Nobody Sends Flowers

The card has a name, and a striking number of decks published since the seventies will not use it. They call it Transformation. They call it Rebirth. It is meant kindly. It is also the plainest available proof that we cannot look at the thing straight on, and it means the card has already done its work before you have turned it over. Ours keeps the name. Death, and underneath it Mokṣa — liberation, release.

Look at ours anyway, because it is not a picture about dying. There is one figure in it, and she is the only one in the deck who has already finished.

She stands the full height of the frame in a black robe with a gold-worked stole running to the ground, and the ground behind her is gold leaf. That is not decoration. Gold ground is the oldest convention we have for a thing a culture has agreed deserves ceremony — you lay gold behind saints, behind icons, behind whatever has been given a form of words. And on her left the world is in summer: dark firs, white and yellow roses in full bloom, the whole side alive. On her right the same trees stand bare and white, every branch furred with frost. Not before and after. Both, at once, in one frame, with nothing between them but her.

And held against the ribs, where the heart would be if she still had one, a single white rose.

That is the teaching, and it has almost nothing to do with mortality.

The gold is the part to stay with. Gold ground is liturgy — it is what we put behind the deaths we have already agreed to honour. There is a form of words for those, and a building to say them in, and people who will come and stand at the back. That is not a small thing. It is most of what religion is for.

Which is the question the card is actually asking, and it is not are you afraid to die. It is: which of your deaths has no gold behind it?

In the last essay I left a woman at a kitchen table on the first quiet evening, listening for something that had stopped happening. I want to go back and sit with her, because something died in that kitchen and nobody in her life will say so.

Her husband stopped drinking. That is a death and everyone knows it. It has a name and a room and a circle of chairs and a form of words, and on the anniversary there will be a cake with a candle and people will clap. Someone built a liturgy for that death, at considerable cost, and it works.

But there was a second one in the same house on the same evening, and it was hers. For fifteen years she had been somebody very specific. She was the one who could read an entire evening from the sound of keys being set down on a table. She knew where to look, and what the silences meant, and how to get three children out of a room without any of them understanding they were being moved. She was extraordinarily good at it. It was the most competent she has ever been at anything in her life.

And the day he stopped, that woman had no work. Not less work. None. The single most developed capacity she possessed became instantly and permanently useless — useless in the best possible way, which is exactly the part that makes it impossible to say out loud. You cannot stand up in a kitchen where a man has just saved his own life and grieve the loss of your job. So she does not grieve it. She says she is relieved, and she is relieved, and both things are true and only one of them is permitted.

Nobody sends flowers to a watchman. There is no anniversary for putting down the listening. No cake, no circle of chairs, no form of words at all. And a death with no liturgy does not stay dead. It goes underground, and it goes on working.

That is the frost side of the card, and it is worth being precise about it, because a white winter half is usually read as the dead half and it is not dead. Look at what is actually drawn there. The trees are whole. Every branch is still on them, holding its exact shape under the ice. Nothing has been removed. It has only been stopped. That is what a loss does when you have not been given permission to have it — it does not leave. It winters. And it stands in the same frame as the summer, at the same moment, which is precisely what she cannot say at the table: that both sides of the picture are true right now.

Pierre Janet, whose lectures Jung travelled to Paris to attend in 1902, had a word for a piece of experience that comes loose and carries on functioning by itself, out of contact with the rest: désagrégation. Our word dissociation comes down from his. Janet thought the remedy was to press the loose piece back into the whole. Jung learned it from him and then spent a career diverging from him, on the grounds that the psyche is natively plural and a split-off part does not want to be dissolved. It wants to be addressed.

The difference matters at that table, because force will not work there. She cannot be reasoned out of fifteen years. Telling her the emergency is over is information, and information was never her problem — she knew about the drinking years before anyone believed her, and she knows about the sobriety now. Knowing was never the difficulty. The difficulty is that a competent, vigilant, load-bearing person is standing in her own kitchen with nothing to carry, and no one has acknowledged that she has been made redundant by good news.

You do not cut the frozen half down. You wait with it, and you call it by its name, and it comes back on its own schedule, which is not yours.

So look at the rose, because it is the only thing in the picture that anybody is doing.

Nobody hands it to her. There is no one else in the card — no mourner, no bishop, no child at the hooves, not one witness in the entire frame. She is holding it herself. The one figure nobody on earth would think to send flowers to has gone and found one, and is carrying it against her own ribs, and is not showing it to anyone.

That is not a rescue and it is not a repair. It is regard — the willingness to look directly at what has arrived and to bring it something anyway. It requires no theology, no vocabulary, and no idea what one is doing. It is available on a Tuesday, in a kitchen.

There are spent petals on the ground at her hem, gold ones, already fallen. Flowers that came and went and were not remarked on by anybody. Notice that she is not looking down at them, and notice that she has not put her own rose down either.

If you are the one at that table, here is the thing, and I would say it quietly. You are not required to be glad. You are not required to have a word for it. You are only required to admit that she existed — the one who listened at the door, who was good at it, who held a house upright for fifteen years and has just been laid off without notice by the best thing that ever happened to her family. She has earned the honest sentence. She was necessary, and now she is not, and that is a loss occurring in the middle of a rescue.

Nobody sends flowers for that one. So you will have to hold one yourself. Our card has been standing there the whole time showing you how: summer on one side, frost on the other, both of them true at once, and a white rose in her own two hands with nobody watching.