Saturn, Loss, and the Break That Makes the New

From Pisces to Aries: Evaporating the Past to Find the Future

I don’t want to keep talking about myself or my dead parents, but Saturn is crossing my Sun at zero degrees Aries, so all this fuss about the Saturn-Neptune conjunction feels extra personal.

While I’m won’t get into the weeds of what this transit means for my specific chart, I will offer a personal narrative that contains a universal lesson.

My father died during my Saturn return in Scorpio after an unexpected and far too short bout with cancer. It was, as you might imagine, a dark and melancholy period. The aftermath of his death was as complicated as our relationship. I found myself grieving the loss of a man who had once been my primary caretaker, but who was also extremely psychologically abusive.

The bright side, if there is ever truly a bright side, was that his death brought me closer to my mother.

She was a woman who left when I was ten. Her vices and our collective pain had prevented us from ever fulling knowing each other, despite her taking every opportunity to remind me, “We’re the only family we have left.”

Honestly, I thought she would live forever. Not because her lifestyle suggested it, but despite it. I come from a long line of heavy drinkers who all lived well into old age because, I am convinced, the alcohol eventually pickled their bodies.

Her death was shocking and astrologically perfect. She passed as Venus crossed my descendant and the Lord of Time stepped in to make his final square to my Moon, the sky’s symbol for body and mother.

In the span of Saturn’s watery trine, the two people who cared for me the most and caused me the most pain have died. The two people who made me have left this world.

If we’re lucky to live long enough, all of us will experience the death of those we love, even if that love is thorny. Biological parents, caretakers, mentors, partners—friends who supported and uplifted.

Eventually, Saturn comes for all of them. Including ourselves.

Astrologers often speak of Saturn as responsibility, burden, gravity. And yet it’s also Saturn’s sickle that clears the field. The cosmic composter, if you will.

When I look back at early memories of me and my parents, it’s haunting to realize I’m the last survivor. Sitting with those impressions now, I find I’m no longer angry at them or myself. The old traumas have faded into ghosts I can finally bid farewell to.

In the two and a half years since Saturn entered Pisces, I have done a great deal of sitting with my feelings. I have made peace with my inheritance.

The last time I saw my mother, she was surprisingly open. She shared stories of my mémé’s childhood in Paris and sent me home with old photographs, including one of her as a teenager. I placed it on my bookshelf when I returned to Los Angeles.

That visit, like every visit over the past two years, ended with her telling me to “make a list of the things you want to take out of here when I die.” She was leaving her house, which had been her mother’s house, to her husband’s nephew because “it’s obvious you’re not moving back to Detroit.”

“Don’t worry,” she threatened, “I’m not dying soon. I have at least 20 years left.”

“In that case, could I have this piggy bank?” It was one of two pieces of pottery she made in a high school ceramics class. The beginning and end of her art career, as far as I know.

“No,” she quickly retorted. “I like it too. You can have it when I’m dead.”

Blast Off

When a spacecraft reenters the atmosphere, it’s subjected to enormous pressure and heat. If not properly fortified, it breaks apart during the descent.

With Saturn’s move into Aries, the fiery beginning of the zodiac, we are asked to undergo a similar passage. The last droplets of Pisces evaporate. What was watery becomes combustible.

For me, this marks the beginning of a phase where I’m truly going at it alone, walking for the first time without the two people who ushered me into this world.

Whether or not you’ve lost your parents, we’re all leaving stories behind. Structures are being tested. We’re being called into courage and independence.

When my mother died, I took the ceramic piggy bank from her house. I wrapped it in piles of clothes and buried in my suitcase for the trip back to California.

When I opened it in Los Angeles, I found it had cracked clean in half during the journey.

And I celebrated the blessing.

The old breaks so that the new can be born.

Looking to explore your own Saturn in Aries story?

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