Tarot and Turning 65: Does Medicare eligibility entitle me to alternative medicine?

 Tarot, Fate, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Reading Tarot, aging, reflection 

Rider Tarot Cards

This past weekend, there was a celebration of my transition to Medicare eligibility which, in the United States, occurs when you reach 65.  This also used to be the retirement age here – and therefore it is considered an important landmark.  So, my mother, who is over 90 and commented that hosting a party for a son who became Medicare eligible was not something she expected to be part of her retirement plan, invited a few people from my home town as well as my nuclear family to a small celebration.

I was the only person at the party who knew everyone there, so I had a notion that I would provide nametags along with the identifiers F, T, and E on them and would, as a party game, ask people to figure out what the letters stood for.  Fortunately, I thought better of that game, but I did describe it to the group, once they were assembled, to let them know about this crazy idea, but also to introduce them to each other. 

I explained that F stands for foundational, and I offered my Mother and siblings as examples of foundational influences.  T stands for transitional, and I talked about friends from high school who helped me move into a broader world, as well as friends from graduate school, mentors in the community, and also my first (reluctant) wife, who helped me transition to being a father, and friends who had helped me transition after my divorce.  I finished by talking about E – enhancements.  These included people who “came with” my second (reluctant) wife – my two stepdaughters and my brother and sister-in-law.

In talking about my son and my second wife, I noted that the FTE system collapsed, because they both belonged to all three categories – as did everyone who was present.  Our relationships help define us, and I have been lucky to have people in my life who have been foundational, transitional and enhancing and have thus defined me in ways that have allowed me to grow as an individual and as a member of a sometimes very disparate community.

After the guests left, the eldest reluctant stepdaughter, who is finishing graduate school in the family business of psychology, offered to do a Tarot card reading for me as a birthday gift.  I was pleased and happy for her offer.  She normally does readings based on the past, present and future.  I have had Tarot readings done (and dabbled in doing them) in a variety of ways, and I was looking forward to this progression; however, at the suggestion of her uncle – my brother-in-law – she did the reading based on a card for Foundation, a card for Transition, and a card for Enhancement. 

Dali Three of Cups

The first card was the three of cups.  The card deck she was using was one that Salvador Dali painted and it was unfamiliar to me.  We had purchased it when we were together at the Dali museum in Sarasota Florida – and she has been working from this deck, but it is mostly novel to me.  She asked for my thoughts about the card as I looked at it.

The card has three women on it.  It has been a couple of days and I have lost some of the visual details, but there are many.  My first association to it was to a recent book that I read, These Ghosts are Family (that I posted on last week).  In that book, three girls are stolen away from a funeral at the beginning of the book and at the end of the book they haunt the ancestral plantation on Jamaica from which the family at the center of the story originates.  I concluded that the card seemed, indeed, to be related to the early components of myself.

What I didn’t recall in the reading is the psychoanalytic importance of the number three.  This is an indication, for psychoanalysts, of the movement from pre-oedipal (dyadic) relating – Mommy and me, to Oedipal level relating – Mommy and Daddy and me have to figure out how to be in relationship to each other – I have to include a third in my understanding of how I relate to you – both in the family and in the world out there.  It’s not just me and you, but us.

The reluctant daughter pointed out that cups are a suit that indicates emotionality and love in particular (there are four suits in Tarot, just like in playing cards, but instead of face cards there are Major Arcana – what Jung would call archetypes).  This led us to discuss the ways in which my foundation, despite my being reasonably smart, is, somewhat confusingly, emotional.  I didn’t say this at the time, but it explains my primary professional interest in the relationship between feeling and thinking – I frequently find that my feelings override my thinking, which is confusing.  Psychoanalysis has helped me have my feelings inform my thinking – though I still cry at Coke commercials…

Dali Two of Cups

So, the second card, the transitional card, was the two of cups.  This card had a picture of a cupid rising out of a bed with a woman lying asleep (or perhaps satisfied) on her back.  I noted that this looked like the card in the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) with a man standing, leaving a woman in bed – perhaps to work.  This card is generally interpreted as being related to romantic love and connection.

The Rider deck shows two people in balance with each other.  The Dali deck, with cupid leaving, seemed particularly apt to me.  I entered into a marital relationship and left it – I failed to achieve the kind of idyllic connection promised by the idea of a soul mate.  That led me to a second marriage – one that has been more complicated – and one in which I have learned that soul mates are forged in the context of relating to each other, not on the basis of some kind of received, preordained connection.  Though some are lucky enough to find magic, in my experience, magic is made, not discovered – and that was an important transitional discovery for me.

Dali Two of Pentacles

So, the enhancement card was the two of pentacles.  This card was a dynamic, vibrant card with all kinds of elements in relationship to each other.  One of the thoughts about the pentacles versus the cups that my daughter offered was that this suit was more focused on things than on feelings.  The two of pentacles is often seen as related to juggling various obligations. 

What I came to was that having both an academic and an applied career has meant that I have been juggling a lot, but one of the enhancements that has emerged from that at retirement time is relative financial security – something that has addressed a central concern of a child of depression era parents.  On the other hand, I was concerned that my devotion to my profession had interfered with my being as available to others in my life, especially family.  (The FTE (usually short for Full Time Employment or Equivalent - something that I have usually been at between 1.5 and 2 FTEs in my life) seemed symbolic of this).

At this point, my daughter suggested that sometimes she will include a fourth card if there are questions that have emerged from the reading.  My concern that the reading was suggesting that I might have betrayed my emotional foundation a bit by pursuing the pentacles/ money/ multiple obligations in my life seemed like a legitimate question.

Rider Five of Cups

So, I drew a fourth card.  It was the five of cups.  This card includes three cups that are empty, or upside down, and two upright, or full cups.  On the Rider deck, the person on the card is looking at the three spilled cups and ignoring the two full cups behind him.  The message here seemed pretty clear: there have been losses based on choices I have made, and I can dwell on them if I want to, but I will miss out on what has been accomplished and fail to celebrate the ways in which I am a good representation of myself – something that I am very prone to do, all in attendance agreed.

This reading was, then, a high point of the weekend for me – along with many others.  Just like in a marriage, I don’t think the message was in the cards, but in the use that we put to them.  I was particularly impressed by the clinical skills that my daughter is developing – and that were on display in this interaction.  She was present to the cards and to me, and she offered support and interpretation without determining the interpretation.  We worked on the interpretive work together.  She brought what she knew about the cards – and, to a lesser extent, what she knew about me, and I brought what I knew about me, but also what I perceived in the cards – my knowledge of them has waned in the many years since I had a passing interest in them, but they are powerful symbols that interact with what I know about the human condition – and she and I used our shared knowledge about that condition to sympathetically explore hypotheses about the psychological space that I am occupying on the eve of a transitional moment in my life.

While the reading was, on the one hand, private – it was an interaction between the two of us (like the twos of pentacles and cups), it was also public (the three of cups) – the family gathered to observe and, occasionally, comment on the material and the interaction.  The reading felt like a microcosm of the weekend – a celebration of us – those of us who have been able to hang out with me (including myself) – as much as it was a celebration of who it is that I am.  In a word, it felt like a three of cups event – a return, if you will, to my foundation.

As to the reading itself, I have often found myself in readings being fascinated by and hoping for the major arcana to appear (those face cards that are archetypal).  Though the cards go up to ten, this reading’s highest card value was five, and the other three cards were two twos and a three.  In poker, I would have had nothing – a pair of deuces.  But the value of the reading was not in the cards, but in the interpretation of them – in the connection between the reader(s) and me and in connecting them to the life I am leading.  And while the reading was apparently not about the clash of the Titans – the big things that determine our lives – that did not make it any less relevant and consequential.  Perhaps our lives are as meaningfully constructed out of the smallest components as they might be by the big flashy elements. 

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