“Please, not the death card,” I whispered as my tarot reader shuffled the deck for my very first tarot reading. I watched in disbelief as he dealt the first card and placed it on the table. There it was, the card of death, a haunting illustration of a white rose held by a skeletal hand – presumably that of the Grim Reaper.
“Am I going to die?” I asked frantically.
Unfazed by my slight panic, my reader explained that the death card did not represent literal death, but a radical transformation, a kind of uprooting. Death, combined with the next two cards, Force and The Hermit, meant an imminent solo journey. That’s when he kicked off the kicker, a prophecy that something might, in fact, be dying: my relationship. It was love reading, after all.
Sometimes you don’t need someone to cheat, lie, or walk thousands of miles away to realize that the future you envision no longer includes them.
What I couldn’t admit to my reader at the time was that I already had a nagging feeling that my relationship with my longtime boyfriend was on rocky ground. It wasn’t something I could articulate. There were no big fights. There were no third parties involved. There just wasn’t a good enough reason to break up. Maybe the honeymoon phase has died out, I thought. But at 26, after half a decade of dating, I was still unsure whether I saw myself marrying her. And like the cards, that wasn’t a good sign.
Don’t get me wrong, my boyfriend and I had a great run. We took classes together in college, but didn’t date until after graduation. We were both in love after our first kiss. He surprised me with soup whenever I was sick and bouquets of long-stemmed red roses for no reason. He was my best friend and confidant. The first time he told me he loved me is, to this day, one of the most romantic gestures anyone has ever done for me. Like a scene straight out of a movie, he planned an elaborate surprise with a trip out of town and me walking into a room filled with candles and rose petals.
But roses fade, and so does love.
I often tried to ignore my uncertainty. Swapping all my friends getting married, dreading getting back into the dating pool and swiping right culture, and having little faith in my intuition didn’t help. But I knew it no longer worked for me. Sometimes you don’t need someone to cheat, lie, or walk thousands of miles away to realize that the future you envision no longer includes them.
I’m not particularly superstitious, but sometimes I think my tarot reading foreshadowed the end of my relationship, a little glimpse to soften the blow. But above all, I think it gave me the courage to end it. It forced me to recognize where I was mentally and if being alone, like The Hermit, was something I needed to experience.
We broke up a few months later. Although I wish him well, and still wish him well three years later, I don’t regret ending this relationship. As beautiful as our beginnings were, our relationship had run its course. It was my own withered rose, plucked by Death’s bony fingers. I just needed tarot cards to give me a boost.