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Last Monday (at the Mars-Pluto conjunction), my cousin\u2019s wife\u2019s young sister was murdered by her boyfriend- who then suicided. Mid-week, we heard sad news of Thich Nhat Hanh’s<\/a> precarious health. Saturday, my maternal grandmother died. \u00a0Though I didn\u2019t know my cousin-in-law\u2019s sister, and since their move to the West Coast, from Ohio, we\u2019re still just getting to know her, my heart trembled with horror. Overnight, jokes about violence have become distasteful. A picture of Annie Oakley on my Facebook feed with the supposed quote, \u201cI ain\u2019t afraid to love a man. I ain\u2019t afraid to shoot him, either.\u201d I would\u2019ve found this funny, previously. Death changes things.<\/span><\/p>\n My grandma\u2019s death, more immediate to me, has thrust me into an alternate universe of not feeling quite myself: of weepy ambition-lessness and memories surfacing that I\u2019d forgotten, or buried.\u00a0 My mother died in \u201998, and my grandmother\u2019s passing has re-confirmed this for me. Grieving is not linear, nor connected to just one person. It\u2019s more like a scatter plot graph, with variables that exist outside our control jolting us into correlations we might not have otherwise made. Ultimate understanding may exceed our grasp, but the hero\u2019s journey into the underworld is one all of us take. My grandmother made this journey her life’s work. A twelfth house Leo Sun who mid-wived her husband, mother, daughter-in-law and two of her daughters to Death’s door, my grandmother made this journey many times that toward the end, her life began to be defined by her losses.\u00a0 It was frustrating, at times, hearing her dwell on the past when the vibrant aliveness of life and all her great-grandbabies surrounded her, yet amidst all the regret, longing and looking backwards she became a very spiritual person. She had this written in her address book, (which one of my cousins shared with us by text message over the weekend): \u201cSeashells remind us that every passing life leaves something beautiful behind.\u201d She had spent enough time with Death, and the bones of the living sea, to know.<\/p>\n Saturn is breathing its final gasp in the end degrees of Scorpio (Saturn enters Sagittarius on 12\/23*), and he wants to make sure we know that he knows that we know.<\/strong> Death and endings loom large, and seems to be everywhere right now. Despite being final, death doesn\u2019t always bring closure, and as often brings more questions. We don\u2019t know why something senseless happens. We don\u2019t always get closure with the ones we love, dead or living, and we don\u2019t get to choose when or how endings occur. Scorpio is a no-man\u2019s land of privacy, and complexity. Since Saturn has entered Scorpio, our feelings, our life, has deepened, but it\u2019s also become less straightforward. We\u2019ve been asked to confront death, loss, tragedy and our own inevitable endings with a level of maturity and level-headed common sense (Saturn). And it still hurts. As Brittany Maynard, the woman who recently took her inevitable death into her own hands, said matter-of-factly, \u201cI don\u2019t want to die. I am dying.\u201d<\/p>\n On Tuesday, the Sun meets Saturn in Scorpio for the last time, not to join again for another 28 years. I won\u2019t be sorry to see Saturn leave Scorpio, but I\u2019m not going to forget what it brought us: intimacy with our interior lives and inner workings, the necessity of looking at how we think about death, endings and loss, and emotional honesty: because let\u2019s face it, no matter how much we want it to be otherwise, sometimes there isn\u2019t a silver lining to be found.<\/strong>\u00a0There is not always a perky pollyanna version of events for every life setback; and for many, the only door opening when one closes is the one that’s hitting you on the backside on the way out. So I\u2019m ready, for both the Sun, then Saturn, to enter Sagittarius– ready for more philosophical journeys of mind, for the big questions of our time to be addressed and discussed. While Scorpio leaves us with the kind of wisdom we can only acquire through loss of life, Sagittarius re-inspires hope in it.<\/p>\n *save a retrograde period 6\/17-9\/17\/15, when Saturn revisits Scorpio<\/p>\n<\/p>\n