One of the most familiar images in the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot is the Five of Cups. A solitary figure stands with his head bowed, wrapped in a long black cloak, contemplating three overturned cups. Behind him, unnoticed, are two cups that remain standing. In the distance, a bridge crosses a river toward a building on the opposite shore.
Traditionally, the Five of Cups is associated with grief, disappointment, sorrow, and loss. It frequently appears in readings involving the death of a loved one, the breakup of a relationship, or some other painful experience.
The symbolism is straightforward enough. The three overturned cups represent what has been lost. The two standing cups represent what remains. The grieving figure is so absorbed in his sorrow that he cannot see the possibilities that still exist.
But I’ve been thinking about this card lately, and it occurs to me that there’s another way of looking at it.
What if the Five of Cups isn’t always about grieving something that happened recently? What if it’s about grieving the life we’ve lived?
And, more importantly, what if it’s about learning to stop grieving that life and begin living the one we still have?
The Grief We Don’t Recognize
When we think about grief, we usually associate it with a specific event. Someone dies. A marriage ends. We lose a job, a friendship, or something else that was important to us.
But there are other kinds of grief that aren’t nearly so obvious.
Consider someone who grew up in a deeply dysfunctional family. Perhaps their parents were abusive, emotionally unavailable, alcoholic, or simply incapable of providing the love and security that children need.
That child experiences some very real losses.
They may lose the opportunity to develop a healthy sense of self-worth. They may never experience the security of knowing that they are loved unconditionally. They may grow up believing that the world is dangerous, that other people cannot be trusted, or that they are somehow fundamentally unworthy of happiness.
And here’s the interesting part.
They may not even realize that they’ve lost anything.
Children generally assume that their family environment is normal. They don’t have another childhood to compare it with. If they’re repeatedly told that they’re worthless, they may simply believe it. If they’re neglected, they may conclude that their needs aren’t important.
Those beliefs can follow them into adulthood.
They may repeatedly choose dysfunctional relationships, struggle with addiction, sabotage opportunities for success, or experience a persistent sense of dissatisfaction without understanding where it comes from.
Of course, not everyone who experiences a difficult childhood develops these problems. But for those who do, the consequences can persist for decades.
And beneath those consequences, there may be an enormous amount of unrecognized grief.
Grief for the childhood they never had.
Grief for the love they never received.
Grief for the person they might have become if circumstances had been different.
In a very real sense, they may be grieving an entire life without even knowing it.
Becoming Aware of the Loss
For many people, the healing process begins with a startling realization.
Perhaps they enter therapy because they’re depressed, struggling with relationships, or experiencing problems they can’t seem to resolve.
As they begin examining their personal history, they discover something they may never have consciously recognized before.
Their childhood wasn’t normal.
The way they were treated wasn’t acceptable. And the things they believed about themselves weren’t necessarily true.
This recognition can be enormously liberating, but it can also be painful.
Suddenly, the person begins to understand just how much they lost. They may become angry at their parents or caregivers. They may feel cheated out of opportunities that other people took for granted. They may experience profound sadness over the years they spent struggling with problems that originated in circumstances beyond their control.
In other words, they begin to grieve.
And that grief is not necessarily a setback. It may be an important part of the healing process. Before we can come to terms with a loss, we generally have to recognize that the loss occurred.
In terms of the Five of Cups, we have to see the three overturned cups before we can understand what they mean.
When Grief Becomes an Identity
Everyone experiences grief differently.
Some people recover from painful experiences relatively quickly. Others require months or years. There is no universal timetable, and the length of someone’s grieving process is not a measure of their character or emotional strength.
But there’s another possibility worth considering.
Sometimes grief becomes so deeply incorporated into our sense of self that it begins to define who we are.
Spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle has written extensively about the way people construct identities around their suffering.
There’s a significant difference between saying, “I experienced something terrible,” and saying, “I am a person whose life was ruined by something terrible.”
In the first statement, suffering is something that happened to us. In the second, suffering has become part of our identity.
And once that happens, moving beyond the suffering can become surprisingly difficult.
We may become so accustomed to seeing ourselves as victims of our circumstances that we unconsciously continue to interpret our experiences through that identity.
Every disappointment becomes further evidence that life has treated us unfairly. Every failed relationship confirms our belief that we’re unlovable. Every setback reinforces the conviction that happiness is something other people experience.
The original suffering was real. The injustice may have been enormous.
But the identity we’ve constructed around that suffering can sometimes perpetuate its influence long after the original circumstances have ended.
And this brings us back to the Five of Cups.
Look at the figure in the illustration. He’s completely enveloped in his black cloak. We cannot see his face or identify much of anything about him.
For the moment, grief appears to be his entire identity.
He is not simply someone who has experienced a loss. He has become the grieving figure.
The Healing Process
Recognizing the origins of our suffering is an important beginning, but recognition alone doesn’t necessarily resolve it.
There may be years of conditioning to unravel.
We may need to examine beliefs about ourselves that were formed in childhood. We may have to recognize destructive patterns in our relationships. We may need to learn how to establish boundaries, trust other people, or experience emotions that we learned to suppress.
And we may have to grieve.
Not just for the original childhood experiences, but for the consequences that followed us into adulthood.
Perhaps we spent twenty years in an unhappy marriage because we never learned what a healthy relationship looked like.
Perhaps we abandoned opportunities because we believed we weren’t capable of succeeding.
Perhaps we spent much of our lives trying to win the approval of people who were incapable of giving it.
These realizations can be painful. And there’s no reason to pretend otherwise.
But at some point, another question begins to emerge. How long do we want to continue standing in front of those three overturned cups?
That’s not a question about how long someone should grieve. Nor does it suggest that grief can simply be switched off through an act of will.
It’s a question about the direction of our attention and, ultimately, the direction of our lives. Because while we’re examining everything that went wrong in the past, something else is happening.
Our present life is continuing. And the future is approaching.
Acceptance: The Moment We Turn Around
I think one of the most important elements in recovering from grief is acceptance.
And by acceptance, I don’t mean approval.
We don’t have to decide that the things that happened to us were acceptable. We don’t have to forgive people who hurt us. We don’t have to convince ourselves that our suffering was somehow necessary or that everything happened for a reason.
We can look back at our childhood and say, “That was terrible. It shouldn’t have happened. I deserved better.”
All of those things may be absolutely true. But there’s another truth that eventually has to be acknowledged.
It happened. And nothing we do today can change the fact that it happened.
We cannot go back and have a different childhood.
We cannot recover the years we spent in unhappy relationships.
We cannot undo the mistakes we made because we didn’t understand the forces influencing our behavior.
We can learn from those experiences. We can heal many of their consequences. We can change the way they influence our present lives. But we cannot change the past itself.
And perhaps that’s the turning point represented by the Five of Cups.
The grieving figure finally recognizes that the wine spilled from those three cups is not going to flow back into them. No amount of sorrow, anger, regret, or resentment will make that happen.
The loss is real. The past is over. And there are still two cups standing.
The Two Cups That Remain
Here’s something I find particularly beautiful about the symbolism of this card.
The figure doesn’t have to create the two remaining cups. They’re already there.
He doesn’t have to earn them. He doesn’t have to repair the three overturned cups before he’s allowed to enjoy them. He simply has to turn around and recognize their existence.
And what might those two cups represent?
Perhaps they represent the capacity to love and be loved.
Perhaps they represent creativity, friendship, curiosity, pleasure, or the ability to find meaning in ordinary experiences.
Perhaps they represent opportunities that we haven’t yet recognized because we’ve been so preoccupied with what went wrong.
Or perhaps they represent something even more fundamental. The realization that we are more than the sum of the things that happened to us.
Our childhood may have shaped us, but it doesn’t have to define every aspect of our future. Our losses may have changed us, but they don’t have to become our entire identity.
And the years we’ve already lived, however painful they may have been, don’t have to determine how we experience the years that remain.
Of course, turning around doesn’t mean that the grief magically disappears. We may continue to feel sadness about the past. We may occasionally find ourselves looking back at those overturned cups. Some losses may always hurt.
That’s part of being human.
But there’s an enormous difference between remembering our suffering and organizing our entire lives around it.
We can acknowledge what we’ve lost while also embracing what remains. In fact, doing so may be an essential part of healing.
The Bridge to the Future
There’s one final detail in the Five of Cups that deserves our attention.
In the background of the Rider-Waite-Smith illustration is a bridge leading across a river toward a building on the opposite shore.
The grieving figure has his back to that bridge. He’s so absorbed in contemplating the overturned cups that he cannot see the way forward.
And perhaps that’s the ultimate message of the card. The bridge doesn’t lead backward. It cannot take us into the past and give us the childhood we deserved, the marriage we wanted, or the opportunities we missed.
It leads toward something that hasn’t happened yet.
Our future.
And we don’t have to wait until every trace of grief has disappeared before we begin crossing it. We can carry our memories with us. We can acknowledge our wounds. We can continue healing as we move forward.
But first, we have to turn around.
What Does the Five of Cups Want?
In traditional Tarot readings, the Five of Cups is often interpreted as a warning against becoming so absorbed in loss that we overlook what remains.
I think that’s a perfectly valid interpretation. But I also think the card has something much more profound to tell us.
Sometimes the three overturned cups represent a particular disappointment or tragedy. And sometimes they represent an entire personal history of suffering, deprivation, and regret.
Either way, the message is essentially the same. We cannot change what has already happened.
We can recognize it. We can grieve it. We can learn from it. And, in time, we may come to accept it.
But eventually, if we want to experience the possibilities that still exist, we have to redirect our attention toward the life that remains available to us.
The Five of Cups doesn’t ask us to deny our suffering. It doesn’t ask us to pretend that the past was different. And it doesn’t demand that we finish grieving according to someone else’s timetable.
It simply reminds us that our losses are not the entirety of our lives.
Three cups have fallen.
Two are still standing.
And there’s a bridge waiting to be crossed.
At some point, we have to decide whether we’re going to spend the rest of our lives contemplating what we’ve lost—or begin discovering what we still have.
