Death - Tyldwick

Death

What I notice in the Death card:

a mirror with the image of a skeleton holding a sickle

clock

a pump organ

two urns on top of the organ

Just as the Fool stepped out of the looking glass from one reality to another to begin his life, here something or someone passes back through again to the other side. The skeleton with his sickle becomes a reaper, cutting down what had once been growing and alive.

The clock above the mirror indicates that, at least on this side of the mirror, time eventually comes to an end. As the writer of Ecclesiastes put it, "There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot..."

The pump organ was an organ popular in small churches and homes in the 19th century. It produces sound when the brass reeds inside are vibrated by escaping air as the bellows is pumped by the foot pedal. The reeds are activated by different stoppers (the knobs), and their function is to add a better sound quality. While the inner workings are fairly simple, learning to play the organ requires some work. In the same way an ending might be sudden and straightforward, but it may take time and work to process it (and deep breathing might help too). Whether an actual or metaphorical death, if we lose something we love, we will need to work through Kubler-Ross' stages of grief if we are to move on with our lives: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.

The two urns on the top of the organ are the ashes of past endings. Why keep the past around? If I was in an awful marriage and finally got divorced, I might want to remember what I was attracted to in that person and avoid it in my next relationship. Those ashes can help me not make the same mistakes twice.