The Tower and Death

Two endings, and they are not the same ending. The Tower is sudden and external, the thing that happens to you. Death is the slow, complete close of a chapter, and it is the one you can see coming. Together the tradition reads them as a shock that finishes something that was already ending.

Read as an ending that was in progress before the event that named it. The shock is usually the disclosure rather than the change itself.

A redundancy, closure or collapse in something already in decline. The pair is associated with hindsight: the signs were readable and were read by somebody.

The question worth asking is not "what happened" but "how long had this been ending". These two together rarely describe a surprise to everyone.