My mom
My parents met in a group home for children. Both came from unstable environments and different forms of abuse. My mom had a far more abusive childhood, but her outlook on life was far more positive than my dad's. Where she embraced kindness, he embraced cynicism. Where she tried to protect us from harm, he caused us damage.
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In the short film below, I document the first 3 months of taking care of my mom in what ended up being the last year of her life. When I started yoga as a teenager, it was at a time when my whole world had been turned upside down. My mother had gone in for brain surgery to have benign tumors removed, but she ended up having complications that left her physically and mentally disabled for the rest of her life.
I decided to be her primary caregiver when I was 28 and finishing graduate school in NYC. It was at a time when I was staying consistent with regular yoga practice and meditation. I still say to this day that during that meditative period of my life, I felt as if a small voice inside of me was telling me to get my mom out of the personal care home in Pennsylvania and bring her to live with me in Brooklyn...and I needed to do it right away.
Every reason I could think of to not move her in with me was a selfish reason. I know now that the small voice I heard tell me to move her in was my own subconscious mind telling me my own unselfish desires, and I'm so grateful that I listened to myself. Together, her and I worked on changing her broken and depressed emotional state into a positive one again.
This short film was created because it was a film project for a class and I had no time to do anything other than care for my mother, so my mother became my project. When I watch this film, I see the stressed-out look on my face all the time. I had so many worries on top of so much pain, but my love for my mom drove everything I did in life. This film project is a rushed and unfinished, but cleaned up and edited documentation of the beginning of her changing her life. Unfortunately, soon after I filmed this, she was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma and our lives changed even more.
The following months were incredibly difficult, but we did not lose sight of our goals. We supported each other in every way possible. She went on to lose 100 pounds, was taken off nearly every medication (most were for symptoms easily manageable with a healthy lifestyle), and she went from needing 100 units of insulin a day down to only using it when the seldom and random glucose spikes occurred. She was literally very healthy, with the exception of the cancer. After several months, the cancer was going away and we had so much to be happy about. Then it made its way into her spine and brain and took her pretty quickly. She passed away on her 62nd birthday, December 7th.
Grief
I was not prepared for how hard of a time I was going to have when my mother passed away. I had experienced grief before, but this was different. This had been a traumatic year of constant appointments, prescriptions, medical bills, tracking blood sugar, weight, and heart pressure, meticulously planning meals that were healthy, keeping an exercise regimen, and many more things while I attended classes and completed assignments for grad school...but then it was suddenly done.
I completed my Master's degree the week after my mother passed and I was suddenly left with nothing. It was as if that entire year never happened because I was alone in our apartment with nothing but old belongings and medical equipment I no longer needed. I couldn't wrap my head around where she was. Even though I thought I was prepared for her eventual death since I was a teenager and she almost died then, her actual death turned out to be the most devastating experience of my life.
I turned to yoga and meditation for comfort because it was, once again, all I really had. It helped me, at least a little, escape my emotional pain. I didn't know nearly as much about how to use yoga as I do now, but at least I knew enough to get me through the worst of the pain. I eventually was able to pull myself together and create a plan to move on with my life. However, even though I was moving on with my life, I was still existing in a state of constant grief that only added to my already existent yet undiagnosed PTSD.
In my grief, I was very self-destructive. I smoked and drank plenty and I left NYC and my career behind me and moved to Taiwan to teach English. I was trying to run away from the pain. There was a point when I connected with someone who related to the pain I was feeling from grief, but he tragically died in a rip-tide accident just a couple days after we bonded, sending me further into grief.
The following years were a whirlwind of drastic change. I eventually married and had a daughter, moved internationally a couple more times before returning back to where I grew up. The pain of being a new mom without my mom was another level of pain I had a hard time dealing with. I was constantly feeling judged and rejected by the new people I was meeting in my life and it was making it harder to be optimistic. The grief made everything so much more worse. I wasn't the mother or wife I wanted to be.
It has been almost 10 years (in December 2022) since my mom died and I still feel the effects of that year of taking care of her and the pain of her death so strongly. However, I'm at peace now. Yogic philosophy has played a huge role in helping me let go of my grief. That year taught me a lot about the person I am and who I want to be.
When I moved my mom in with me, she was severely depressed after years of living in assisted living facilities and feeling like she'd been tossed aside by family and society. She was a prisoner of her mental health. She was obese and on a lot of medications that made weight loss difficult and therefore her mobility and happiness continued to suffer. In that year together, we worked on changing her mindset to a more positive one again. Eventually she was once again the happy and positive mom I remembered having as a kid, from before her brain surgery changed everything. I'm so grateful I got to see her again one last time.
​As hard as that year was, I would do it all again. I'd still spend all those hours at hospitals or in doctors offices or cooking her meals or sewing her clothes or bathing her or dressing her or whatever else she needed me to do. I would do it all again in a heartbeat because she needed me to. She had been a nurse who took care of people before her brain surgeries. She was good at that.
I'm good at helping people change their lives. I'm not a nurse like she was, but I still want to take care of people the way I know best. I teach yoga based on my own experiences in life and what I know works. Yoga works. And I will devote my life to helping people use it to change their lives.