Reading with the Queen of Coins

identification with (one) man’s loneliness

Every time he saw me, he called me “sweetheart” or “pretty.”

Hey pretty, he’d say as I climbed out of my car, my head all peach fuzz and acne and weird, weeping wounds at the back of neck where I hadn’t yet trained myself to stop picking at my skin’s bad reaction to the paclataxol. It didn’t seem like Jimmy was being facetious or teasing me. I never actually saw him act mean or flippant toward anyone, never heard him tell a joke or strike a jaunty tone at someone else’s expense. Hey pretty, how’s it goin’? He’d ask, and at first I’d mutter something like Just Fine and gesture toward whatever shit I was trying to haul out of the car and into the house. Bags of scattered art supplies from Kiernan’s school, Theo’s bento lunch boxes sticky with old ketchup and nibbled on vegetables, my notebooks and pens, books I’d picked up from whatever shop in town. I was reading Hernan Diaz’s In The Distance when we moved in across the street from Jimmy.¹ It’s a Western, I said, crossing the pot-holed, “End of State Maintenance” road to show him the paperback. Actually, it’s an anti-Western. Jimmy laughed. What are those, he said. Yeah, I said, laughing, then: It’s really sad, actually. It made me cry.

How ya doin’, sweetheart, he’d ask when I was loaded down with grocery bags filled with food I was ashamed of buying. Bad fruit, berries out of season, the only kind our three-year-old would eat at the time. Chicken nuggets shaped like dinos. In the months after chemo, we’d mostly given up on pots of beans and fancy farrow salads. We traded fresh bread for canned biscuits and hastily cooked “angel eggs,” which are what Theo calls egg whites fried in olive oil. He hated the yolks almost as much I hated the growing hours of sunshine in those early spring days of 2023. Everything other than darkness seemed offensive to me, a mockery of my ugliness. My second "remission” in two years was more painful and less easily celebrated than the first.

Jimmy never offered to help me carry in the groceries. He couldn’t, he didn’t have legs. He had spina bifida, a wheelchair, and a spot on his back porch from which he rarely moved. His back porch faced our front one. He was mostly out there in his flannel shirt and blanket alone, though sometimes there’d be a woman in a sweatshirt and scrubs sitting there with him, shooting the shit. The intermittent home health aid, I’d learn, who helped straighten the house and deliver his meds, change his colostomy bag.

---

We live in what most people in Virginia would call the middle of nowhere. A town of some 500 people off Route 29, tucked in between untended mountains filled with people’s discarded trash, the leftovers of need and longing, halfway between Charlottesville and Lynchburg. Jimmy had lived here his whole life. We had moved after I finished chemotherapy because this was where we could afford to own a house, escape the climbing rent and shitty landlords of the Charlottesville area. One day, when I stepped outside, I noticed a woman who looked Jimmy’s age on the porch. She wore a bright pink shirt, pale pink jeans, a thick Southern accent like a coat she had shrugged into and could no longer figure out how to unzip. I’m Jimmy’s mom, she said, crossing over to my porch in the sun, offering her hand. Purple nails. Medium diamond. I’m a breast cancer survivor, too, she said, we’d love to have you at one of our rallies. But in the end, she kept her distance from me in the way that certain older survivors do. They’ve lived 20 years without recurrence but they go to every local event, make ribbon-pink their color. They don’t mind that I don’t show up. They’d rather I didn’t. I’ll never be far enough away from death or the bad mood it can bring on in a person.

Jimmy’s dad was a local music legend. Swanky country, folk rock, lovingly nicknamed “the Amish Elvis.” Songs played in front of crowds of thousands, sometimes, not just the 50 or so locals who liked to gather for shows at the old wooden house that had been refashioned into a venue of sorts on the town’s front street. Dad’s playing at the high school tonight, Jimmy would holler at me, when we were both sitting on our porches in the middle of the day, waiting for the sun to set, and, along with it, the daily routine of waiting it brought on for us both. Dad’s playing in the Christmas parade, he’d yell at me before dusk, Did you know they’ve got a statue of dad put up in the county now? Jimmy’s dad was a teenager when Jimmy was born. He had thought he’d take his talent and his guitar down to Nashville. Eventually, he did, but first he took both to Jimmy’s mom’s house. Jimmy was born early, problems with the spine, given a few months to live. There were potlucks and tears, preparations to send the baby on its way. Back to the stars, as my Theo might say these days.

---

Instead, Jimmy lived for 51 more years. Disabled, courting poverty sometimes, a bit of local fame at others, in this strange foothills place in ivy-covered central Virginia. As an adult, he lived by himself in the only apartment building in town for a while, but struggled with the taunts and petty cruelty of other tenants. Eventually his parents, divorced, got the money to buy him the house on our mountain road. Moss growing on the roof but a mostly open floor plan, the wide-enough back porch. The road it sits on is accessible for the home health aid and a van that could accommodate his wheelchair. Not many other people around, but there were the elm trees and the groundhogs. You can see deer, foxes, and coyotes at night. Every star you can think to name. Joan, a widow in her 80s, lives in the house toward the road’s bottom. Missy and Bill, a boomer couple who made their money in construction work, reign from their retirement compound at the mountain’s top. Sometimes they came down and brought Jimmy dinner. Sometimes they came down and brought me dinner, too, after we moved and became the closest human part of Jimmy’s daily scenery. After the story of my own illness and disability began to circulate, garnering gentle feelings on the road and in the town where there had at first been some suspicion. Rightfully so. Kiernan and I don’t look the part for people who live out here. We look like gentrifiers, opportunists, come-heres. From nearly any angle, when we’re being real about it, we are.

We knew Jimmy for a year, a little over. At first his “sweethearts” and “pretties” bothered me. His constant presence on the porch. When we moved, I had been looking forward to writing, reading, and growing my hair back without having to see another living soul for days if I didn’t want to. I wanted woodpeckers, an overgrown garden full of tomatoes and holy basil, the white willow infested with black walnut. I got all those, but Jimmy was there every day, too, a constant companion.

It was impossible, almost immediately, to miss the similarities of our daily lives, despite how different we were from each other, despite how different I wanted to be from a sick, hurting, Republican man who enjoyed being on his phone almost as much as he enjoyed talking to God. But you couldn’t miss it: Everyone else on our little road, in our little town, headed out in their cars every morning to go to work, or garden club meetings, or school board meetings, or school. Only Jimmy and I hung back, always on our porches, always facing the hours of the day alone. Only Jimmy and I were forced to hang back as bodies in pain, but not so much that we required much from other people. As bodies in need, but not so much that we couldn’t be left to our own limited designs. I wanted to sulk about my own condition. Jimmy’s presence marred the experience of pitying myself. I spent a few weeks, then, seething, keeping myself in the house, trying for total ruin.

He calls me “pretty,” who does he think he is, I complained to Kiernan one night in our first months after the move. I’m not going out there while he’s out there. Kiernan rolled his eyes at me. Jimmy is great, he said. Theo loves him. The dogs love him. What he was telling me was to grow up, get real a little bit: my old habits of online feminism didn’t really work here, in this place where we’d moved. I spent a few weeks being resentful of that, too. I sat in front of my computer and filled myself up with newsletter essays on how terrible men are, people are, the world is. Being indoors of compassion like that, for days on end, was so boring. I was so boring. I was in so much pain: the lupron shots and letrezole pills were taking out the bones and vertebrae in my spine one by one. Women on the internet were writing champion-fighter stories of menopause.² I wanted to destroy the world, outside, on every screen, within myself.

---

Theo and the dogs did love him. They were always on Jimmy’s porch. Theo took over drawings he made for Jimmy—stick figure people, monsters with too many legs—that made him laugh. Sappho, our blind dog, would niffle her way appreciatively up his wheelchair ramp. Most stairs are impossible for her, but she learned her way around Jimmy’s ramp in no time. If I couldn’t find her in the evenings before Kiernan and Theo got home from school, I learned to look for her in Jimmy’s lap. Aww, that dog, he’d say. Aww, that dog is incredible. I’d never heard another person other than myself and Kiernan refer to Sappho with the appropriate amount of reverence. It lit me up. I’d let her stay over with Jimmy after that, sometimes. Sometimes, I began to join the two of them. Jimmy would pet Sappho, and he and I would start talking about our days. We’d swap stories of back pain and internet friendships. There were a few women writers I’d become really close to online, I’d say. Jimmy had 4,500 Facebook friends and he was proud of them all.

We had nothing and everything in common, and, at some point, the identification stopped unsettling me. It just became real. Fine. Of course! We couldn’t talk politics or the specific names we called our Gods. But we could get into it about chronic illness, cancer, the particularities of all-day pain. We shared silences a lot, our moods synced with a similar rhythm of days: excitement and jokes before the mail lady was due, maybe she’s bringing us messages of good fortune and change. The low hour of 3 pm, after all that arrived in our mailboxes were hospital bills or fliers about a historic home tour neither of us wanted to attend. Jimmy had his bowl for those hateful afternoon shadows. I had tarot cards and an anger to write through.

A camaraderie I had not quite been able to find in crip lit corners online found me in the form of Jimmy and a routine of stasis and small talk that, at another point in my life, I’d have disdained. Hey Jimmy, I’d say, every morning after Theo and Kiernan got off to school. Hey pretty, he’d say. We’d talk about the weather. Too hot, too cold. The metal in his spine knew when it would rain. The silicone in my chest knew it, too. We talked scars, Halloween and Christmas decorations, prayer. We both liked to pray outside, at night, with an accompaniment of whiskey, until I got sober last January for good. He showed me Facebook exchanges with people from other countries; I saved Instagram memes of cute animals for him. When I quit the menopause drugs and began baking bread and running again, I took him focaccia and stories of the birds and snakes and neighbors I saw on my route up Naked Mountain. There was a black bear this morning, I told him last fall, Another neighbor came out to warn me.

It seemed, on the surface, like I was getting better, leaving Jimmy behind on the sick side of life. In reality, we were both sicker than we knew. My cancer was already back. Jimmy’s blood was bad. You can’t know until the body gives up its signs, switches symbols.

In December, Jimmy took photos of the decorations Theo and Kiernan put up at Christmas, and said it was the best holiday ever, though it might have been the whiskey talking. Theo, Kiernan, and I hung around his porch rail late on Christmas Eve, chatting about our birthdays. Jimmy, Theo, and I were all Capricorns, we discovered, each born five days apart.

Later that night, after setting out the Santa presents for Theo, I pulled out the Queen of Coins from my Waite-Smith deck, the court card associated with the first two decans of Capricorn. It was easy to see it, then, how the queen’s red cape was Jimmy’s red flannel, her throne his wheelchair, her downcast smile Jimmy’s gaze as he chatted on Messenger or watched the Hokies play on his phone as the sun set. The golden light of the natural world hung all around the edges of our lives and this little square tarot image. All of a sudden I could imagine the vegetation of Smith’s card hiding rusted washing machines and rotting car interiors in its unpainted recesses. Magic and its misuses, its trashed bodies, hidden in plain sight, and out of it, too.

---

This queen is a quiet one, lonely, a person who presides over one’s life, in the words of Arthur Waite, by “contemplat[ing] her symbol and see[ing] worlds therein.” I can’t know how many and which worlds Jimmy saw, but I do know he was both contemplative and plain-spoken about what his disability meant for him. A lack of movement, hard fucking times, for one reason or another, tangible or not, most of the time. He didn’t wax on about the importance of embodiment, and he taught me how to be ok with the fact I wanted escape. I wanted to get out of my body, all the time, too.

Crowley’s description of the Queen of Coins has always resonated with me—“as if they could only realize their essential happiness by getting outside themselves”—and now it struck me as an apt description of what Jimmy and I were doing together-apart-together most days, with our porch sitting, our silences, our weather chats, our phones in hand.³ We were managing the essentials, groping towards an essential happiness. In nature, but not quite. Living, but on the downward slope of death’s pot-holed road. The Queen of Pentacles, elementally, is water of earth, all mud. On the hermetic Tree of Life, she’s understanding in action, transcendence through severity, hard form. Suffering, if you’re not bored of that word.

The Waite-Smith Queen of Pentacles on top of my paperback copy of Catafalque.

Jimmy died two weeks ago. A sudden bout of pneumonia, after an ambulance took him away months ago for kidney stones. We woke that morning and noticed a new paper skeleton hanging from the eaves of his porch, blowing in the October wind. His parents must’ve put the Halloween decorations up, I said to Theo, pointing out our front window, speaking the morning’s first words. An hour later Missy from up the hill was texting me a screenshot of a Facebook post from Jimmy’s dad about his son’s death. Small fame, a lot of likes.

I’ve been bereft, weepy. In the same span of days, Kiernan’s grandmother also died, and a close friend’s father-in-law, an anesthesiologist who once pulled strings to get me more immediate cancer care at UVA. I put all three of their names into the blessing bowl on Tuesday night meditation at the Unitarian Church. Kiernan will travel to the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana to say goodbye to his grandma this week, on All Soul’s Eve. My friends are relying on me to coordinate meals and childcare for them each night in the wake of their own sudden loss. I’ll honor all of these deaths, in the mundane, daylight ways I can. But it’s Jimmy’s spirit that’s been visiting me. It’s Jimmy, my Queen of Coins, I’ve been reading with. It’s Jimmy who is my personal dead, my true ancestor, in that his life, and now its absence, asks both spiritual and practical questions of mine.⁴ How do I want to live my own disability, illness, and death, the middle hours of every day?

Hey sweetheart, I prayed for or to or with Jimmy the other night, when it finally got dark enough to rest. Thanks for being my neighbor.

This is the second in an occasional series on the court cards of the tarot. You can find Reading With the Queen of Wands here.

1. I wrote about In the Distance alongside thoughts on the myths and astrology of Chiron here. I also included the book in a roundup of 2023 favorite reads here.

2. I wrote about my decision to end the menopause medication here. And here’s an angry essay about how others were writing about menopause (and whales lol) circling similar themes in a different register.

3. For Waite on the tarot, see The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. The Hermetic Library is a great resource to Crowley’s writings on the tarot in The Book of Thoth and elsewhere.

4. For ancestor work, I follow Carl Jung’s model of speaking to and working with our personal dead, identifying them as those whose lives have made demands upon our own. See Jung’s Red Book, or the “Seven Sermons to the Dead,” specifically. Also Peter Kingsley’s Catafalque: Carl Jung and The End of Humanity. Or, if you’re not into reading 600 pages from a classics-scholar-turned-mystic, you can listen to a 60-minute podcast episode from a magician-turned-psychotherapist, the latter of which is just as (maybe more!) profound.