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To Every Thing There Is A Season

As a middle-aged man - teetering treacherously on the brink of 50 - I'd suddenly found myself in that age group where one is suddenly surrounded by friends, acquaintances, and coworkers that are experiencing the initiatory loss of their parents. Becoming a member of this unsolicited fraternity of grief, I would soon discover that no matter how much time one has to emotionally prepare for the death of a parent, it's never enough time. I would also discover that one can never wholly understand the loss of a parent, until one has gone through the experience.

In particular... when it comes to your mother, whether you be man or woman, Mom was literally the first love of your life. Whether this first love affair went relatively well and you're someone who was fortunate enough to have had what D.W. Winnicott called a "good enough mother" or whether it went rather badly and your mother was too emotionally damaged to provide you with adequate healthy emotional nurturing - Mom was the first love of your life. As such... there's always going to be a hole left in your heart when she passes on.

Ages and Stages
A few years ago, as an astrologer, I'd spent most of one particular summer worried about my aging mother’s health. Mom had always been fiercely independent, raising me and my sister on her own, but she was now getting up in years. For the first time I could no longer deny the slow but sure progression of her becoming physically more feeble. With my father having died before I was born, the idea of losing my mother had always seemed doubly disturbing.

I hadn't been aware of any particular new medical concerns, but during that summer my birth chart had shown certain strong indicators that seemed to mirror potential physical and/or emotional distress having to do with my mother.

According to one tradition within the Hebrew faith as contained in the "Midrash Kohelet," King Solomon was considered to be a great and accomplished astrologer; and - in this all too familiar excerpt from the "Book of Ecclesiastes" - it is believed that he was making referral to the cycles of life contained within the Zodiacal wheel of astrology.

In the apocryphal "The Wisdom of Solomon," Chapter 7:17-19, Solomon says:

The Cycles of Life and Death
While there is differing of opinion among astrologers on the subject of death in the birth chart, I have found that the unconscious psyche (soul) doesn’t appear to recognize the physical death of the body as an ending of life.

As such, the death of an individual is often easier found in the charts of loved ones left behind to deal with and grieve over their personal loss. At the point when this particular suspicious configuration in my chart had passed on its way with seemingly no significant event having taken place, I once again began breathing a little easier about my mother. I never mentioned my concerns to her.

It wasn’t until after my mother had been diagnosed with a fast spreading tumorous growth - that she shared something with me that I hadn’t known. It seems that during this one particular summer - she, like me, had been worried about dying.

What had never dawned on me was that during that summer she had reached the same age my grandmother (her mother) had been when she had died. Lying there in her bed, my mother calmly explained that while death had never completely left her mind... after that one summer passed, she too had once again begun breathing a little easier and had stopped being so concerned and focused about the possibility of her impending death.

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