LOL. Yeah, I KNEW you guys would go for the as-far-from-RWS-as-possibles first! I'm glad you liked the card, though.
Of all my cards, this is one where I can't explain it without discussing my beliefs, since that's why I changed it so much from the RWS original.
Death is one of the few RWS cards that's never really spoken to me. With other cards, even when what's in the card doesn't tie up with my interpretation of the meaning of the card, it's still an OK springboard to trigger my intuition- but the apocolyptic horseman of the RWS death card has always seemed cold and without compassion to me.
Although there's much debate over whether the Death card ever means physical death, I think that it's a possibility. But even if it's not, if it's just the "massive upheaval and change" more commonly suggested, then that can involve some grief as well. And in my experience, grief needs to be met with compassion every time.
I've lost a few loved ones over the past decade, from my four month old nephew (crib death) to my paternal grandmother (who died in a very poor Nursing Home with gangrene). The former made me a right mess for months, and the latter made me feel so guilty (I lived interstate) that I moved back to my hometown to make sure that my maternal grandmother got better care.
I'm not a Christian. Much as I would LIKE to believe in heaven, a benevolent God etc, I simply can't. But one thing I do believe is that death can be a relief, an escape from pain, from fear. It can be a gracious thing, a mercy. So, when I saw Konrad Von Soest's "Death of Mary" it immediately grabbed me as being the basis for my card.
As some people know, this was the one card where I handed over two alternate versions to the publishers:
http://www.goldentarot.com/madeat.htm
In the version that made it to print (my preferred), I did use the van Eyck arching skeleton too, as a number of people had commented on how much they liked it in my old Death card, and it was at least a small nod to the skeletal horseman of the RWS version.
The other one had a hooded Grim Reaper type skeleton instead of the arched one. He was much more menacing and dominant of the scene so I didn't like it as much, but I felt it was closer to the RWS card. I was very happy when USGS chose the other one, though.
The other thing that I believe about death (although it sounds a bit corny) is that someone never really dies if they were loved. I still drive past where my grandmother lived when I was a kid and feel her prescence in a warm, palpable way. My kitchen is full of her "depressionware" and my two brothers say that coming to my place is like going to Nans. I wanted the card to show that, that although things change, they never really end. We all leave our mark, even if it's just in the minds of the people who are left behind.