20/30: grief, yoga and the first law of thermodynamics: on letting things take the time they need to take

Funeral rites, the possibility of life after death, seven year cycles and welcoming grief in

Anything physical is always changing, therefore, its reality is not constant, not eternal. (BKS Iyengar)

I’ve been thinking a lot about choices and decisions about what happens to the body - to your body - after death. My mum wanted to be cremated, while my dad wants to be buried. 

Mum was an Iyengar yoga teacher for many years and, while she was a firm agnostic (if such a thing is possible!), she subscribed to the Hindu belief that cremation frees the soul (which is eternal) from the body (which is not). In Hinduism there are five elements from which everything in the Universe is made: air, earth, fire, water and aether (space). Cremation returns the body to those five elements and releases the soul, ready for reincarnation into a new life form. 

I want to believe in reincarnation. I want to believe that Mum’s soul, that some essential spark that made up who she was, endures in some form. I sometimes slip into the magical thinking of believing that she’s present or sending me a message through an animal - like the hare I saw on the morning of the day we scattered her ashes. But ultimately, I’m unable to truly believe in that sort of endurance of the soul, of the survival of the personality beyond death.

I do believe in the endurance of matter. In the first law of thermodynamics: energy cannot be created or destroyed, but can instead be transformed from one form to another. We are made of stardust. One day the atoms that make up my body might become part of an oak tree, or a fish, or a butterfly. But I think that consciousness, whatever it is and however it forms, ends when we die.

In some ways, burial makes more logical sense than cremation as a way in which that transformation of matter from one form into another can take place. I read that cremated remains are biologically inert, which as far as I understand it means that they’ve been effectively removed from the ‘circle of life’ as it were. They can’t provide nutrients for plants and animals in the same way that a body buried in the earth can do. Fire is cleansing, but it’s also destructive.

I don’t know how I feel about the two options: cremation or burial. My dad wants to be buried and I assume that we will honour his wishes in the same way that we honoured my mum’s stated wish to be cremated. But I don’t like imagining myself going about normal daily life while at the same time my dad’s body is lying in a coffin buried six feet under the soil.

Burial gives you a place to go where you can remember your loved one and feel close to them. I don’t like the absence of a single place I can go to remember Mum. There’s no grave I can visit or lay flowers on. But at the same time I like that instead there are a multitude of places where I can feel close to her. We scattered some of her ashes into the sea, so in a way I feel like she’s in all seas. Whenever I visit the coast it’s like I’m visiting her. My childhood home is another place where I can feel close to Mum  - partly because so many memories are woven into that place, but also because Dad scattered some of her ashes in the garden. There’s comfort in a sense of her continuing physical connection to that place.

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As we explore the soul, it is important to remember that this exploration will take place within nature (the body), for that is where and what we are. (BKS Iyengar)

I want yoga to be another way I can feel close to Mum. She was an Iyengar yoga teacher. I used to go to some of her classes as a teenager and later as a young adult, when I was home from university. In the first few years after her death I tried to going to several different types of yoga class: mother and baby, Hatha yoga, Ashtanga yoga. None of them felt right. They weren’t the same type of yoga that Mum had taught, and I was aware that I was actively avoiding finding an Iyengar yoga class to try, because then the issue would be that the teacher wasn’t her.

But all the different types of yoga I tried also brought Mum too closely to mind. I couldn’t get through a class without my eyes burning from unshed tears, a knot in my stomach that shortened my breath and pulled my shoulders tight. Savasana - corpse pose - relaxation at the end of each class could not quiet my mind. I felt sadness, anger, guilt, shame, and an enduring sense of disbelief. It was impossible to believe that she was truly gone, that I would never see her again. 

I stopped seeking out new yoga classes to try, decided I needed something new, a form of exercise with less emotional baggage. Barre classes, running, strength training and swimming all provide alternative ways of being in my body. Lately, however, I’ve been wondering if I should return to yoga. Last time I tried it, I was in the chaos of grief and pregnancy and mothering an infant/ baby/ toddler. The sharp edges of experiencing death and birth have softened over time. My body is more my own these days, rather than being annexed by my children on a regular basis.

Of course I grieved for Mum after she died, but sometimes I feel like I didn’t grieve fully. Like I held back from some parts of grief, or put them aside until a time when I was more able to embrace them. Like my body or my mind - whether consciously or subconsciously - prioritised the immediate need to nurture and care for a baby, and postponed some of the grieving process.

The first two years after Mum’s death were dominated by pregnancy and the first year of my youngest child’s life. Mothering consumed me, leaving only slivers of time and space in which to be a grieving daughter. Add seven more years on to that, and we’ve reached the present. Seven year cycles crop up everywhere, from child development to cell regeneration to the ‘seven year itch’. Maybe I needed that time to pass before I could return to the raw grief I felt immediately after Mum’s death, before I was ready to process the experience.

Maybe now is the time. I’m writing about Mum’s illness and death and the aftermath more than I ever have done before. Beyond the short poems and fragments of writing I’ve scribbled out previously, now I’m writing long form prose and reflecting on my experiences, shaping a narrative that makes sense to me. I could - I can - start practicing yoga again as part of that. I feel (more) ready to face the emotions that yoga might bring up for me. I recognise that they’re probably necessary emotions. That I need to let them in and allow them to move through me. I need to stop resisting them, learn to bend rather than break.

The pose begins when you want to leave it. (BKS Iyengar)

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