Background

My father passed away in February 2023. The disease had officially entered our imaginations a year earlier. He had been admitted to the hospital for the eradication of a hernia that was causing him terrible pain. He had lost much weight over the previous year, except for his belly, which remained swollen. Dad thought this was due to a change in his medication. But when they opened him up for what was supposed to be a minor operation, a copious amount of fluid came out of his abdomen, which was unexpected. That was an ascite, an accumulation of water, an inescapable sign of cancer.

To make a long story short, a series of examinations lasting almost six months did not reveal the exact source of the cancer. All we could say was that it had metastasized into the envelope of the belly, the peritoneum. Doctors didn't want to operate on Dad to find out the source. At his age, such an operation would have been risky.

I visited my father on Friday and Saturday with one of my sisters. My parents live 220km from me. On Sunday, I got the call that Dad's health was deteriorating rapidly. So, my four sisters and I were all back at the family home on Monday. We had agreed to look after our father day and night, not to tire our mother too much.

But then things started to happen. Dad had signed the papers for medical assistance in dying. We immediately contacted the local health department. We were told it might be too late to undertake this procedure. It's one thing to ask for this type of help; it's quite another to get it. The protocol is strict and must be followed to the letter.

Nevertheless, a doctor came to visit my father, and a kind of bureaucratic miracle occurred. Thanks to the compassion and thoroughness of the nursing staff, and in keeping with the protocol enshrined in the law, Dad's wish to die close to his family at home was granted on February 14, 2023, at around 8:20 pm.

A precise birth chart in hand

My father's natal chart can be considered accurate. Although the time was provided from memory by several people, it has long been joked that my father could have been an April Fool's Day, as he was born fifteen minutes before midnight.

The birth chart below shows this.

The subject of this article will be limited to comparing the birth chart and what happened in terms of transits.

The illness unfolded "consciously" in our minds at the third Saturnian return in my father's chart. I often told my sisters that the most challenging time would be January/February. There was hope if he managed to get through the last, slow, quasi-stationary Saturnian passage. In my opinion, a natal chart is more like a weather report, allowing us to see the mood of the ocean and the weather we're in.

Predicting someone's death is illusory, even if I had, so to speak, predicted to a friend that I had a feeling it would happen around Valentine's Day. How had I come to this conclusion? I had noticed that the midpoint was almost conjoined with the birth position. I don't think this is reproducible with another theme. It's probably just a coincidence.

The birth chart features a Sun/Mars conjunction and parallelism ( and ), a Moon/Jupiter conjunction () and an important Moon/Saturn trine and parallelism ( and ).

When Dad died, the Moon was rising as Mars, ruler of Aries, Dad's sign, was setting. Two weeks earlier, Saturn had left the "shadow" of its retrograde period (25º Aquarius), also the planet's birth position, and completed its passage over Venus. Like a blow on a heavy bell (), the Sun visited this region two days before death. As for Jupiter, the great benefic, it was two degrees from the IC (if the time of 11:45 p.m. is correct...), very close to the Sun, as if death represented for Dad the beginning of that famous great journey we're so fond of hoping for.

Declinations

What's intriguing about the event is probably the declinations, which I'm beginning to discover.

At birth, Dad had , which no doubt tempered the longitudinal conjunction (Dad was known for his secretive but jovial temperament!). When he died, the transiting Saturn was making a parallelism with natal Moon (). Saturn was also parallel to the axis of the lunar nodes ().

What's more, the presence of Mars on the Descendant echoed the parallelism of their birth (and also their longitudinal conjunction).

I didn't see anything worthwhile in the secondary progressions. At most, the progression became exact in the year preceding Dad's death, as did the progression.

Finally, the 2022 solar return (precessed) shows a Venus/Saturn/Mars triplet at the Descendant.

These are subtle considerations, but they support what's been going on with longitudinal transits, and the study of declinations is something I must pursue. We could take as an example my parents' wedding on May 18, 1957. In Dad's chart, the transits are serious for such a day. Saturn is ascending in square Mercury, and the Moon opposes Pluto... I think that, for Dad, this wedding meant something not to be taken lightly.

The declinations denote something more joyful! and .

The couple's synastry features some very nice parallels: , and .

On my mother's side, we see a fine series of parallels for this day: , , , , .

Not taking declensions into account risks obscuring part of the truth!