This morning I went to a yoga class in a lovely old building in downtown Davenport, which also housed a used record store and a vintage clothing store. There were ten women in the class, including some extremely skinny blond women who I imagined to be stay-at-home moms, and an enthusiastic mother-daughter combo, neither of whom was particularly flexible but seemed to be having a really good time. The woman next to me had just gotten some sort of Japanese symbol tattooed on the top of her foot.
The class was not difficult. It had been advertised as a “Level 2″ class, which had almost scared me off because frankly, I just don’t feel like working that hard right now. But it was pretty basic and led me to believe that their Level 1 class was probably just a bunch of stretching. Whatever. It was just what I needed at this moment in my life.
During our relaxation period (“Savasana,” for those of you who don’t do yoga), the instructor put bean bags on our bellies. The bean bags had been resting on the radiator so they were very warm. Then she walked around and sprinkled something on us, and began speaking very slowly.
“Our Sally passed away one year ago this week. Some of you knew Sally, she was an instructor here. Her students told me that she never used to call this Savasana, but instead called it the corpse pose. And then she would say, ‘Some of us are practicing it more seriously than others.’”
She paused for a moment.
“Sally was sick for a long time. For those of us who were with her the last few days, we watched her breaths. She would exhale and then take the longest pauses. And we would all think, is that it? And then breath would be invited back in again.”
She then asked us to consider our breaths in various ways. She suggested we pause at the end of our exhales. I did.
Right before we came out of our relaxation she said, “Sally asked me to sprinkle glitter on all of the classes for a week after she died. She didn’t ask for me to do it a year later but I don’t think she’d mind.”
We opened our eyes, and sat up. My belly was in fact covered lightly with glitter.
The little girl said, “I found a star.” I looked over and she was peering at her finger and smiling.
I sat outside of the studio a few minutes later, putting on my boots where I had left them. There were a few clippings about Sally posted on a bulletin board. She had originally started doing yoga because she had postpartum depression, and had eventually become an instructor that specialized in yoga that helped with that very same disease. She was a single mom, with two kids. She had breast cancer.
The little girl came out and sat next to me.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said.
“I’m just reading about Sally,” I said.
“She was my mom’s friend,” she said. She pointed to a picture of Sally with her two sons. “It’s so weird, he and I were born thirteen days apart.” And then she got up and walked away.
I started to get choked up and I left.
