I don’t usually put much stock in horoscopes. Mine tend to read like fortune cookies written by someone hedging on an emotional bet. I still read them, of course, but for amusement rather than guidance.
So imagine my pause over the morning paper when my horoscope declared, “The return to known territory restores you. It’s as though you’re pulling up in a familiar driveway. The minute the tires touch this sacred pavement, your body relaxes. You are in a safe place—a place like home.”
I’ll admit, it was evocative and a little cinematic. I pictured a soft exhale of arriving somewhere meaningful. It was the kind of language that makes you believe the universe might be sending you a sign.
Then I remembered something my wife Lori had said just a few hours earlier with the same casual tone one might use to announce a trip to Walmart.
“We’re going to drive to the cemetery to see the bench they installed on our burial plot.”
And that’s where things took a turn.
It was an eerie juxtaposition— almost poetic in how the mundane and inevitable collided. The horoscope framed “a place that feels like home” in a soft, comforting ambiguity. It invited imagination and even nostalgia like the hopeful sentiment inside a Hallmark card. Then my wife’s comment landed like a cold dose of reality. Suddenly, “home” shifted from metaphor to something literal and unsettling. It reframed the horoscope entirely—not as mystical foresight but as a morbid inevitability.
To be clear, it’s undeniably practical to pre-plan one’s eternal accommodations. It’s fiscally responsible, emotionally considerate and remarkably efficient…if you squint through that last part. There are no last-second arrangements or awkward family debates about granite colors. It’s just a bench, a plot and a sense that all future logistics have been tidied up. Not the fun kind, like planning a Rocky Mountain vacation, but there’s a sense of accomplishment, nonetheless.
Still, I gripped my coffee mug and reexamined the horoscope like it was less spiritual and more like a travel itinerary. Together, the experience read like an existential comedy— how we easily project meaning onto vague predictions and how life—or a spouse with impeccable timing— can snap that meaning into something far more grounded.
To her credit, Lori approached the outing with admirable normalcy.
“It’ll be nice to see it finished,” she said, as if we were talking about a patio renovation rather than our final addresses.
And admittedly, there’s a certain peace in treating the inevitable with the same practicality we apply to everything else.
It turns out that mortality is really just another item on the to-do list.
By the time we drove the several hours distance to the cemetery, I couldn’t help but notice the parallel to my horoscope. Tires rolled slowly onto quiet grounds and an overwhelming sense of stillness. It wasn’t exactly the warm embrace of a childhood driveway but not entirely foreign, either. Oddly enough, there was a kind of calm in confronting the long view of things.
The horoscope got something right. It really did feel like I was arriving somewhere known, not in the sense of memory, but in the sense of certainty. I recognized it, whether I was willing to admit it or not.
As we stood there admiring the bench following a photoshoot of several selfies that certainly added some lightness to the overarching theme of death, I couldn’t resist mentally rewriting the day’s prediction into something a bit more honest. The paper had promised that I would travel somewhere that feels like home. And my wife told me where: amongst rows of quiet stones, where we’ll someday settle for good.
That kind of alignment makes you reconsider a horoscope column less as prophecy but more as an invitation—not to predict the future but to notice the strange, sometimes funny ways it overlaps with the present.
If nothing else, it convinced me of one thing—my next horoscope can wait. I already know where I’m headed— eventually.
And no ambiguity is required…
