Change is Death

It always seemed to me a cheat that the Tarot for Death is really the Tarot for Change. Death is reduced to a metaphor, a symbol for the end of one job and the start of another, the end of singlehood and the start of marriage, or the end of marriage and the start of singlehood. Recently, I’ve realised it is more than a grandiose symbol.

In a big change, there is the feeling of death. You are cutting off a life you have carried with you for so long. No matter what you replace the loss with, you have lost something. No matter how indifferent you were to it, its absence weeps in you. You were fine with that old job and now it is gone, and you have lost some minor limb.

More directly, change is a reminder of death. Quite often, our day after day is day repeating day. Yesterday is the same as tomorrow. We live in an unexamined illusion of an eternal present, which, because it is the same, we feel — even if we would never say — that it must last forever.

Change breaks that repetition. Change reminds us our life was never progressing in a circle, but always on a line. Change, no matter good, no matter bad, no matter what, is a memory in the gut that we are progressing inexorably towards our end.