How doing my mom’s astrology chart helps me cope with her death


A fast scan of my mom’s astrology chart tells me that at the moment goes to be an excellent day for her. If she have been right here doing a studying with me, I’d say: “Pursue one thing at the moment that’s deeply essential to you.”

Some individuals go to the cemetery once they miss their mother and father. As an astrologer, I have a look at my mom’s delivery chart, regardless that she died 23 years in the past.

Usually, I do charts for people who find themselves nonetheless alive. Associates usually textual content me once they need to know why they’re having a foul day and want a planet guilty. Saturn? Mercury in retrograde once more? I additionally present astrological recommendation to strangers, normally the individual on the barstool subsequent to me if I’ve been consuming vodka martinis.

Astrology generally will get a foul rap for being generic. How can three sentences in a ladies’s journal describe somebody? That’s as a result of most individuals don’t know greater than their solar signal. Utilizing a delivery chart offers a extra full image. It exhibits what place all of the planets have been in while you have been born. I have a look at my chart each day. I really feel off once I don’t, as if I’ve left the home with out carrying underwear.

My astrology chart is a street map for my life. It helps me decide what I’m good at and the place I fall quick in order that I can work on it. It will get me to take motion in my life once I’m scared to take a leap. Astrology can’t predict the longer term with exactitude each time — the story that you simply suppose goes to occur hardly ever does — but it surely by no means fails to offer me the lesson I want probably the most.

Once I was in my 30s and studying how you can learn a chart, I discovered it useful to review the astrological charts of celebrities, each useless and alive, whose delivery data is normally public. As a result of their lives play out on a public stage, you’ll be able to relate main occasions of their lives to what’s occurring astrologically. It made me surprise — might I do this with my mom’s chart? All I knew about her was that she was a Pisces. Maybe there was some secret knowledge there for me. I barely knew her as an grownup. She died when she was 56; I used to be 20.

I bear in mind her studying the newspaper cowl to cowl most days, horoscope included. “It’s a very good one at the moment!” she’d say, handing me the paper.

Once I left house for school, she minimize my horoscope out of the newspaper, taped it to a card and mailed it to me. There was no higher feeling than seeing considered one of her letters in my mailbox, the envelope plastered with stickers. The horoscope itself wasn’t nice for predicting the longer term. By the point I’d get her letter, the longer term had grow to be the previous, however that didn’t actually matter. I simply liked figuring out she was on the market excited about me.

She died my junior yr of faculty. She went into the hospital for a routine medical operation and was given a blood thinner that she ended up being allergic to, however no one realized it. It sophisticated her therapeutic course of, and she or he died inside the span of a number of months.

I blamed God. I couldn’t return to the Catholic church the place I used to be baptized, the place we had her funeral. I took photographs out of the scrapbooks she made for me and reprinted them into bigger sizes to show round the home, however there weren’t many to select from. She was at all times the one behind the digital camera.

The arrival of a letter from the Pennsylvania Division of Well being 20 years later modified all the pieces. I had requested a replica of my mom’s delivery certificates to get her delivery time in order that I might do her chart with extra accuracy. The day the envelope arrived in my mailbox, it felt like she had despatched me a letter from the opposite facet.

I entered her delivery data into my on-line delivery chart calculator. In seconds, it spun out her outcomes.

An astrology chart is formed like a wheel. All 12 astrological indicators (Gemini, Most cancers, Virgo…) correspond to a dozen slices of the wheel, like a pie. Planets (the solar, Mercury, Venus…) can fall anyplace on the chart, relying on the time you have been born. There are lots of layers to a chart and simply as many interpretations. I’ve been doing charts for years, and there are nonetheless components of my chart I proceed to discover and discover new which means in.

The very first thing I seen in my mom’s chart was her twelfth home moon. In astrology, the moon corresponds to our feelings and represents the mom. Her moon was in Sagittarius, additionally her rising signal. My mom positively got here off like a Sagittarius — humorous and passionate and shiny — however that twelfth home moon informed me that there was much more beneath, that she was a religious and deeply emotional individual at coronary heart.

It jogged my memory of the primary weekend I got here house from school. I used to be in my bed room on the brink of exit for the evening. Once I appeared up in my mirror, my mom was standing behind me. I hadn’t heard her come up the steps.

“The home is so empty while you’re not right here,” she mentioned, crying.

It’s a reminiscence I consider usually. I attempted to lighten the temper, to faux her harm didn’t exist. I want now that I had hugged her.

My mom’s solar was in Pisces within the third home, the house of educating and writing. She taught enterprise and accounting programs to highschool youngsters and technical faculty college students and was working towards a graduate diploma in particular schooling. Whether or not my mother was within the classroom or at house, she at all times had fashion. She liked thrift retailer finds and treasures from the TJ Maxx sale rack. I attribute that to Venus, the planet of magnificence, in Aquarius — fly your freak flag.

I noticed Saturn and Mars hanging out in my mom’s seventh home of partnership and instantly considered my mother and father’ marriage. My mom and father have been nonetheless collectively on the time of her demise, however their marriage was rocky at occasions. As somebody who acquired divorced, I couldn’t ever perceive why they hadn’t parted methods. However Mars (battle) and Saturn (accountability) in her seventh home hinted that she was the kind of one that didn’t shrink back from dedication. Her Saturn was in Gemini, an indication that believes within the energy of language. Perhaps “Till demise do us half” meant one thing completely different to her than it did to me.

My mom died within the hospital. By the point I arrived house from school to see her, I used to be too late. She was unresponsive once I tried to speak to her. I at all times questioned: May I’ve executed something to stop her demise? I used to be capable of enter the date of my mom’s demise to see what the planets have been doing the day she died. Pluto (deep transformation) was lining up with my mom’s moon within the twelfth home of endings. Not everybody who has this once-in-a-lifetime transit dies, after all, but it surely’s not a simple transit.

I had at all times blamed myself for my mom’s demise. If solely I had been dwelling nearer to house, possibly I might have helped. If solely we had transferred her to a greater hospital sooner, possibly she’d nonetheless be alive.

Seeing Pluto conjunct her moon in her chart gave me a deeper understanding of the circumstances of her demise. It made me suppose that possibly nothing I might have executed would have made a distinction. I usually take into consideration the affect that her demise has had on my life, the way it’s made me a extra religious individual. I miss my mom each day and would give something to have her again, but it surely’s laborious to disclaim that my life has been formed as a lot by her demise as her presence.

To today, I nonetheless test in on my mom’s chart, the way in which I do when my associates ask for a studying. I’m comforted by the solar returning yearly to the identical spot it was when she was born, the moon waxing and waning by way of the zodiac, touring across the wheel by way of all her completely different homes. After my mom died, I had at all times questioned how life would go on, how the planets would proceed to spin, but it surely’s the rhythm of the cosmos that retains me going now. It’s what makes me really feel as if she’s nonetheless alive.

Once I discover myself lacking her, I open her astrology chart on my laptop computer. I click on on the drop-down menu and search by way of my record of names for these three magical letters: Mother.