Once upon a time, the Internet was a wild wonderland of pages of text where anyone could publish anything they wanted, from a deep-dive niche fan site to their most trivial thoughts about nothing, and eventually, their painstakingly uploaded photos, too. Not a lot of people had thought about SEO or advertising or monetizing this drivel— it was just words on the Internet, usually with links to other people’s pages full of words on the Internet. This was known as a blogroll, where you could daisy-chain your way through a forest of these pages, a never-ending scavenger hunt of strangers. I had whole imaginary relationships with some of these strangers, most of whose names and certainly whatever the domain names were, are absolutely lost to my aging memory.
But one stranger, who tippety-typed the raw details of her life onto the World Wide Web and then did monetize it with an unhinged fearlessness, stands apart. Her name was Heather Armstrong, or in the way we speak of fellow icons Kleenex and Alexa and Beyoncé and The Rock— we knew her just as Dooce.
I think I blogroll-surfed my way into Heather’s world sometime in 2007 or 2008, which was well after she essentially invented a genre, or made it her own. And the reason I stuck around was her “About This Site” page, which had me snort-laughing that day, again today, and now has me taking a short break to weep and wonder why anyone tries to write anything at all, or why, when someone does it as well as Heather, they break our hearts.
Okay, having wiped the tears off my keyboard: I humbly submit that her About page from the late 2000s is the finest representation of blog comedy gold from a lost era and should go in the Time Capsule. It’s as loony and thrilling and vicious and gross and endearing as I remember it from the first time. I was immediately captivated by her.
It’s hard to write that Heather is now also in the Time Capsule. And I hope it is of small comfort to her and her family and fans, that when anyone writes with unnecessary capitalization, especially ALL CAPS, that’s a wink to Heather, and not such a bad legacy.
Heather died of suicide on May 9, 2023. I learned the news on Instagram, a place that didn’t exist when she started defining “influencer,” and a place I was shocked to learn I don’t even follow her. I broke into a cold sweat and texted the friends who remember the Blogiverse That Was. My heart stopped for her children, now teenagers like mine. I frantically Googled to find out if the Internet was aware yet (of course it was) and then sped to her website to drown myself in a little guilt that I hadn’t kept up with my imaginary friend lately. How could I fall out of touch with her? How did I miss that she was struggling? Had her life been anything like mine over the past decade, after everything changed so much?
A lot has happened since Heather and I were young mothers. GenX American white women are not the leading edge of pop culture (were we ever?), and the digital world we walk in is almost unrecognizable from the early 2010s, when the literary world Heather helped create migrated onto social media or disappeared forever.
Other things changed for Heather and me, too. Our kids, so fascinating and difficult and all-consuming when they were tiny, are so grown now that they have their own voices and take care of many of their own needs, and we aren’t their public representatives to the world anymore. We both divorced and found love again (okay, I did that twice and that’s just one reason why it took me twenty years to start a blog.) We both spent time feeling unhappy with our relationship to alcohol and with our mental health, and made changes. We both just kept on being a breadwinner in this Godforsaken age of late capitalism and pestilence and violence, no matter how the landscape shifted. And I’m sad to say I don’t know much else about what Heather had been up to in the past decade, but I know I was thinking about her when I decided, not all that long ago, that it was going to be necessary for me to do something deeply anachronistic and start… a blog. And then, she died.
During the time when Heather got famous entertaining us on the blogosphere, I was using the same interwebs to deepen my study of astrology. I also fell in love with, raised a small child with, and eventually divorced someone whose birth chart I learned like the back of my hand. And I don’t remember when I found out that Heather had the exact same birthdate as that person (maybe it was this one?) but it stuck with me, because weirdly I know six or seven other people born on the same day. I already deeply related to Heather for being my age-mate, with babies the same age, who loved the same music and pop culture and laughed at the same things, and now I felt like I knew her even better because of how well I knew her horoscope.
When I learned of her death, one of the things that ran through my mind was, dear God, what has she been going through? What had been happening for her, in the astrological sense, that once I would have had committed to memory? Because the person I loved, who shared her birth chart, also died to me, and now I’ve lost them both. That loss gave me the courage to reach out to her partner, who kindly shared her time of birth with me so I could read her chart more accurately. Thank you, Pete. And in the spirit of Heather’s trademark oversharing, thanks for indulging me in this story. The best tribute I could think of was to christen my blog with a little essay on Heather’s horoscope, and explain why I wanted to. So, here we go.
Heather was born on July 19, 1975, around 2:00 p.m. outside of Memphis, Tennessee.
That she was naturally hilarious was a given. There are few born under a Cancer Sun that aren’t just a little bit funny, and add a Sagittarius Moon as its ruler and it’s off to the races. Now that I know her birth time and see Scorpio on her Ascendant, I recognize it in her intense gaze, often staring directly into the camera. You can see it break the fourth wall in the beautiful, haunting selfies she shared on her Instagram in recent months and years. Mars ruling her chart in placid, stubborn Taurus tells me a little bit about her tenacity, and the way she knew instinctively how to stick with what was authentic for her and see it through. Who else could have the patience and consistency to write about her life online for… twenty years now??? In this economy?! It also makes me giggle that she wrote about how she was born four weeks late. Classic Mars in Taurus, doing it when they’re good and ready and not one moment before. A bit that my son, also Taurus Mars, covered in 2005 by also showing up very late to this Earth Party.
Mars in a woman’s chart is a special interest of mine. Sitting angular in her seventh house, it’s a Very Important Planet for her. It speaks to me a little about how she related to men and male energy around her, and that perhaps she experienced her desires and her force in the world through them. Despite all her vivacity and her public persona and fame, maybe she lived life just a teensy bit through her relationships with men. It’s a good fit for someone who went into business with her husband and made a career out of sharing their life together. And in this way, she was capable of compelling men to live through her strong presence.
I also find Mars prominent in a woman’s chart often when they struggle with alcohol—not necessarily with other addictive substances, but I’m still gathering data. The reason I imagine for this is that women’s Mars drive—anger, libido, courage, leadership– so rarely finds enough traction or support in this world. And nothing puts that life force to sleep, where it can stop needling us and upsetting others, like alcohol does. In the year 2023, after all we’ve been through, there aren’t many who haven’t tangled with the world’s most ancient and omnipresent plant medicine. But I want to honor her experiences with and without alcohol in her life, and the Sagittarius Moon candor and humor she used to describe the journey.
Because Heather died some time after sharing that she had relapsed from a period of sobriety, I could talk to you about how her Mars contacts a Centaur named Pholus, whose fascinating mythology speaks to the destructive forces that alcohol can unleash in our lives, because I am an astrologer. But this is my tribute to Heather’s life, and that’s not all she was about or did here. Mars also contacts her Mercury, so you know her words were going to come fast and furious and hit hard.
To be a woman born under the sign of Cancer is to deal with the archetype of motherhood, whether you raise children or don’t. And she made motherhood the centerpiece of her writing, even though she had many other things to say. Maybe that’s what was so compelling about Dooce—she wrote about living a fun, dramatic, messy, original, and professionally very successful life before, during, and outside of the times she was mothering her kids. But we never forgot that she was their mother, and she’ll never outlive the label of “mommy blogger.” Sure, the media tried to make that category sound trifling, but we all know it wasn’t.
Heather’s Cancer Sun rules her shiny, larger-than-life Leo Midheaven, so it doesn’t surprise me that she grew her fame by sharing the big and small emotions of motherhood with the world. Saturn tightly conjunct her Sun speaks of a core insecurity—that she could never quite feel like she was enough, no matter how much she was loved. And yet, Aries Jupiter trine her Moon says she had the balls to center herself, in order to make a point, or just because it was fun.
A quick word on Heather’s Ceres and South Node, also angular, in late Taurus. This is about nurturing, dark material, and deep attachment in all her relationships, but I like to think it says something about her relationship with her mother, also known as The Avon World Sales Leader. I choose to illustrate that with this post and no, I will not be taking questions. Since her parents and stepparents survive her, my heart hurts to acknowledge the hole she leaves in her family line, not to even mention the men who likely loved her for being gorgeous and emo and infuriating. I’m glad they have an archive of her unique voice, for as long as they don’t pull the plug on Al Gore’s Internet. It sure would kill a lot of trees to print it out. I read that her mother has shared, in her grief and in her faith, that she’s confident they will meet again. Well, I’d say they’ve met before. On the other side, her North Node at the very last degree of Scorpio in her first house— she really left us with a message about death. Maybe the fear of it, or how not to fear it. Dear reader, no one ever really dies.
It’s possible you’re not here to deep-dive on astrology, but I would really squander my credibility with fellow astrologers if I didn’t talk about that Jupiter-Chiron opposite Uranus. She shares that with everyone who was born around the same time, but this energy is what describes in Heather her capacity to model laughing through the pain for many who looked up to her, and to be incredibly forward-thinking, as she was in her life and in her genius for business.
Venus square Neptune belongs to someone who never stops loving to believe in impossible things, no matter how many times they fail to come true. That Venus is also a Very Important Planet for her, and I know that this placement lent her the beauty and irresistible charm that I am sure her loved ones are bereft over right now. But I believe it will also sprinkle fairy dust on her memory.
And last, a note on how she is remembered. I have entered “Heather Armstrong” into the Googs a few too many times in the writing of this article, in order to get some biographical facts straight. And I have read some press that I was better off not reading, about the fake media wars of mommy bloggers and, ultimately, internet bullying, that I will not be adding another hit to from my tiny insignificant unmonetized little blog. But what I want to say is, no matter what she shared publicly about herself, we will never know who Heather was in her very innermost secret heart. A Moon-Neptune can never be known as well as she knew and understood others, and I’m willing to bet Heather kept the vast majority of her real self to herself. When you consider the scope of what she shared with others, you can appreciate how deep that privacy and mystery really was.
Now that I’ve finished crying, a tribute to her Cancerian passion for photography and her daily photos, usually her kids or her dog. I just want to laugh at how Chuck’s little furry face, holding so still for the camera with a tooth sticking out, brings all the memories back.
Rest in peace, Heather.
category: DOOCED