Corpse Pose
June 2021
I’m just another 42-year-old white lady on her porch doing yoga. I’m trying to quiet my anxious mind and make pliable hips and thighs tight from years of running. There is nothing special about this Tuesday.
My dog stretches long, her body parallel to mine. Bella’s more religious about hewing to this twice weekly practice than I am. She is my shadow. I don’t like to imagine having to creak my body through these postures without her. She places her thick, mutt’s body between me and the rest of the world and moves from sun to shade and back again. My thin purple mat and I stay in the shade. I dab retinol on my face to reverse the effects of past sun damage and my shoulders are more than freckled. I take yoga via Zoom now, like so much else—teaching and meetings. I’m sick of Zoom for the other applications, but I think the Zoom yoga will stick. I never manage to motivate myself to drive to a yoga class, pandemic or not.
The woman teaching the class is my running coach. This class is part of my ultramarathon training program, which in my mind makes it inherently valuable. Mobility, flexibility and gratitude get squeezed out in my striving, over-scheduled life. Again, just another middle-aged, privileged white woman. In a bending chair pose, after I click to see how many minutes of class elapse, I twist and try to find my balance, a point of focus. My exterior light could be my drishti until I spot the sole wasp in the small comb of a nest inside the halo of the light. My epi-pen is somewhere inside, either in my bathroom or downstairs in the pantry. I am allergic to stings. I’ve survived half of the hour-long class without molestation by the wasp (or anything else), but once seen, I can’t unsee the long, sharp wings, the quivering antennae, globular eyes. I straighten into warrior one.
Two of my fifteen-year-old daughter’s friends are losing their mothers. One is still losing. One has lost. The first death was fast and shocking: an aneurysm. One moment she was nurse practitioner, mom, wife, friend, volunteer vaccinator and clinician for homeless and fragilely-housed children. The next she was on life support. Less than a week later, even that light dimmed. The machines keeping her alive quieted. Her chest stilled. Her daughter hasn’t returned to school. My daughter texts her and deletes: Im thinking of you. I love you. Im so sorry. Finally she hits send, knowing that nothing she can say or do can fill the crater in her friend’s life. There has been no obituary. A Google search highlights her beautiful bright smile, her medical practice. The internet still thinks she’s alive. Feet together, I fall into a forward fold.
Bella growls at a wind-surfer. People walking by our house on the beach don’t upset her. She ignores the endless stream of cargo ships and Navy vessels that arc past our home as the Chesapeake Bay channel opens into deep Atlantic. Fishing boats, sail boats don’t ignite even an ear twitch. But windsurfers and their colorful sails she can’t abide. Like an old man shooing away kids. Get off my lawn. For a moment, she quiets, victorious. She’s chased him off. When the wind shifts, he returns. The growl builds deep in her throat. Seated back down on the mat, I reach for my toes, but graze only my ankles.
The other mother only has weeks left to live. A brain tumor has gobbled her celebrated legal mind, the brain that transformed companies and led corporate and civic boards. When the doctor found it, she was given two months, maybe. So her family has weeks to watch her wither. Her daughter, my daughter’s friend, tries to play soccer, tries to show up as the smartest student in their ninth grade class, though now she never knows who’s picking her up from practice or when. She’s the youngest of four. Until the diagnosis, she was the only child left at home. Now the house is full of grandparents and all of her siblings. She asks my daughter for a therapist reference. Lucy has heard me extoll the virtues of my therapist (again, could I be a bigger cliché) often enough that she asks me for a recommendation.
Butterfly your legs, my instructor says, her voice tinny through my Macbook speakers. Press the soles of your feet together. Goal post your arms. Feel the opening. Breathe through it. I stare up at the wasp. It’s nearly motionless. Close your eyes. Let the opening happen. Welcome the discomfort. I close my eyes, but just as soon feel something on my arm. It has to be the wasp, ready to sting. There’s nothing.
My hips ache as she cues me to shavasana, corpse pose, the rest, my favorite part of any yoga class. Forced napping. Corpse pose. I release my hands from the fists they’d formed, let my feet loll open, my legs lay. Bella growls out to the ocean. I lay on my mat between her and the wasp.
