The defining moments in our lives often don’t come with advance warning.
~ Sally Yates, former US Deputy Attorney General
I read the news today, then consulted the Tarot. Seeing myself in the Major Arcana’s High Priestess of unknown secrets and hidden information, who dispenses both if I’ll listen: What happens changes a life. XIII, the Death card, turns full frontal. I spend the better part of a May day with my better half at the ER in Rochester, EMTs expecting he’d have to be admitted. Dehydration. Prognosis: becoming more problematic. Dementia deep-sixes appetite for death by starvation; swallowing reflex shuts down and he aspirates food, gets pneumonia, dies. I know a secret. I have information. This is defining.
Karla Linn Merrifield has 14 books to her credit, including the 2019 full-length book Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North from Cirque Press. She is currently working on a poetry collection, My Body the Guitar, to be published in December 2021 by Before Your Quiet Eyes Publications Holograph Series.