If you've ever wondered what tarot and ancient mourning rituals can teach us about grief, episode 460 of Grief and Happiness is for you. Psychic medium Jenna Matlin discusses her book, The Tarot Book of the Dead, born from helping clients hold unresolved loss—including the taboo \"widow's fire\" that can follow a partner's death. She compares global grieving traditions to the West's approach, showing how ritual can make grief sacred.
In This Episode, You Will Learn:
(01:06) Jenna Matlin's introduction — tarot reading, mediumship, and doula training
(01:55) How tarot and mediumship help clients process unresolved grief
(06:15) What Western culture gets wrong about holding space for someone else's pain
(08:26) Emily's story of losing her husband Jacques — and the friends who stayed
(14:00) Why some people receive spirit visits in dreams and others don't
(18:04) The \"At the Waterline\" tarot spread for grief and mediumship readings
(23:06) \"Widow's fire\": the instinctual desire for aliveness after loss
(27:06) How death became the unexpected inspiration behind The Tarot Book of the Dead
Jenna Matlin is a professional tarot reader and psychic medium based in Durham, North Carolina, with a practice serving clients worldwide since 2012 and a tarot career dating to 1990. She is the author of multiple books, most recently The Tarot Book of the Dead, published by Weiser Books, drawing on her anthropology background and cross-cultural research into death and mourning. Her honors include a COVR Silver Award and Best Spiritual Guru distinction from Philadelphia Magazine, and she teaches at Omega Institute while mentoring aspiring readers.
In this episode, Jenna brings that lens to grief, exploring it through tarot, mediumship, and ritual. Drawing on her anthropology background, she contrasts the West's administrative approach to death with the communal, presence-based mourning of indigenous cultures, arguing Western culture rarely teaches people to sit with pain without trying to fix it. She describes tools she uses with grieving clients, including a tarot spread called \"At the Waterline,\" and speaks to disenfranchised grief among those excluded from funerals. She also introduces \"widow's fire,\" the surge of desire that can follow a partner's death, framing it as sacred rather than shameful, and closes by weaving in myth to argue grief deserves more ritual and community.
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Book: Emily Thiroux Threatt - Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief
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