This card puts the ethics of reading under more pressure than any other, and the range of practice is wide.
The standard modern reading is an ending that is not negotiable: a phase, a relationship, a job, an identity or a belief that is finished whether or not the querent has accepted it. The emphasis falls on the non-negotiability. Other cards describe choices; this one describes something that has already happened and is now working through its consequences.
A second reading, common in psychological practice, treats the card as the necessary clearing that precedes anything new, and reads it forward rather than backward. A third, closer to the older image, reads it as a levelling: the specific observation that the situation does not care about the querent's status within it.
The literal reading has not disappeared. Some experienced readers hold that refusing ever to read the card literally is its own kind of dishonesty, and that the responsible course is to read what is there and be careful how it is said. Others hold the opposite, firmly. This is a live disagreement about practice and neither side is being careless.
Reversals here are particularly contested. Waite gives inertia, sleep and lethargy for the reversed card rather than a cancelled ending, which again is not the simple negation many modern books assume. Marseille practice does not turn the card. What both traditions agree on is that a card of this weight should not be read in isolation, and that a reader who announces it without looking at what surrounds it is not reading, only reacting.