This eclipse season took out the mothers. The sovereigns, as it was supposed to. And this is what eclipses do. For thousands of years, when an eclipse crossed a kingdom, people waited for a ruler to die. The sun goes dark, a crown falls. Kings believed it enough to keep astronomers on payroll just to warn them. This August the sky gave us two eclipses in sixteen days.
I saw a pattern. What is happening in 2026 happened in 2016. Ten years apart. So I did what you do with a pattern. I looked at who died then. I looked at who died now. I put them side by side.
THE COURT OF 2016
Bowie - the Thin White Duke.
Prince - Prince.
Glenn Frey - the Teen King.
Rickman - the Half-Blood Prince.
THE COURT OF 2026
Kusama - the Polka Dot Princess.
Dolly - the Queen of Country.
Gloria - the Mother of Feminism. The Queen Mother.
Tim Curry - the most famous Queen in cinema for fifty years.
King Harald - an actual king.
One court passed ten years ago. One court passed now. This is symbolism, not a ranking. Nobody on this list matters more than anybody else. The titles are the pattern.
Kusama is the one princess in the 2026 court, and she earned her spot another way, which is the whole back half of this essay.
Here is who they were.
Kusama died on August 14 and nobody knew for twelve days. She was 97, in a Tokyo hospital, painting until her final days. Yayoi Kusama, one of the most famous artist alive, the woman whose mirrored infinity rooms let millions of people stand inside forever for one minute each, and she made all of it while living voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital, crossing the street to her studio every morning for nearly fifty years to paint the visions that started when she was ten.
By the time her studio told us, Dolly Parton was already gone, at home in Nashville at 80. Dolly wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love You on the same day, then spent her later decades mailing free books to children, over two hundred million of them, because her own father never learned to read.
Tim Curry was reported that same day, also 80. Tim Curry put on fishnets and heels in 1975 and played Frank-N-Furter so completely that half a century of strange kids walked out of midnight screenings knowing they were allowed to exist.
Yesterday it was Gloria, announced today, at 92, at home in New York, twenty days before her own memoir comes out. Gloria Steinem went undercover as a Playboy Bunny to expose how the girls were treated, founded Ms. magazine when the whole publishing industry said women’s issues couldn’t fill a magazine, and became the face of the movement that rearranged half the population’s lives.
And on August 28, King Harald V of Norway died at 89. He told his father he would marry a commoner named Sonja or marry no one, and held that line for nine years until his father gave in.
A princess, a queen, a queen mother, and a king. In sixteen days.
Ten years ago it went the same way. January 2016. Bowie died on a Sunday, the man who reinvented himself so many times he taught three generations that you’re allowed to become someone new, two days after releasing his final album on his birthday. Alan Rickman died that Thursday, the voice, Snape, the actor who could make a villain the most loved person in the film. Glenn Frey died the Monday after, founder of the Eagles, co-writer of Hotel California. By April we lost Prince, who played every instrument on his own albums and changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol rather than let anyone own him.
So I decided to connect the dots. Literally, this time, because Kusama spent ninety years drawing them. I connected what happened to the dukes and the princes of 2016 to this eclipse season, and there is a connection.
There is one hundred percent a connection.
Both years, the sky did something rare.
Both years, the rare thing meant an ending.
It was about the moon.
It was about Neptune.
I saw the deaths, I remembered 2016, and then I checked what the sky was doing both times.
It matched.
An eclipse is simple. The moon slides in front of the sun and the light goes out in the middle of the day. The old rule was just as simple. The sun is the king. Cover the sun, lose the king.
On August 12 there was a total solar eclipse in Leo. Leo is the lion. The sun’s own sign, the sign of kings. The lion’s light went out.
