When grief renders us speechless, tarot offers a symbolic vocabulary for expressing what feels inexpressible. This article explores how tarot's imagery can accompany us through loss—not as magical solutions or shortcuts around pain, but as compassionate witnesses to our journey. From specific cards that capture grief's shifting landscape to practical spreads designed for mourning, discover how tarot can help us navigate grief not as something to "get over," but as an experience to be integrated with gentleness and respect.
The phone rings at 3 a.m. A doctor looks down at their clipboard. A letter arrives that changes everything. Grief enters without knocking, and suddenly we find ourselves in a country whose language we don’t speak. Society offers platitudes that ring hollow; friends grow uncomfortable with sorrow that doesn’t resolve on schedule. In this strange territory, tarot provides not answers but companionship—a visual language when words fail us completely. While shuffling, drawing, and contemplating these age-old symbols won’t erase our loss or hasten some imaginary timeline of healing, they can offer something equally valuable: recognition of our experience in all its messy, non-linear complexity. Cards like The Tower, The Star, and the Five of Cups don’t exist to predict our healing, but to accompany us as we learn to inhabit a world permanently altered by absence—a world where, eventually, we might carry our grief not as an unbearable burden but as part of who we’ve become.
The Language of Loss
Grief is perhaps the most universal of human experiences, yet it remains stubbornly personal in its expression. Each loss carves its own shape into our lives, leaving impressions as unique as fingerprints and just as identifying. Some losses announce themselves with the drama of The Tower card – sudden, life-altering events that leave nothing unchanged, dividing life into distinct “before” and “after” territories. Others arrive with the quiet inevitability of Death – expected perhaps, but no less profound in their impact, gradually altering our landscape until we find ourselves inhabiting a changed world. The contours of grief shift too—sometimes appearing as a vast chasm that seems impossible to cross, other times as a weight we carry, and occasionally as a fog that obscures everything familiar.
When words fail, as they often do in grief, symbols can speak volumes for experiences that resist articulation. This is where tarot offers something unique, providing a visual language that doesn't require us to reduce complex emotions to inadequate vocabulary. Its rich imagery creates pathways to expression when our usual routes are blocked by the sheer magnitude of what we're feeling. The structured system of the cards offers organisation to experiences that feel bewilderingly chaotic, allowing us to locate ourselves within a larger narrative without diminishing the individuality of our loss. Through symbolism, we can acknowledge parts of grief that might otherwise remain unrecognised or unexpressed—the anger hidden within sadness, the relief tangled with guilt, the love that persists despite absence.
It's worth noting that tarot isn't a replacement for grief counselling, support groups, or other professional resources, particularly when loss has left us truly adrift. Rather, it's a complementary tool that can help us process emotions, honour memories, and eventually imagine a different future – not despite our losses, but including them. Tarot doesn't ask us to “move on” or “find closure”—those well-meaning but often unhelpful societal prescriptions for grief. Instead, it acknowledges the ongoing nature of our relationship with what's been lost, offering ways to integrate this relationship into our continuing lives rather than suggesting we leave it behind.
Understanding Grief Through Tarot's Lens
Traditional models often describe grief in stages or phases, attempting to give structure to what feels structureless, but anyone who's lived through significant loss knows it rarely progresses in such an orderly fashion. Grief moves more like a spiral – circling back through familiar territory, yet never quite returning to the same point. One day brings numbness, the next overwhelming emotion; a month passes in foggy detachment, then suddenly a song or scent catapults us back to acute pain. We might find ourselves laughing at a memory, then moments later drowning in tears, wondering if we've made any progress at all. This unpredictable movement isn't regression or failure; it's simply the nature of how humans process profound loss – not in tidy stages, but in messy cycles of integration that gradually, almost imperceptibly, transform our relationship with what's been lost.
Tarot, with its non-linear nature and cyclical patterns, naturally resonates with this reality of grief. The cards don't pretend that mourning is a straight line from despair to acceptance, an oversimplification that often causes grieving people to question whether they're “doing it wrong.” Instead, they acknowledge the messy, circuitous route of mourning while still suggesting movement and evolution over time. The cyclical structure of the Major Arcana itself—beginning with The Fool and ending with The World, only to begin again—reflects how we circle through experiences, revisiting similar emotional territories but with deepening understanding. Each return brings new insight, not because the territory has changed, but because we approach it differently with each pass.
The Major Arcana, in particular, offers a framework that resonates with many grief experiences, providing a visual vocabulary for emotional landscapes that often feel beyond description. The Tower represents the shattering moment when loss first strikes—that phone call at 3 a.m., the diagnosis we weren't prepared for, the moment that divides life into before and after. Its imagery of destruction and upheaval captures how loss can collapse our foundations, leaving us standing amid rubble, disoriented and exposed. The Moon follows, reflecting the disorientation and overwhelming emotions that typically emerge once the initial shock recedes—that period of confused navigation through changing emotional states, distorted perceptions, and the peculiar timelessness that grief often brings. In this phase, nothing feels quite real, yet everything is painfully acute.
As grief continues, The Hermit often appears, signifying the withdrawal and reflection that mourning both demands and forces upon us. This card acknowledges the necessity of turning inward, of stepping away from normal life to examine what has happened and what it means for our continuing journey. It honours the solitude that grief sometimes requires, not as rejection of connection but as essential processing time. Eventually, for most, The Star appears as hope begins to glimmer, however faintly—not the vanishing of sorrow, but the appearance alongside it of possibility, the first moments of believing that while nothing will be the same, life might still hold meaning. Later still, The Sun suggests the possibility of joy returning, though inevitably transformed by what's been lost. It speaks to the gradual reemergence of vitality and warmth without denying that shadows remain. Finally, The World represents integration of the loss into a new sense of wholeness—not completion in the sense of grief being “finished,” but a form of acceptance that incorporates the loss into a changed but continuing life narrative.
This isn't to suggest a prescribed sequence that everyone follows, a tidy progression from card to card that measures “progress” in grief. Some might experience The Star's hope early in their grief journey, only to be plunged back into The Moon's confusion months or years later. Others might linger with The Hermit for years, finding that withdrawal and contemplation remain necessary far longer than others seem to understand. Still others might find certain cards don't resonate with their experience at all, or that they experience multiple states simultaneously. The value of these cards isn't in creating a standardised map, but in offering recognition without judgment or arbitrary timelines. They acknowledge both the universality of loss and the deeply personal nature of how we live through it.
Cards That Speak to the Grief Journey
Certain cards seem to capture grief's essence with particular clarity. Let's examine these not as predictions, but as reflections of emotional landscapes many mourners traverse.
Death
It would be remiss to discuss grief without mentioning the Death card, which takes on a particular poignancy in this context. While beginners often fear its appearance in readings, experienced tarot practitioners understand it rarely predicts literal death but rather significant transformation. In grief work, however, its imagery becomes directly relevant in ways both literal and metaphorical. For those mourning an actual death, the card validates the enormity of this most fundamental ending. For those experiencing other forms of loss—relationships, health, capabilities, identities—it acknowledges that some endings create a similar magnitude of transformation, equally deserving of recognition and mourning.
Death represents endings, yes, but the card's imagery also points to the transformation that inevitably follows—not as forced “silver lining” thinking, but as natural consequence. The white rose in the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith imagery speaks to the purity and beauty that can exist even within loss, while the sunrise on the horizon whispers of continuation beyond endings. The skeleton figure, neither malevolent nor benevolent but simply part of the natural order, suggests that endings aren't punishment but an inherent part of existence. Perhaps most significantly, the card shows various figures confronting Death—some in resistance, others in acceptance—acknowledging the range of responses we might have to profound loss while suggesting that all are valid parts of the experience.
When this card appears in grief readings, it often acknowledges the reality of what has been lost while gently suggesting that this ending, painful as it is, contains the seeds of a different kind of continuation. Not replacement of what's gone—nothing could serve that purpose—but transformation of ourselves and our relationship with the loss. The Death card speaks to this paradox: that endings, while absolute in themselves, rarely represent the complete story. What changes is not the reality of the loss itself, but our capacity to carry it and how it reshapes us in the carrying.
Five of Cups
Perhaps no card speaks to the early stages of grief more eloquently than the Five of Cups, with its stark depiction of mourning and the complicated emotional landscape loss creates. A figure draped in black—the universal colour of grief across many cultures—stands hunched over, staring at three spilled cups, their contents pooled uselessly on the ground. The posture conveys both the physical and emotional heaviness of grief; that sensation of being literally weighed down, as if gravity has somehow intensified around the mourner. The spilled liquid suggests the irretrievability of what's been lost—no matter how the figure might wish to gather it back up, some spills can never be undone. Meanwhile, two cups remain standing full behind them, temporarily forgotten in the absorption with what can no longer be recovered.
This card perfectly captures grief's tunnel vision—the overwhelming focus on what's been lost that makes it temporarily impossible to notice what remains. Anyone who has experienced profound grief knows this phenomenon: how loss can dominate our field of vision so completely that everything else—relationships, pleasures, responsibilities, even basic self-care—fades into peripheral blur. The forgotten cups aren't a judgment but a recognition of how grief temporarily reshapes our perceptual field. Yet the card also holds a compassionate reminder: the two standing cups persist even when unnoticed, suggesting that grief eventually evolves to where we can acknowledge both our loss and what still sustains us. Not in equal measure, perhaps, but in the same visual field. The card doesn't rush this process or suggest that noticing what remains somehow diminishes the significance of what's been lost. Instead, it simply acknowledges that our perception gradually widens again, allowing space for both sorrow and connection.
When working with grieving clients, I often point out that the bridge in the background of this card suggests a path forward exists, even if we're not ready to cross it yet. This distant bridge offers neither pressure nor false promises—it's simply there, indicating that passage to a different landscape is possible when the time is right. The castle or dwelling on the far shore doesn't represent “moving on” but rather the possibility of eventually inhabiting a different relationship with our grief—one where we carry it rather than being subsumed by it.
The Tower
The Tower represents those losses that shatter our foundations – the phone calls that divide life into “before” and “after,” the diagnoses that collapse our sense of security, the goodbyes we weren't prepared to say.
This card's imagery is violent – lightning, falling figures, crumbling stone. It doesn't sugarcoat the devastation grief can bring. Yet it also contains a paradoxical truth: sometimes structures must fall to allow for rebuilding. The Tower never appears to punish, but to clear space for what needs to come next, however inconceivable that might seem in the moment.
Temperance
Grief demands a peculiar kind of balance – between remembering and forgetting, between honouring the past and creating a future, between tears and eventual laughter. Temperance, with its imagery of blending waters and standing between worlds, speaks to this delicate calibration.
This card appears when we're learning to carry grief rather than be crushed by it. It suggests that healing comes not from leaving loss behind, but from integrating it into a new equilibrium.
The Star
After the destruction of The Tower comes The Star – a naked figure kneeling by water, vulnerable yet serene, pouring forth nourishment. This card represents the first fragile moments of hope that eventually emerge, even from the deepest grief.
The Star doesn't promise that pain will vanish or that what was lost will return. Instead, it suggests a gentler truth: that even in darkness, stars provide enough light to orient by. When The Star appears in grief readings, it often indicates those first moments of feeling that survival might be possible after all.
Six of Swords
The journey away from acute grief isn't a dramatic leap but a gradual crossing. The Six of Swords depicts this transition perfectly – a boat moving from troubled waters toward calmer shores, carrying passengers who look neither back nor forward, but simply endure the crossing.
This card acknowledges that healing from loss is a process, not an event. It suggests movement away from the most turbulent emotions of grief, not through denial or forgetfulness, but through the quiet determination to continue despite the weight we carry.
Grief-Specific Spreads
Tarot spreads designed specifically for grief work can provide structure for exploration without imposing false solutions. Here are several options, ranging from simple check-ins to deeper processing.
Daily Grief Check-In (3 cards)
This straightforward spread helps track grief's shifting nature from day to day:
- What emotions am I carrying today?
- What do I need to acknowledge about my loss?
- How might I best care for myself today?
This spread isn't about “fixing” grief but about witnessing it with compassion. Use it as a regular check-in, noting how the cards change over time – this can provide visible evidence of movement when it feels like you're standing still.
Honouring What Was Lost (5 cards)
Creating space to celebrate what's been lost is an essential part of grieving:
- A precious quality of what/who I've lost
- A lesson they taught me
- What I wish I could say now
- How this loss has changed me
- How I can honour this legacy going forward
This spread works particularly well on anniversaries, birthdays, or other significant dates connected to the loss. It creates space for both sorrow and gratitude.
Finding My Way Forward (6 cards)
When grief has settled enough to begin considering the future:
- Where I am in my grief journey now
- A strength I've discovered through this experience
- What I need to release to move forward
- What I want to carry with me
- A challenge I may face in this next phase
- Guidance for creating meaning from this experience
This isn't about “getting over” grief, but about finding a way to walk with it more easily.
Communicating with Grief (4 cards)
Sometimes it helps to visualise grief as something separate from ourselves – not to distance from it, but to relate to it more consciously:
- How my grief is presenting itself right now
- What my grief is trying to tell me
- What question I want to ask my grief
- How I can best listen to what grief has to teach
This spread personifies grief as a teacher or messenger rather than an enemy to be vanquished.
Practical Applications
Beyond formal spreads, there are numerous ways to incorporate tarot into grief processing:
Visual Expression When Words Fail
Sometimes selecting a card that matches your emotional state can be more expressive than trying to put feelings into words. Try looking through your deck and intuitively selecting a card that resonates with your current emotional state. Sit with the image, noting what elements draw your attention. This can be especially helpful when emotions feel too tangled for verbal expression.
Creating Grief Rituals
Cards can become powerful focal points for personal grief rituals:
- Select a card that represents your loss and one that represents your hope. Light a candle between them, allowing yourself to sit in the tension between what was and what might be.
- On significant dates, draw a card with the question “What would serve me today?” and honour the guidance it offers.
- Create a small altar with meaningful objects and a selected tarot card that changes weekly, representing your evolving relationship with your loss.
These rituals need not be elaborate – their power comes from intention and repetition, creating containers for emotions that might otherwise feel overwhelming.
Tarot Journaling Prompts
Writing can be a powerful grief processing tool. Consider these tarot-based journaling prompts:
- Draw a card and write about how its imagery relates to your grief experience.
- Select The Tower and write about your “before” and “after.”
- Choose the Five of Cups and write about both what you've lost and what remains.
- Pull the Six of Wands and record a small victory in your grief journey – any moment when you felt a sense of accomplishment, however modest.
The key is writing without judgment, allowing whatever emerges to be valid.
Ethical Considerations
Working with grief requires particular sensitivity, whether reading for yourself or others:
Respecting Fresh Grief
Immediate grief can be too raw for analytical tools like tarot. In the earliest phases of loss, simpler forms of support – physical comfort, practical help, quiet presence – are often more appropriate. Tarot becomes more useful once the initial shock has begun to settle.
Processing vs. Bypassing
Tarot should never be used to rush grief or skip its necessary phases. Cards like The Sun might point toward future joy, but that doesn't mean bypassing the essential work of mourning. True healing incorporates loss rather than leapfrogging over it.
Reading for the Grieving
If reading for someone experiencing grief, exceptional sensitivity is required:
- Ask permission before addressing their loss directly
- Avoid predictions about “moving on” or timelines for healing
- Focus on validating emotions and identifying resources for support
- Recognise when someone needs professional support beyond what tarot can offer
A compassionate reader acknowledges both tarot's potential and its limitations in the face of profound loss.
When Tarot Meets Other Support
Tarot works best as one element in a broader support system that might include:
- Professional grief counselling
- Support groups
- Arts-based therapies
- Physical movement practices
- Spiritual or religious resources
- Community support
The cards can complement but never replace these other forms of support.
Moving Through Grief, Not Past It
Perhaps the most important insight tarot offers about grief is that we don't so much get over it as learn to move with it, incorporating its weight and wisdom into our continuing journey. Like The Fool carrying their small pack across unknown terrain, we don't leave our losses behind in some imaginary “closure” scenario—we incorporate them into who we are becoming. This integration doesn't happen through effort or will, but through the natural process of living with loss over time. The incorporation happens precisely because we continue to live, to experience, to encounter new terrain—all while carrying what and who we've lost within us. Sometimes this carrying feels impossible, sometimes strangely natural, but it is always a form of continuation rather than conclusion.
The cards remind us that grief, for all its pain, is evidence of love—an ongoing testimony to connection that persists beyond physical presence or circumstance. Without attachment, there would be no grief; without love, no mourning. The depths of our sorrow correspond directly to the heights of our affection, a correspondence that can be both agonising and strangely comforting. The cards suggest that healing doesn't mean forgetting or “getting past it,” but transforming our relationship with what's been lost so that it becomes integrated into our continuing life rather than standing in opposition to it. They show us that even The Tower's destruction, with all its upheaval and disorientation, contains the possibility of The Star's quiet hope—not as immediate succession but as gradual, almost imperceptible evolution. This evolution happens not because we “work at it” or follow some prescribed grief programme, but because humans are remarkably adaptive creatures who, given time and the absence of pressure to “move on,” naturally find ways to live with even the most profound losses.
In the end, tarot's greatest gift to the grieving might be its insistence on cycles rather than straight-line narratives with distinct endings. The World card, representing completion and integration, leads directly back to The Fool's new beginning; winter always gives way to spring, not in denial of winter's reality but in natural continuation. This cyclical understanding isn't about diminishing loss or suggesting that grief simply vanishes with time. Rather, it acknowledges that life, stubbornly and sometimes against our active will, continues to unfold—and that we continue to participate in this unfolding even when doing so feels impossible or even disloyal to what we've lost. The cards suggest that participation isn't betrayal but the natural motion of being human, a motion that gradually transforms how we carry our losses without erasing them.
Grief changes us—it must. Its gravity alters our emotional, psychological, and even physical landscape permanently. But tarot suggests that this change, given time and tender attention rather than forced positivity or rushed “healing,” might eventually reveal unexpected capacities among the ruins. Not as compensation for what's been lost—nothing could be that, and such thinking only compounds grief with the false pressure to extract “lessons” or “silver linings” from pain. Rather, these capacities emerge as testament to our remarkable ability to carry both sorrow and joy simultaneously as we continue our Fool's journey, one step at a time. The cards don't promise that grief vanishes or that losses become somehow worthwhile. They simply acknowledge that humans, remarkably and against all odds, find ways to continue bearing witness to both what we've lost and what persists, integrating both realities into lives that remain worth living.
