybe we reach nirvana without being spun back into samsara to try and try again to learn those life lessons. Or perhaps we just sign up for another go at this thing called life.

Many philosophers like Plato, Socrates, and Pythagoras believed in metempsychosis (the souls rebirth and migration). Zhuangzi, from a Taoist perspective tells us that dying is just a state of matter transforming from to the next, much like the stages of our lives. Moving on in reincarnation. There are so many religions, beliefs, and philosophies in support of reincarnation that it is hard to debunk this idea. However, each to their own as this is a personal belief and one size doesn’t fit all. In the end, I suppose we will find out when we die.

Alan Watts talks about how we never question going to sleep. We aren’t afraid of it. Yet one day, we are all born and we wake up. There is no sense in being scared of the future, or speculating what will or will not happen. It may be easier to just trust the cycles. Just like everything is born, everything dies.

In a metaphorical sense, a part of us often dies to let something new enter. It could be a job you say goodbye to that doesn’t fit your work/life balance. It could be saying goodbye to one place and moving to a new place that fits your lifestyle better. An ending to a bad habit that is taking a toll on our health. Ending a friendship that isn’t good for us, or saying goodbye to a love partnership that has run it’s course. No matter what it is, letting something die to close one door, will inevitably open another.

Looking at a bookshelf in a Boston hotel, I read the titles: Keepers of the Faith, and The Master of the Magicians. In a sense we are all the masters of our lives, and the magicians of how we perceive matters. Maybe this is what it means in a sense to keep the faith. To see death whether it is physical, philosophical, or metaphorical and to welcome in the darkness as an opportunity to be open for the light of something new.

-Keri

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