Deck Review: A Grieving Tarot

At first glance, A Grieving Tarot is not the kind of deck I usually back on Kickstarter. It’s very simplistic, and y’all know I love images crammed with detail, like the weird little greedy magpie I am, haha. It’s also kinda… gimmicky? But the second I gave it more than a passing glance, I realised this was an incredibly powerful and clever little deck: a sharp, tender, and extraordinarily effective tool for navigating the deeply personal hellscape of grief.

The creator Sara Kathleen describes herself as an artist, illustrator, writer, tree witch, pagan, and “professionally curious whim-follower.” She lives, in her own words, “a bit on the Hermit side of things,” and her artwork is deeply rooted in her love of trees and nature.

A Grieving Tarot, emerged after the death of her father in late 2024. Having created several Tarot and oracle decks before, Kathleen turned once again to her art as a form of solace. But this time, the work felt different: “When I lost my dad, I began drawing these cards because my other tarot decks weren’t speaking to me the way I wanted. I wanted my grief to be the centre of the conversation, and not something I was wishing away.”

The result is a 78-card deck that approaches the traditional Tarot structure “through a pure lens of loss.” Kathleen calls it a “safe space to feel things deeply”, not a manual for navigating bereavement exactly, but a tender reflection of her own “grey path”. As she puts it, “it is my hope that it finds the right people, and that maybe it can be a gentle way to introduce more grief-informed perspectives to your readings.”

I really like the name. Not the Grieving Tarot, but a – because even though grief is universal, it feels so piercingly personal when we’re in it. My grief is mine and mine alone, mine all alone to shoulder. As E.M. Forster once wrote, “One death may explain itself, but it throws no light upon another.” And so it is, too, with grief. There are many griefs, not one unifying one. Sara Kathleen echoes this in her introduction to the deck: “Your own heart and circumstances matter the most, and I encourage you to use your own intuition and insight when it comes to your readings.”

It’s also no surprise that all* the figures on her cards are alone. Because grief is, above all things, incredibly lonely. In her short story (mémoire? comic?) about grief, You Died And I Hated It, A Grieving Tarot’s creator Sara Kathleen expands:

“’You are not alone’…is total bullshit because yes, actually I am alone and no one can live for me or breathe on my behalf and every decision I make must ultimately be mine alone. Yes every one is suffering their loss too but they are alone in theirs and I am alone in mine.

THERE IS NO “ALONE” QUITE LIKE THIS.
This. A deep, primal, fundamental kind of alone. And I hate it. And I know you hate seeing me like this. But my soul has been torn. I am alone. Even in company, I am alone. Instead of telling me I’m not, just be there. Be kind. Be quiet. Let me have my Alone, without dismissing it.”

‘You Died And I Hated It’ by Sara Kathleen

What Kathleen does so well is capturing the despondency that comes with deep loss. Her characters aren’t wailing, crying, raging. They’re that emptiness that comes from being hollowed out by grief. It’s the Four of Cups writ large. As she notes, “some losses carried feelings of tragedy, panic, and injustice with them. Others did not, and were slower and more exhausting.”

It reminds me of Julian Barnes’ devastating novella Levels of Life, written after the death of his wife of 30 years, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh. He describes how he took to watching random, unimportant sports matches, for teams he had no allegiance to, in leagues where the stakes were low: “Because now I could only be indifferent; I had no emotions left to lend.” Love is dangerous, he reminds us, because it always carries with it the seeds of loss: “Love gives us a… feeling of faith and invincibility… But there is always the sudden spear-thrust to the neck. Because every love story is a potential grief story.”

How Kathleen channels that truth through simple, childlike stick figures is astonishing. But that simplicity, that childlikeness, that dancing on the borders of cutesy or twee, is what gives this deck such an emotional wallop. Our first major loss, our first major grief, is often what rips us out of our childlike belief that the universe is good and fair and happy, and plunges us into a very adult kind of knowing: that loss is inevitable, and it changes everything. And that we must carry on anyway.

“Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven’t. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven’t. Later still – at least if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) – it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven’t. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.”

From ‘Levels of Life’ by Julian Barnes

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

All of the artwork for A Grieving Tarot was created by Sara Kathleen over nine months, drawn digitally in Procreate with “absolutely no AI involved.” Every line and word is her own – including the handwritten text on the cards themselves (the guidebook being the only exception).

The deck comes in standard Tarot size (70 x 120mm) with 3mm rounded corners, housed in a two-part rigid box, that’s reassuringly sturdy. According to the spec, the cards are printed on 310gsm Heretic Smooth Black Cored Playing Card Board. They’re fairly lightweight, but elastic more than out-and-out flimsy, so there’s no warping for mine deck so far, and they’re pretty slippy. The guidebook is short and sweet, and you’d need to have a rudimentary understanding of the RWS system already, to see how ‘grief’ maps on to the historic meanings.

Greatest Hits: My Favourite Cards from A Grieving Tarot

A recurring motif in A Grieving Tarot is the lone figure clutching the traditional tools or symbols of the RWS, but with a kind of blank, “…and what exactly am I meant to do with this?” energy. It’s that despondent recognition that the objects, hobbies, or roles that once gave life meaning now feel dull and pointless. The Magician especially brings this home: yes, all the tools are laid out, yes, the potential is still there, but the figure radiates, “I don’t want to build anything” vibes. Kathleen’s guidebook gently validates this pause: “You already have everything you need to heal and move forward, but you also need time to lay your tools down and sit in your feelings.”

In the High Priestess, that same hollowed-out energy is turned toward the moon. She holds it like it’s useless to her now, bewildered that it even still exists. It feels like the inverse of the old song ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon‘ – not “but it wouldn’t be make believe if you believed in me,” but rather, “now you’re gone, everything is just a stage prop in a life that no longer feels real.” It reminds me of what the English scholar Seamus Perry (weirdly my ex-boyfriend’s old English prof!) writes of grief, “often the true immensity of love is learned through realising the enormity of its absence.” Again, Kathleen’s guidebook urges us to find grace in this: “explore your new internal landscape without insisting on… familiarity.”

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead’.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

‘Funeral Blues’ by W. H. Auden

But that’s OK. As Kathleen points out in the guidebook, “grief and love are intertwined and you have space for both”. Or, as Barnes reminded us, “every love story is a potential grief story”. That’s just how life works. To love is to be vulnerable, but not to love at all is… I know it’s trite but it’s true!… worse.

The Emperor in A Grieving Tarot is still on top, as ever, but here it feels different. He’s perched on his mountain, not exuding control, but looking upward, towards the heavens, searching for guidance. There must be more than this, the card seems to whisper. For Kathleen this is a card about owning your own grief: “deal with things in your own way, without shame.”

The Hermit here puts me in mind of the song Rocket Man by Elton John, especially Kate Bush’s hauntingly lonely cover: “Rocket man burnin’ out his fuse up here alone.” The Hermit is usually about solitude, but in A Grieving Tarot it’s unmistakably about loneliness. The figure stands against an alien moonscape, the once familiar made strange by grief. No one can hear you in space, there’s no one who understands. And far, far away through the dark, the world still turns – vibrant blue and green, alive – but you’re cut off, cold, and breathless. Kathleen’s guidebook frames this as a necessary reckoning: “You have changed, and you need to spend time with your new self.”

The Wheel of Fortune usually shows figures clinging desperately to the top, to their good fortune, or despairing as they’re thrown from it and crushed beneath its turn. Not so here. The grieving figure doesn’t fight, doesn’t cling – they’re numb to the spin. It’s that hollow state where the twists of fate barely register. Win the lottery? Whatever. It won’t bring your beloved back. Lose your job, your house? Who cares. They were your true home, and they’re gone.

I find it super interesting that Death* is the only card in A Grieving Tarot to hold two figures. The second isn’t quite solid; more like a ghost, an echo, or even a reflection. A memory. The way the dead live on inside our recollections of them. The rest of the card is starkly blank, which instantly reminded me of the awesome Death card in the Hayworth Tarot which is just a plain white card. Death is that blankness, that white page. And of course, the question it poses: do you see a crisp new page as terrifying, or as an invitation? A new story waiting to be written or the loss of a tale you dearly loved? Kathleen’s guidebook captures this beautifully: “Endings are always entwined with beginnings, and we are continually letting go and starting over.”

The figure in Temperance seems a bit lost – all at sea, literally – but Kathleen reminds us that “extremes never last… eventually we find our way back to a calm middle space.”

In the Star card our stick folk stands on a barren planet, gazing into the void as one lone star twinkles overhead. The hope is there, but they can’t see it – not yet. And Kathleen reassures us that’s OK: “we aren’t meant to be permanently hopeful… There’s a time and place for darkness and hope. Both have value.” It also reminds me of this fucking fantastic poem by Rosemerry Trommer. I’d get the whole thing tattooed on me if I could.

On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.

Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.

There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.

‘Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Is Not Breaking’ by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

All the Twos in A Grieving Tarot are stunning. They carry the same ‘what am I meant to do with this?‘ energy of some of the Majors, but also, more than anything, they convey the idea that there’s someone missing. The harbour to your ship, the salt to your sea. How it feels to operate solo through a world designed for pairs. WHAT THE FUCK DO I DO WITH THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BED NOW?! Particularly haunting, the Two of Wands, with its paired birds flying off into the sunset. It reminds me of the line from King Lear, after his daughter dies: “Why should a dog, a rat, a horse have life / And thou no breath at all?”

The Two of Cups is perhaps the most poignant of them all: the “cheers” when there’s no one there to clink your glass. Yet it also carries something gentler: the idea of legacy, of ritual, of commemoration. Kathleen reminds us: “When we lose someone, that doesn’t mean we’ve lost the ability to connect to them. How we make space for them has to change, but the connection does not disappear. Explore and nurture your own personal ways to stay connected to the loved ones you have lost.”

It brings to mind Henry Scott Holland’s ‘Death Is Nothing At All‘, which was read at my mum’s funeral when I was seven. A family friend gave me the page they’d typed it on, and I’ve kept it with me ever since; tucked first in my purse, now in my wallet, where it’s lived for thirty-six years. The line that always stops me is: “Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well.”

The Six of Cups carries that same ‘no one to cheers with’ gesture (“to absent friends”), but this time it’s five absent friends, not just one. It reminds me of Bernie Taupin’s lyrics again: ‘Do they know what it’s like to have a graveyard as a friend / ‘Cos that’s where they are boy, all of them / Don’t seem likely I’ll get friends like that again‘. Kathleen captures the ache succinctly: “Remembering good times can be bittersweet.”

Woke up early this morning and from my bed
looked far across the Strait to see
a small boat moving through the choppy water,
a single running light on. Remembered
my friend who used to shout
his dead wife’s name from hilltops
around Perugia. Who set a plate
for her at his simple table long after
she was gone. And opened the windows
so she could have fresh air. Such display
I found embarrassing. So did his other
friends. I couldn’t see it.
Not until this morning

‘Grief’ by Raymond Carver

The Eight of Wands still hums with its usual “things are moving fast” energy, but here, our figure is outside of it all. The world is as busy and frantic as it always was, but now we sit aside, passively, while things happen around us. It’s the numbness again, that dislocation, that quietly whispers throughout the deck.

Traditionally, the Five of Pentacles points to grief and loss, but usually with a side order of rebuke: hope is there, if only you’d stop wallowing long enough to see it. Help is available if you’d stop being so proud and ask. Kathleen takes a different tack. Sometimes, she argues, “misery is absolutely where we should be.” Hope and comfort aren’t always accessible, and “that’s the truth of it. And it isn’t our fault.” In her version, hope still exists – traced in the stars above – but she gives us permission to sit with sorrow without berating ourselves for not being relentlessly positive.

Despite it’s cute lil Purple Ronnie style graphics, A Grieving Tarot is not an easy deck, nor is it trying to be. It doesn’t soothe with platitudes or push us towards false positivity. Instead, it holds up a mirror to the hollow, numbing, lonely textures of loss, and insists that these feelings, too, deserve space. It’s straightforward, it’s tender, and it’s devastatingly true.

And yet, within that truth is something like grace. The cards don’t tell us how to grieve, they simply sit beside us, a companion in the loneliness. They remind us that grief is not simply a stage to be moved through, it’s often a landscape we learn to live within. As Kathleen writes:

“The wheel of time turns, death and life continue to dance their dance, and at some point it will be time for all of us to go. And [until then]…we carry on, because that is what we do. That is how this works. We will be soft, we will be strong, we will keep loving. We will change, we will adapt, and we will feel whatever we need to feel at the time. And we will carry them with us, always.” 

The deck is available from Kathleen’s site, here, for £40, and will be available shortly from Salon Des Arcanes, here for approx. £50.

              

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

‘What The Living Do’ by Marie Howe

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