Arcana of the Heart
STEPHEN O’SHEA
Content Note
This story touches on terminal illness, end-of-life experiences, and emotional conversations between patients and loved ones.
Tarot
I keep the box on my desk like an altar. It is cardboard with frayed corners, and a hospital label half‑peeled from the lid. On the top, in the handwriting of my son, Jonah, is the word: ‘Tarot.’
Inside are silver‑and‑black MRI scans, a Codex, and a paper crane folded by Ms Alvarez, the head nurse, on the day he died. The crane is yellowed now, wings bent from being held too often.
Above my desk, one scan hangs in a frame. ‘The Magician.’ A bloom of darkness in the left hemisphere. Once, that shape kept me awake at night. Now I stare at it as though it still speaks, as if Jonah left messages in the shadows, proof that meaning survives even when breath does not.
I used to correct people when they said card instead of scan. I clung to neat medical language that promised order. That was before Jonah taught me another language, of metaphor and magic, of vending machine songs and paper cranes.
Some days I imagine him laying his scans before me. ‘Let me read you,’ he would say. He never read tumours, only hearts.
I still visit the ward where he died. The wall near the nurse’s station has become a living collage. Scans beside sketches, tarot names scrawled in pen, paper cranes blooming like prayers. Some of it his, most of it belonging to those he changed. Visitors stop. Some cry. Some smile. All leave carrying something they did not arrive with.
That is when I know he is not gone. To understand how, you have to start with his story.
*
The Beginning Arcana
Every story begins with a card. Mine was silver-and-black, a shadow near my brain stem. ‘The Tower.’ The tarot card you draw when what holds you up is about to fall.
I did not know it then, but this deck would become more than scans. It would be the arcana of my heart, the language I used to read myself and the people I loved, when facts were not enough.
Welcome to the ward, a place built for facts. I am not.
I am Jonah, and I read my brain like a deck of cards.
The MRI hums with a kind of knowing, tuned to the secrets buried deep inside. The first time I slid into it, I thought its cavernous mouth might swallow me whole. It did not. It translated me. What I returned with was not a diagnosis nor a cure, but a deck of magical cards.
I called them my arcana. Each scan became a card, each shadow and light a symbol, a cipher for what I needed to see.
It began with a flicker of my right thumb. A ghost of the piano lessons I abandoned when tremors made Mozart impossible.
Outside, Mum stood before the vending machine, head tilted, as if its hum might surrender a secret. As if it could dispense not snacks but a different kind of truth, a packet of hope, a world where Mozart still played and my fingers stayed still.
While the vending machine gave her candy, the MRI dispensed twelve silvered slices of my brain, thin as cards. Each one whispered a different story.
I laid them across my bed. ‘They are tarot cards,’ I said.
‘They are scans,’ Mum replied.
‘No,’ I told her. ‘They are a map only believers can follow.’
I named the mass in my left hemisphere ‘The Hermit,’ after the tarot card, lantern raised, illuminating the dark.
Mum watched me christen my skull with tarot names, as though she sensed I was giving shape to something that, for now, lived only in my heart.
‘You want me to stop?’ I asked once.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Explain it to me so I can understand.’ She meant for me to let her into my world, but not the parts that terrify us both.
‘These are magical cards,’ I told her. ‘And this is my Codex of False Prophecies. If you turn your body into a deck, you need a guide. I have given it this name because once you admit something is false you can be braver.’ I filled it with diagrams, dates, and card names, stolen and invented. Magic does not care which.
Later, I carried the stack to the nurse’s station. Ms Alvarez was folding a paper crane to honour another young life that had passed through here. She said one day she would make one for me.
‘I did a reading for you,’ I told her. She looked up, curious.
I folded the words and set them gently between us, the way she folds her cranes. ‘I drew 'The Sun,' the card of radiance and return, of warmth breaking through the shadows. The silence will break, and the voice you long for will rise again. It is your son, and his love will shine on you more fiercely than you ever knew.’
Her eyes welled, as though the warmth of the card itself had broken through the shadows of her heart, flooding the hidden places she thought would never feel light again.
Word travels fast here. People stop by my door to talk. I am not a doctor. My readings are not medical. I do not say remission, fatal, or treatment. No one cries because I am dying. They cry because, for five minutes, my cards help them remember who they were before doctors told them what to be.
*
The Arcana of Life
I am seventeen. Stupid and brave in equal measure.
Maya, my closest friend on the ward, lives three doors down. She is my kindred spirit, tuned to the same wavelength, walking the same tragic road. She hums the vending machine’s song, calling it secret music, a hidden spell of sound. A reminder that choice, like the machine’s rows of offerings, is still possible with the time left, if one only listens. I can hear it, and Mum once listened too. I think of my own devotion to light and shadow, their shifting tones and quiet revelations. Between us, sound and light become twin languages of survival.
Until now it was only the two of us who shared the ward’s arcana. That was until Saffron appeared in the doorway, at the invitation of Maya, who during today’s painting class had sensed her kindred nature.
Saffron is a therapeutic volunteer with watercolours and a gift for coaxing dreams out of people who have forgotten how to imagine. She encourages us to paint beyond the confines of the ward, beyond the journeys our bodies have forced upon us.
She smiled, sketchbook in hand. ‘Maya showed me your cards,’ she said. ‘I felt closest to this one, so I painted it.’
On the page was a lone figure holding a lantern, light spilling into the dark. She turned it toward me.
‘That is The Hermit,’ I told her. ‘Someone who withdraws into a dark cave to seek truth, carrying a lantern to light the way.’
‘It is you,’ she said. ‘The way you journeyed into the MRI, as if into that cave, and returned with a deck of images that only you could read. You hold them like tarot cards, seeing possibilities no one else can, and you shine that light so others glimpse paths beyond the ones they thought they were destined to walk. That is your arcana.’
Maya nodded, her eyes bright, as though she had always known it.
And in that moment, I understood. Maya was ‘Judgement’, the arcana of sound and awakening, the one who could hear the hidden song and call others to rise. Saffron was ‘The Empress’, the arcana of creation, who could take what she saw, give it form, and scatter it where it was needed. And I was ‘The Hermit’, the lantern bearer.
Light, sound, and creation. Illumination, resonance, and form. Magic is always based on the power of three.
*
The Final Arcana
In that moment I realised this isn’t about counting down. It’s about finishing the spread, twenty‑two cards, every Major Arcana, like a map of everything that still matters.
Along the way I want Maya to find the joy in the vending machine’s hidden song, let that joy melt the ward around her, and remember why the earth still holds her. I want that joy to touch anyone who’s listening, to make them believe that even here, there’s still a way back to their heart’s own arcana. And for Ms Alvarez, I want the hum of that same machine to reach her like a hymn she’d forgotten, urging the choice to pick up the phone, hear her son’s voice again, and feel, deep inside, the return of something she thought she had lost.
If that is my final arcana, then it is not an ending. It’s a spread I lay down myself. Every card face‑up. Each one a lantern for hands I will never hold, a map for someone I will never meet.
After Saffron leaves, Maya asks me to do a reading for her.
‘The Moon,’ I tell her, pointing to a scan where my ventricles look like twin crescents. ‘You will find the vending machine’s song, name it and share it. Proof that even in a place built on facts and endings, there is magic in the choices we can still make.’
At the door, Maya says. ‘I’ll find it and work with Saffron to share it with those who think they have no choice.’ She laughs on her way back to her room, the kind of laugh that forgets the ward, forgets the clock, and remembers only the world waiting beyond.
Ms Alvarez appeared the next day humming Maya’s song. She had called her son. He answered, and for a moment the years fell away. He called her Mama, like he always did. When the line went quiet, she held the phone to her chest as if she could keep his voice alive inside her.
I watched her, and it felt like the vending machine’s hidden song had finally broken through. A few minutes was enough to remind her she was still his mother. Enough to remind me that even here, where time is rationed and endings are written in advance, there are still choices that can surprise us, still songs waiting to be heard.
Over the weeks Saffron kept returning with Maya. One afternoon she painted my IV pole into a lighthouse, her version of the hermit’s lantern.
She asked to see the Codex and underlined a line I had written. ‘It’s not a coping mechanism, it’s inheritance.’
The words struck like a card I had not known I was waiting to turn. I thought of the first time I entered the MRI, slipping inside like a hermit into his cave, searching for truth. I returned not with answers, but with a deck to scatter among fellow travellers and a Codex where each page was a lantern or song, a prophecy or painting. False only because I would never live to prove my prophecies. That was the paradox. Once certainty is gone, imagination can be braver.
I begin to see my mother changing. She no longer corrects people when they say card instead of scan. One evening she asks for a reading. She draws ‘The High Priestess’.
I tell her ‘This is you. Quiet knowing, magic hidden in plain sight.’
She nods. In that moment I realise she is not just hearing the prophecy. She is becoming part of it.
When the tumour grows, the scans darken. I know the words for this: progression, aggressive, inoperable. I do not add them to the Codex.
I do not want to tell this part. The part with candles and words like hospice. But I am seventeen, and the story does not care what I want. So I ask for candles. No prayers.
We place them in a circle with the cards, and people come like pilgrims, each choosing one.
I give a final reading. To Ms Alvarez, ‘The Chariot,’ because she has learned to hold the reins when the rest of us drift, steering voice through silence and giving grief its wings. To Saffron, ‘The Empress,’ for the way she has helped me carry the Hermit’s lantern into the world, turning care into creation. And to Maya, ‘The Star,’ because she is the one who sings of choice when the ward appears to offer none, the one whose light will go on shining when mine fades.
My mother’s fingers fold over mine. ‘You don’t have to do this.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘That’s why I want to.’
The night before what everyone else will call the last night, I ask her to pick a card. She hesitates, then chooses ‘The Magician.’
I swallow hard. ‘For every miracle you made look ordinary. For every time you turned fear into something I could hold. For the magic that was never in the cards, but in you.’
I sleep as though someone has told me a bedtime story. My last breath sounds like a card turning. The candles are still burning when the window shifts from black to the colour of new day. My mother sits beside me, eyes open, a paper crane cradled in her hand, humming Maya’s song, the vending machine’s endless tune of possibility. It is as if each note were a button pressed, each breath a falling coin, carrying me past the end, into a beginning which awaits me, like light folded inside the silence, like wings folded inside the crane.
*
Living Arcana
Jonah told me once that stories don’t end, they change hands. And when his voice faltered, he placed the last of it in mine.
Afterward, I sit with the Codex open on my lap, reading the fragments he left behind. Above my desk ‘The Magician’ keeps its place, silver‑black and watchful, as if still translating the world for me.
I think of the ward, Jonah’s fellowship with Maya and Saffron, and the arcana of life. It is still being played out there. The wall near the nurse’s station has become the new Codex to guide all who journey through. Ms Alvarez’s paper cranes bloom across it like prayers in flight, a reminder that grief can fold itself into wings. The vending machine is painted with the same lighthouse image as the IV pole, which stands beside it. And above all, the MRI still hums, tuned to the secrets of all who enter its cave.
And if someone re‑emerges with a deck of silver-and-black cards, I encourage you to draw one. The trick isn’t believing. It’s choosing.
Stephen has walked among humanitarian frontiers where conflict, poverty, and sickness reduce life to its barest truth. In his published prose and poetry, he bears witness to those moments when, even amid loss, the human spirit endures, when eyes meet without armour, and voices rise again.
