My Dad is dying
And I am giving birth to Conscious Desire
I nearly flew to Spain last week but he pulled through. He always does. And then he goes back to slowly killing himself, which has been his main hobby for about fifteen years now. So I am back to waiting. We all are.
He’s 77. Every organ is malfunctioning. The doctors keep applying a bandage to one thing and screwing up another. He’s supposed to take over 30 pills and, because he’s a rebel (hello! it’s my Dad!) he doesn’t take them all. He’s given up on life a long time ago. He actually died in 2008, when my mum finally told him she was done. They were both 60 back then.
To this day, in 2026, they still live under the same roof. My childhood home (the one I always wanted to run away from).
Here’s an annoying thing I’ve noticed while waiting for that phone call: I have his coldness in me. I do. I can feel it. The part that observes instead of breaks. The part that reaches for analysis when the feeling gets too big. The part that, even now, is more comfortable writing about this than crying about it.
That is not something I am proud of but it is honest. And the way I choose to live my life now or to write or to speak is only worth anything if it is honest.
So yes. My Dad is dying. And I am, at the same time, trying to understand what his life is actually teaching me about mine and how it can be used to help the collective.
Because let me tell you another thing: sometimes, my friend, it is actually too late. If I hear one more time the cliché: “It’s never too late” I swear I’ll throw up.
Sometimes IT IS too late.
A Doomed Marriage
Brief story of my parent’s marriage so you have context: first relationship ever for both in the late 60s Franco era in Spain, a few walks to the cinema, months to hold hands, married in 1972.
My mum’s literal words about their honeymoon: “I knew that same week I had made a mistake.”
That’s where I come from.
I have studied my Dad’s natal chart thoroughly and it is fascinating - I am saying this for the astrogeeks like myself, because it is all in there.
Sun, Mercury and Mars in Aquarius in the 12th house. Also Aquarius rising. A whole identity built around being different, separate, mentally sharp, impossible to domesticate - and yet hidden. Buried.
His primal masculine energy, his anger, his libido, his capacity to act, to choose, to leave, to touch, to feel is in that hidden and foggy 12th house.
The man who should have used that fire to move, create, protect, rebel consciously, lead, love, DESIRE... instead swallowed it whole.
And swallowed fire does not disappear. It burns from the inside.
A man with enormous energy and zero emotional education. A rebel’s chart born into a repressive religious world. A man who was told his natural body was wrong, literally. He was left-handed and forced brutally to use his right hand. He was abused by an authoritarian mother who told him he was possessed by the devil and ignored by a sick old father who did not have a say.
He was made to believe he was born defective and that is the curse he owned and kept repeating his whole life: “I should have been killed when I was born” - I wish I was joking but I am not, my Dad uses this language on a regular basis and, let me tell you, sometimes he is actually quite funny. The paradox of life.
His sense of humor is as dark as the shadow he carries and, also, he’s got a big heart. He is a good man (now tears roll down), he really is. He’s just… unaware. He never asked any life-changing questions, he never knew what he really wanted (like 90% of the population sadly). He just followed a script written by who-knows-who. The same script everyone else around him was following.
And yes, he also was a rebel, but an unconscious rebel is not free. He is a prisoner in his own mind while his heart starves. He got stuck saying no to the past instead of yes to life.
That was my Dad.
Then there is Pluto in the 6th house: The body. Work. Illness. Daily life. The routines that either sustain us or destroy us.
His body now looks like the final document of his life. Every organ failing. Every system compromised. Dialysis, pills, hypertension, cardiac failure, glaucoma, pain, dependency, slow collapse.
Pluto in the 6th (symbolically, at least) feels like a life where the body becomes the place where everything unprocessed eventually gathers. I am not saying astrology caused his illness or that illness is always psychological but when I look at his life, his body now feels like the final document of everything he never knew how to make conscious.
My Dad did not know how to kiss
I don’t mean that as a joke. I mean it as not knowing how to place his lips to kiss my mum on the cheek when they were dating. Kids learn to do things by imitation, right? There were no kisses in his home. A kiss was a sin in the religious cult nonsense he grew up in.
But a kiss is presence. A kiss says: I am here. I can feel you. I can soften. I can meet you. Without hiding behind performance, duty, fear, religion, shame, control, or the television.
He just couldn’t.
A man physically there but not embodied. A man with desire, buried under shame and conditioning, with a wife but no real bridge into his inner world (let alone hers!). A man who could father children but never understood the sacred responsibility of touching another human being with consciousness.
And what happens with unconscious desire is that it leaks and becomes entitlement. Bad sex. No sex. Duty. Resentment. Illness. Children who grow up feeling something is wrong before they have the vocabulary to say what.
And then those children spend half their lives trying to understand the atmosphere they were raised in.
Conscious Desire
I think I am giving birth to it because I come from a line where desire was not conscious. Where nobody knew what they actually desired. Where bodies were used, ignored, controlled, shamed, obligated, neglected, or sacrificed. Where people got married before knowing themselves. Where women stayed because they had no money (my mum’s true story). Where men touched without presence. Where duty replaced truth. Where the body eventually screamed what the mouth never said.
My Dad’s body is screaming now.
This is not about follow your bliss or manifest your dream life or any of that pastel nonsense. It’s about something much more serious.
What happens when a human being does not listen to what is alive in them?
I always missed a present Dad, not physically - he was always there - but in presence and awareness. Emotionally present. Determined, strong, protective, proactive. A Dad I could run into and ask for help. That never happened.
Even now, I am still the one who secretly hands him money so my mum does not notice, because they are tight and he wants to spend it at the pub. I catch myself doing it and I recognize her - the girl who learnt that love looked like solving things. The savior in me. I have done a lot of work on that girl but she still shows up.
The gift
And maybe this is the part I have had to face in myself too: the temptation to keep rescuing people who refuse to participate in their own life. Because that is also unconscious desire. The desire to save. The desire to be needed. The desire to finally receive love by becoming indispensable (just in case you thought I was a white angel with wings or something).
The gift my Dad leaves me is, precisely, the awareness of not becoming him.
That is harsh. But sometimes inheritance does not arrive as wisdom but as a body collapsing in front of you, showing you with brutal clarity the road you are not here to take.
Like a warning from the darkness. The living map of what happens when desire goes unconscious, the body is ignored, pride replaces softness and survival replaces aliveness.
My Dad is dying and I am giving birth to Conscious Desire, not because I want to make something pretty out of pain but because somebody has to look at the inheritance and say: this ends with me.
That is what Conscious Desire means to me: the break up with the family script nobody questioned.
Love,
Eva:)
It seems that you are taking it upon yourself to break the cycle of your parents.