When I entered my empty apartment, I was in a daze. My dad had just died the day before. A heart attack, swift and devastating. The throbbing of my head could have formed from the endless day spent at the hospital or the useless attempts at consoling my sobbing mother. What a difference a day can make, or even a single moment! My world felt like it had broken open, and everything was lost. The apartment was quiet with abandonment. Was this still my home? Was I still me?

I’m not sure what made me do it, but the first thing that I did when I got inside (my first moment alone since the previous day) was to go to my tarot deck, which I kept carefully wrapped in a cloth in the drawer of my bedside table. I had long been interested in using tarot as a tool for reflection and introspection. People who are unfamiliar with tarot often dismiss it as fortunetelling or sillier and sometimes more sinister forms of mysticism. Not so.

Like a Rorschach test, the art, colors, shapes, words, numbers, and symbols of a tarot deck can be interpreted in countless ways and offer tremendous insight, provided that the reader keeps an open mind and heart. And boy, was mine open. A sign was what I needed, something, anything, to let me know that everything was going to be alright. I unwrapped the deck, pulled three cards, and placed them facedown on the table. There was a moment of hesitation. What if this was all bullshit?

Doubt set in and froze me in place. I regarded the three downward-facing cards with unease. Tarot was part of my true religion, right up there with nature and love. But what if it all meant nothing? What if the cards didn’t say anything valid or relevant? It had certainly happened in readings before, hence the doubt. What if my dad had died, and that was that? What if there was nothing else? Now, when I was at the lowest point in my life, if my faith and spirituality turned out to be a hollow thing, I can’t say for sure what I would have done. Slowly, I turned the cards over one by one.

I won’t tell you what the cards were. Likely, they would mean nothing to you. But they meant everything to me, and still do.