BY LISA MARIE BASILE
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”— Rumi
I’m always pulling the death card, or the death card continues to find me.
Throughout the years, it’s hunted me down. It finds me while I lounge in the dewy morning grass. It finds me in the shade of a witness tree. It wraps its cloak around me in the orange light of a pre-sleep candle. In grief, it asks me to sit with it, to climb upon that horse, to ride off into whatever comes next.
Ah, yes, I whisper. My dear friend.
The truth is, I used to fear the death card. It is so misunderstood. My heart would burst in my chest, palms sweaty. I knew it was coming; Not the death card, not death, not death, I’d whisper. Of course, any tarot reader will tell you, “Don’t worry, it’s not literal.”
But I’d had reason to fear it; In my life, I’ve lived a thousand iterations of myself; dying and being reborn. And it hurt every time. Full of thorns, full with lack. I’ve grieved so much my hair turned to silver when I was young. I’ve carried a hundred corpses in my sternum.
***
On September 11, 2002, I was in my first foster home in a new city, and I started the first day of my second go-around in tenth grade. I’d stayed back after a flurry of trauma and evictions and custody loss. On that day, we stood on the front lawn of the high school, and we saluted the flag. Everyone cried. I thought back to September 11 the year before. The smoke rising in the sky, the fighter jets over my house, leaving school and walking home alone. The way the skies over the Newark Airport, which our little house sat under, went silent. I’d been going into the city every weekend for months for a new boyfriend; the city had become my home.
But on the anniversary in 2002, the wind was strong and ominous and it cracked a tree limb straight off a tree and crushed a few kids sitting opposite me. I watched with my own eyes what happened next; we were rushed inside and helicopters came to take the injured away. And death.
September is a time of grief; for the nation, for my city, for my family, for the families of thousands, and for my younger self. A ribbon of sorrow attaches me to my past. It loops forward and backward, and I find my fingers sliding across its satiny fabric, playing a tug of war with my child-self. In an instant, I am transported to that lawn, to those years, to those wild grey skies, to the loss of everything I knew.
Weeks after the city lost thousands of its people, I was in there, in some bedroom somewhere on the Upper West Side. My then-boyfriend, the then-love of my life, sat behind me playing guitar. His friend — or someone, I can’t recall — pulled the Death card.
At the age of 16, you think literally. You think literally when death surrounds you. When endings are all you know and all you fear.
No, not again.
But I was growing. The world was growing. We were surviving.
***
Over time, the corpses have turned to gardens. Or at least I’ve learned to find the roses.
The endings have become beginnings; they’re the same language, yet they speak different dialects. The horse has galloped through bitter-cold nights, its feet raw and wounded, its heart and saddled back heavy with its burdens — and she has emerged. From behind the trees I stand watching her drink from fresh running water. She sleeps in the sunlight.
She remembers the pain, but she knows light.
That is the death card; the card of transformation, of night to morning, the path that had to be taken in order to find water again. This is the bounty of a life lived well and in agony and deeply; this is the shift.
The death card tells me not to resist the transformation. It tells me that no matter what heartache I am feeling, there is a way through it, even if I emerge differently. That the sea rushes in and goes back out.
The death card tells me that all suffering is inevitable, but that the wounds can leave us with more space to hold presence and gratitude and empathy — and even joy. For how do we know night without the day?
***
It’s September 16; I pulled the Death card again.
This time I feel its warmth; I feel its promise. I think how this month has always served me. September. A time of loss. A time of pain. A time of death. A time of school and education. A time of new homes. A time of growth. A time of coffee in sunlit classrooms. A time to grow up. A time when summer dies. A time when my first nonfiction book was published. A time of chilly mornings with chosen family. A time of reflection.
Lean into change, Death says. And I do.
My city is trying to survive a virus, and somewhere, in one of its little rooms, I am doing the same. My city is mourning and so am I. We all are. My country is trying to survive a monster, and I am doing what I can to make change.
My body is holding onto the grief and trauma of a deadly year. Our bodies pass by one another and nod hello.
The terror in me sees the terror in you.
But the death card reminds me that through loss and fear, and through pain and resistance, eventually the sky cracks open and floods us with light and hope. I have to believe this because I have been shown it. I am the physical embodiment of it. I am Scorpio. I am a girl standing.
It’s about making the choice to see it, to feel it, to be inhabited by it — in small doses, in soft ways, every day: A smile, a gesture of generosity, a prayer for someone you love. A morning ritual of light. A house bursting with music and open windows. A poem recited on the riverside.
***
This past weekend I spent a few days living in a cottage with a few dear friends. We made beautiful foods — honey and ricotta and apples. And we let the air in every morning. We sat quietly on wrought-iron benches framed by stalks of tall grass and wildflowers. We found the creatures and myths in the night sky.
I wouldn’t have chosen that beauty and those people and that goodness had I not experienced sadness or loss. Death tells me to embrace the shifts that make us who we are. Death tells me that we have to feel the hurt us so deeply that we become magnets to softness and delight.
Life is not fair. It’s not easy. It’s tragic and it’s overwhelming and it’s lonely, but all of the looming shadows give us an opportunity for change and growth.
Death tells me that we will survive — in some way, in some shape, in some iteration.