snow day thoughts

“Your mama can’t open her eyes, but she’s still responding to sound. The doctors are amazed that she’s still hanging on, and we think she’s waiting for you to come visit one last time before she goes. Can we put you on speaker phone with us and she might think you’re in the room?” “Well, we all know where I get my stubbornness from. Yes, let’s do it. Now? I’m on my way to teach a noon class, so we’ve got plenty of time.”

At 11:59, I hang up and walk into the practice space. My energy shift from confused and anxious to comfortable wasn’t even a conscious one. It was involuntary - sort of like my next inhale. That room feels more like home to me than even my own bedroom, and in that moment, I needed to be home. With a smile and a “how’re we doing guys?”, yoga had begun. I move my students through a gritty practice, rewarding them with a little extra cool down. Grit and grace. That phrase pretty much sums up my entire life. They groan and roll their eyes through laughter along the way, discovering new ways to be strong, but they don’t realize how much they are gifting me. Sixty-six minutes later, as soon as savasana is over, I send my aunt a text. ‘How are you? How are things in hospice? How is she?’ A few moments later, she responds asking me to call her, and when I do, she answers with “She’s gone. 1:05.” Already pulling out of the studio lot at this point, I whipped into the nearest parking lot, flung my door open, and dry heaved into the grass until a grocery store bagger came over to ask if I was okay. “I’m always okay.”

I wrote those top two paragraphs sitting mostly in the dark at the dining room table of a friend’s house the night my mom died. In fact, they were the lead in to the rest of this post, but I wasn’t ready to deal with those words yet. From the outside, I knew it would read callously in a yeah-the-woman-who-actually-gave-me-life-just-died-and-I’m-living-it-as-though-she-hadn’t sort of way, and to add more external conflict to the volcanic inner turmoil seemed, well, impossible. These past ten months, though, have taught me that there isn’t one right way to process death - or anything else so spectacularly shitty, for that matter. People navigate it differently. Hell… one person can navigate it differently day by day or moment by moment, even, and that’s okay. It’s funny how you can live for over four decades and logically know something, but it takes life dropping you smack in the middle of it to actually learn the lesson. Anyway, as I do, I’m skirting the point of revisiting these snow day thoughts.

I’m not much of a Universe or Fate person. By that, I mean I believe in the power of choice and the presence of coincidence. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe that humans are the pinnacle of it all. That would be both narcissistic and naive, but I don’t think that there is anything out there purposefully designing circumstances as veiled signs or subtle directives. I think that the universe is doing its thing just as all the things in it are. That said, I couldn’t help but notice that I sent the text asking my aunt for an update at the exact moment she died. And I couldn’t help but notice my reaction to it. Incredulity, I suppose you could call it. It was a notably uncanny feeling to be on one end of such a remarkable coincidence with someone who would find deeper meaning in the timing on the other end. I also can’t help but notice that it still takes up space in my mind almost a year later. I’m not entirely sure what to do with it, or even if I need to do anything with it. Perhaps, simply acknowledging it will move it over a bit and create room for something new. My mom would’ve turned 67 this month, and unlike all of the milestones that have come and gone, I’m staying curious. I’m paying attention to what bubbles up around this one. I’m, quite strangely, welcoming it.