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I recently read an article in The Atlantic entitled ‘What Happened to Yoga?’ — a well-written piece offering some valid reflections on the state of contemporary yoga. When I say contemporary, I mean that quite literally — the article, for its purposes, only seems to trace the practice back to the time just before the covid pandemic vs. now. That takes a somewhat limited view of a practice that reaches back into thousands of years of history.

I don’t disagree with what the author is saying — that the practice of yoga as we have come to know over the last ten or so years is highly commercialised, but does that mean that that is all yoga is?

In the opening of the piece, the author references and interaction with one of her old yoga teachers, who makes the claim that “Yoga is dead.” I have to wonder at this point what her teacher’s criteria for such a certain, if “hyperbolic” write-off of an ancient, esoteric wisdom tradition spanning many thousands of years involves.

Is she referencing the fact that yoga classes do indeed on average have a lower attendance than they used to some years ago? Is she killing the practice based on its supposed commercial failure? Has she assigned it to the bin of history because yoga, at its core, is an introspective, non-showy practice that no longer tickles the taste buds of a new generation of relentless optimisers?

With great respect for this lady and her projections on the life-span of yoga — yoga itself doesn’t care what she thinks of it.

Yoga is not just a practice. It also describes a state of being. It is a state that is already there, not something you need to acquire. It is a remembering, not a finding. Before the expensive studio memberships, it cannot be bought. Yoga means union. We are already whole. We are born into this truth, but the world, and specifically the systems of patriarchy and capitalism, seek to separate us from this essential fact so that we will feel less than, and then be lured into spending money to get that wholeness back — the same wholeness that can’t actually be sold because it is already inherent.

Yoga is also a practice, and one that, in our modern world, comes at a price. I have practised yoga in elite gyms and on luxury retreats, but I also started out my practice in run-down church halls before the aforementioned spaces existed (yes, I’ve been practising a long time). I teach the bulk of my classes in two top London studios that command prices that might stretch the budget of most attendees, but I started off, and still occasionally teach in community spaces on a pay-what-you-can-afford basis. I teach at events for big corporations so that I can afford to also teach in schools for children with additional needs for little to no pay. I cannot do one without the other.

Wherever I am teaching, and to whoever I teach, I am not thinking about yoga as commerce. I am privileged to teach this ancient practice that is still, whatever the Atlantic article says, relevant and needed after such a long history. I am also privileged to be able to afford to teach in London, which is important to note, because it would not be possible for me if I didn’t live in a household with a much larger second income to make allowances for my often variable one. This in and of itself is a shame, because it means that, especially in London, where costs are prohibitively high, more and more you see one kind of yoga teacher being represented, especially across the ‘top’ studios. To be able to advance your career as a yoga teacher you need a lot of flexibility, and no, I’m not talking about the spaciousness of your hips and hamstrings, but the wiggle room in your savings account for the many months you will spend making a loss as you try to build up your classes, the extra cash needed for the many trainings and workshops you will need to take, and the over-priced wardrobe you will buy so that you look the part.

So yes, as a commercial pursuit only, yoga is unsustainable.

But that isn’t really yoga. That’s just the current image of it, and it’s a poor illusion.

The Atlantic piece is entitled ‘What Happened to Yoga?’, but I think a better question would be, ‘What happened to Yoga’s PR?’

I love yoga — I’ve been practising it for quite a long time now, since I was fourteen (I’ll be thirty six tomorrow), and I’ve been teaching it in some capacity for almost fifteen years. I care deeply about sharing what it truly is. Has my teaching style changed over the years? Of course. But the essence of the yoga I share has not. That is because I understand that I am just a messenger of this time-honoured tradition, one that most definitely did not start of me and will absolutely not end with me, just because the trends are changing and tastes and appetites are fickle and fast-paced.

If I were to get too high up on my horse here, I’d go as far as to say that a Western yoga teacher referenced in the article, who probably only did their teacher training in the mid-to-late 2000s to proclaim yoga to be “dead” is quite offensive. Maybe her brand of hybrid ‘yogalates’ is “dead”. Maybe the people in her class got tired of doing push-ups in their sun salutations because they’ve realised that, oh I don’t know, you can actually just go to a boot camp or calisthenics class for that, and thus her own brand of yoga is “dead”.

But the yoga that was first recorded in the Rig Veda c.1500BCE is not dead because someone who no longer commercially benefits says so. Something in her appreciation for the practice has died, for sure, but it sure isn’t yoga — literally an undeniable, unchangeable state of union and wholeness — something that is there for all of us if only we can remember it.

Versions and adaptations of Yoga might die, sure (like the aforementioned ‘yogalates’), but that doesn’t mean that the entire practice is written off, and it also isn’t the first time this has happened.

In the medieval period in India, the practice of Tantra arose so that women and people of a lower caste background could participate in yoga. Before then it had been the preserve of the Brahmin (priestly) caste only. Tantra, although not to be confused with modern Neo-Tantra and all its dodgy sex stuff, was still considered a transgressive practice, but one that gifted us with a lot of the powerful Kriya and Pranayama practices some teachers still share today (see the highly popular Wim Hoff method).

Then, in the post-war period, when men felt somewhat universally emasculated after years of trauma and little to show for it, German physical culture and athleticism took centre stage and, you guessed it, began to cross-pollinate with yoga asana. That doesn’t make yoga less authentic to its Indian roots, it just means that it adapted to the changing world around it and thus endured all the way to what we have come to know it as today. Aspects of a practice can die off, but the essence of it does not.

There are many methods and routes to yoga, but there is only one yoga.

I know this from experience as well as study.

During the time my daughter Ruby was in hospital — the best part of two years — it wasn’t always easy for me to make it to a yoga class in ways I had previously been used to. I think this is a shared experience for most new parents, especially those who have children with complex medical needs.

We forget, in the commercialisation and the fetishisation of yoga as only fitness and being able to perform impressive physical feats, that it is a wisdom tradition intended as a way of life, accessible to all, no matter the shape of their body or the size of their bank account. That is what teachers (in the know) mean when they say that it is a practice that continues even once you leave your mat. There is no point spending an hour to seventy-five minutes in a blissful, calm state with yourself if you then go and shout at your spouse once you get home. Your headstand might be rock solid, but does that really matter if you can’t take a stand on global issues?

Some of my best yoga teachers have rarely, if ever, set foot in a yoga studio. The nurses who cared for my daughter, for example — they wouldn’t have been able to afford to attend my studio classes, but they displayed a more advanced yoga than I have seen practised by those who could afford to attend. This is because they embodied one of the key principles of yoga — Seva, which is the Sanskrit word for service. These less visible, and less celebrated aspects of the practice are the reason why I don’t believe that, as a practice, yoga is “dead”.

Service isn’t dead.

Integrity isn’t dead.

Decency isn’t dead.

Humanity, despite many efforts by the rapacious megalomaniacs, isn’t dead.

Just because a class has lower numbers and thus the teacher’s ego is injured, to proclaim an entire practice that hails from a part of the world that you don’t have any original understanding of “dead” is, at least in my opinion, wrong.

Let’s not forget what underlies the very shallow portion of yoga that most of us have been sold.

For reference, here are the Eight Limbs of the practice, as originally laid out in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras:

For more of my writing on yoga specifically, check out some of the below articles:

The Yoga Stack by Elle

Where are you leaking?

There is a Sanskrit word, Brahmacharya, that often carries the weight of misunderstanding. In its earliest context, it was a vow of celibacy taken by monks who sought to devote all of their energy to the divine. To the modern reader, the word can sound monastic and intimidatingly austere, but, as with each and every one of the Yamas and Niyamas, its real teaching is far more nuanced. Brahmacharya, when broken down, literally means…

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a year ago · 4 likes · Elle Daniel ✨

The Yoga Stack by Elle

Who are you when nobody is watching?

This week, we begin a new series, exploring one of the core foundations of classical yoga philosophy: the Yamas and Niyamas. Often translated to mean ‘restraints’ and ‘observances’ respectively, the Yamas and Niyamas form a yogic code of ethics that point towards a way of right living. These rules have nothing to do with how your practice appears publicly on your mat, and everything to do with the private, daily choices you make when nobody is watching…

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a year ago · 1 like · Elle Daniel ✨

The Yoga Stack by Elle

What will you find there?

In the late 1980s, a young yoga teacher named Larry Schultz returned from Mysore, India with a restless vision. He had been studying with K. Pattabhi Jois, the fierce guardian of Ashtanga Yoga, a practice that in its traditional form was strict, sequential, and hierarchical; postures were introduced one at a time, meaning that his students progressed sl…

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a year ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Elle Daniel ✨

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Behind my little London flat is a rare spot of unclaimed land. It is a wild boundary between the back of our building and the larger homes that line the park. It is populated by ivy and foxes — the latter of which are often hidden from sight in the deep verdant carpet. The canopy above is laced with the most abundant bird song. This is incredibly lucky for London, especially the part we live in, whose green spaces are increasingly arrested year on year by incessant property development and faceless individuals who greedily and misguidedly believe that empty homes are better than full forests.

Most mornings I am awoken by the dawn chorus before any alarm I set has gone off, and most evenings I am lullabied to sleep by that same song. The sound of it walks me through the passage between dreaming and waking. No matter what day I’ve had, or what day lies ahead of me, no matter the weight of all the grief I carry, during those mornings and evenings, somehow I am calm. I feel safe even if the conditions of life try to tell me the opposite is true.

Birds only sing when they know safety. When they sense a threat, they cease their melody. Hearing their song therefore, signals that safety to me, and on some deep, primal, subconscious level, my heart is calmed, even if my mind is not. It occurred to me how, the whole time we were in hospital with Ruby, which was the best part of two years, I could rarely hear birds. They were there, but I could not hear them. Their madrigal was somewhere, but my ear, and the waves of my longing heart, couldn’t quite pick it up.

Ruby’s care took place in Great Ormond Street — a phenomenal, world-class hospital located right in the middle of Central London. The air within its hallowed walls was embroidered not with a lark song or the crooning of a wood pigeon, but with melodic and mechanistic accents of a different kind — the sometimes miraculous music of a life being saved. Other times those same machines provided the awful keening cry of time and life running out. The air around the hospital was awash with siren song — not of rare or seasonal flocks, but of vehicles of life and death, tearing their way to the hospital’s back door. There was constant chatter in the streets, not between robins and sparrows, but a canon of human voices detached from their human bodies via phones and endless notifications, signalling the next meeting having started before this one had even begun. There was the whoosh of coffee machines and the hiss of cigarettes being stubbed out on the old pavements. The neat little olive trees that lined Lamb’s Conduit Street clamoured for air in the busyness of it all. Even in Coram Fields, where children and their play took precedence, the adults that accompanied them still thronged the atmosphere with fears that had no real meaning — I’d often watch them and think to myself

If only they knew how scary it can really be

As a park primarily for children, it was so often overwhelmed by a crane or some kind of new scaffolding that promised a new, exciting structure on which the children could climb. Bigger, better, taller, more engaging, more exhausting. Whenever it arrived the children still only wanted to climb the trees. I watched the rise and fall of many of these architectural revolutions — feeling sad that so few of them could be enjoyed by my daughter Ruby, who was all too often confined to her ward cubicle, even further away from the song of the skies than here. Although, the constant din of more and new often delayed the arrival of the birds, and they went elsewhere. Children only really want to climb trees and listen to birds, after all.

When they were able to come and visit her in hospital, I always noticed, and took a great deal of delight in the ways my friends’ children interacted with Ruby. They saw her before they saw her diagnosis — not yet weighed down in life by the burden of trying to make meaning out of something so unknowable anyway. Some of them understood hospital, and therefore understood that she maybe felt unwell, so they sought to comfort her in any way they knew how — no more no less. Often, that was all she really needed.

There are parts of me that wish I could back to a time of similar innocence, when I didn’t know about rare disease, or liver transplants, or IV drugs, or resuscitation plans and whether or not they were the right thing to do. Those things are further away now, but they remain a part of who I am forever. They were so entrenched in my entire system that, for weeks after Ruby had passed, when we had already returned home, I was unable to hear the bird song that was just in my back garden. It is always there but your heart can’t always listen.

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It was there when she was born, behind the din of the the emergency surgery. It was there when she was diagnosed, but my tears were too loud for it to compete with them. It was there when we shared a surgery to try to save her life, but we were both unconscious, sharing only in our physical cells for that brief period of psychic separation. It was there when she crashed a thousand times into the ICU. It was there when her soul lifted out of her body — not a dawn chorus but a mourning chorus. It is here now, even in the impossible depths of grief, especially now, because the thing we all feared has actually happened, and there is no more threat. I think she hears it too, perhaps more clearly now, wherever she is. I sometimes think I hear her voice in their song.

My new baby dances so similarly to their sister in my womb — I recognise a kindred rhythm. It is a new person, but they shared the same womb. This new little person probably knows Ruby more intimately and innately than anyone else because of that shared origin. That gives me huge comfort. I grew up speaking to spirits, just like I grew up following the sounds of the birds — heeding their song and their silence. Most people don’t learn to commune in this way until they lose a loved one. It is a worthwhile skill. Perhaps this new baby will be born with it. What a gift. There’s so much to learn from the unseen. We are taught to fear it, but when you truly experience it, you know it is nothing but comfort and confirmation.

It should have been strange and dissonant trying to balance an intuitive inner life with a highly controlled, highly managed and medicalised outer one. In fact, it was the tool I needed to survive it. At no point did my intuition dull, even when the machines and the terror were at their loudest — I could still hear my inner guidance. Maybe that was all the bird song I needed.

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Grief is not sadness alone, but many challenging and sometimes conflicting emotions that have a way of arriving together when you least expect them, and when you are most defenceless against their torrent.

Anger is a big component of grief — it is often identified as a ‘stage’ of grief (although I am highly suspicious of anyone or anything that tries to arrange grief into neat stages or sequences, because you can’t). Whilst I don’t believe anger to be a stage on its own, I have come to know it well in recent months, as a significant piece in the puzzle of my own grief.

What is most puzzling about my anger is that it has nowhere to go, and no one to be assigned to. Every loss is different, but many medically complex children, like my daughter, sometimes lose their lives to medical negligence. That was not the case with Ruby — quite the opposite. In fact, I have never seen a medical team work so relentlessly to preserve someones life with the utmost meticulous care as Ruby’s team at Great Ormond Street did. So I have nobody to blame. Would having someone to blame make the composting of the anger I feel now a little easier? Or would I be lost in a post-mortem rabbit hole, as so many parents are, when their child dies at the hands of something that supposedly could have been avoided. Either way there is no closure on the anger.

So what’s to be done? Anger is a real, human emotion that cannot and should not be denied, but when it hangs around for too long it has a way of atrophying your soul. The preserving of anger as some kind of barrier against the horrors of the new world you find yourself in after the person you loved the most has gone is brittle — and it can really hurt other people too, which leads to more anger.

Anger, no matter how atomic, can and should be felt fully, and then it needs to be metabolised. Below I’m sharing with you what I’ve been exploring lately in my own, impossible journey with grief, drawing on my nearly decades of experience as a yoga and meditation teacher, writings on grief that have resonated deeply with me, and other fragments of deeper inner work that I have been pursuing throughout my life that are becoming all the more useful to me now. I hope some of them help you. For paid subscribers, I’ve included two led video practices for you to enjoy.

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Ever since my daughter died, and even before that most terrible day that changed the course of my entire life, I have written fervently about my grief. I can’t not — it feels like a therapeutic impulse, and one that I am so glad that I was already tapped into before she left her body at the end of January. There is no ‘right’ way to manage your grief. There is no guide, but what I do know is that grief is big and dynamic, and it needs to move — it needs places to go when it hits you in one of those terrific waves that you only read about until you are forever changed by the experience of it taking you under. My grief can go to places that cause more grief, be that anger or blame. A better place for it to go is onto the page, whether that be digitally on here, or good old messy pen to paper in my ever more shocking handwriting when I do my morning pages.

I have always enjoyed bending words to make sense of my reality, since I was little, but there’s something about grief that gave me a whole new language. I notice it with lots of bereaved people I’ve met. You do not have to be a ‘writer’ to write about your grief. It doesn’t have to be shared, although it is a magic kind of service when it is. There is something about the most profound and perpetual of heartbreaks that cracks open a literacy in you. Why not take advantage of that? Even if just for your own benefit.

I started writing mostly for myself, but I quickly realised that what I was sharing was providing some kind of outlet for others too, and that made me feel much less alone. It also gave me a body of work. In this article, I’m going to share my experience of how I got my grief out from a stagnant place in my heart and into the world of people who are ready to share in it. Writing will not annul the pain of grief, because nothing can, but it will synthesise it into something you can live alongside. Read on for the exercises and techniques that have helped me move through the process and create something tangible along the way.

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This article is not so much a completed ‘How to’ as much as an ongoing ‘What’s working’ for me — a live document, if you will, and one I welcome suggested edits to. I learn a lot of nuanced, in between knowledge from what I read on Substack, particularly in the field of parenting, and I especially love that now, you can see for yourself what is written by a human as opposed to the proverbial soup (slop) of an LLM (although I know the new feature has been a cause for controversy).

I hope this guide, although I hesitate to even call it a guide, offers something of the impossible experience of entertaining the possibility of new life after loss, of daring to take part in creation when your greatest creation has been taken from you, of being reckless enough to love again. I hope it is more interesting than any generic list, although to be completely honest, any such list barely exists anyway, as so few people want to talk openly about this unspeakably vulnerable journey.

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I’m taking a little break this week from mourning pages to bring you something a little bit more one-off and current. For the past however many weeks/months I have had two babies in my orbit — one somewhere up there, one coming ever more into form down here. I’ve been reluctant to write about it, and I’ve also struggled not to. Pregnancy after loss is not a taboo subject, but so often the writing I’ve found on the topic is in the case of pregnancy after the loss of pregnancy. Ruby was two and a bit when she died. She lived in my body for nine whole months, and outside of it, alongside it, for more than two years. I can’t speak to pregnancy after pregnancy loss, because it is not something I have experienced, but I imagine the loss of a child who stayed for a few years in the world is decidedly distinct from that.

Children dying is, very sadly, not a rare thing in the rare disease world that I lived in, and continue to inhabit in Ruby’s legacy. I bore painful witness to the passing of at least three children in the CDG community alone in the space of less than a year. These children were older than Ruby, and their parents had long since finished having children. They left behind siblings. By contrast, Ruby was my first, and although she will always be my daughter, and I her mother — I cannot tell you how strange a heartbreak it is having the entirety of the physical manifestation of that role stripped away from you overnight. Being Ruby’s mother was not a job — it was a privilege, but it came with many roles that required very diligent, very hard work from me. Those disappeared with her last breath.

I am certain that losing a child who left siblings behind carries its own kind of upheaval and cruel re-arranging, but again, I can’t speak to that experience directly, and can only imagine from the information those other families would share — which could never be a truly full picture in such a painfully overwhelming and necessarily private time.

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My grief counsellor asked me how Ruby would have reacted to meeting her new sibling, had she still been here. I said she would have reacted exactly how any three year old would have reacted — first with fear and then with delight, possibly with some of her own grieving that my attention was now divided. I like to think that attention might multiply when you have your second child, but I just don’t know yet. Motherhood reveals an abundance of superpowers with each child.

My attention is the most divided it has ever been right now. I hold the awareness of a new life growing inside me, getting a sense of them through their first flutters of contact. Contemplating what they’re doing in there, if they’re having a nice time, if they’re comfortable, if they appreciate the fact that I’ve started doing pull ups and back squats again. At the same time, I have Ruby all around us, enveloping us with her omnipotence. In my dreams I see her as one contained form — she looks exactly as she did when she was here, but when I am awake she is nebulous. As I place one hand on the belly that is getting harder and harder to hide, I find myself reaching out to see if I can somehow touch her too. Both are just slightly beyond my reach and my comprehension.

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Like much of Europe, we’ve been experiencing heatwave after heatwave here in the UK, felt most harshly in my home town of London — a place that was never designed to sustain such climes. When my daughter passed away, it was in the depths of winter — outside was mostly as dark as the inside, and I found myself bundled under more than one blanket at all times to keep out the cold, and to keep the cold within me from stopping my already very broken heart and calcifying my weary veins.

Now though, the season has changed, somewhat dramatically from then. In recent weeks the temperature reached a existentially concerning thirty eight degrees celsius. This season is entirely unrecognisable from the one in which I lost my first born, but the grief? That has remained the same. I don’t think I expected grief to adapt to the outside environment, or the season of the year, but the contrast at the moment feels particularly stark, especially because I am engaging in normal summer activities (when it isn’t too dangerously hot to go outside), as I would have in previous years, and yet something is permanently changed. I will never see summer the same way. I’ve been reflecting on it, as I always do, in my mourning pages. Excerpt below:

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There is talk of how your life grows around the hole left by the grief, but what happens when that grief is so immense and you don’t know if you have the capacity to match its size with the contents of your life? It got me thinking about whether or not grief to me actually feels like a hole at all. I’ve spent many hours, days, weeks, and now, more than five months, meditating and journalling on the shape it takes in my life. It isn’t really a shape as such, and much less a blank space. It is more a whole than a hole.

I’m always interested to read the many theories and studies out there about grief, but there is nothing like the personal practice of grief to help you understand what it really means. We all grieve differently, of course, and that is why I try to balance these essays with my own, lived experience of loss, whilst also drawing upon different academic resources out there to both support (and sometimes contradict) what I write about in my own mourning pages.

Thursday July 2nd (an excerpt)

Grief is not a hole in my heart, but the whole of my heart, and the whole of my life. That does not mean that all of my life is sad all of the time, but it does mean that my heart now beats with the ferocity of all the love it has lost, along with all the love it has left to give. There will be more love along the way, and parts of life that need to come into being and to join me. How do I add potential to loss? How can I consolidate what is to come with what I’ll never see again? Grief is a thief of the imagination, of inspiration, they say, but I am not sure I agree. It just colours your imagination in a different way.

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The transition. I think about it all the time. The point at which she stepped over the threshold. It wasn’t on January 27th 2026 at 1:46am — it began before that. Did you ever sense a loved one was ready go weeks, even months before they did? I wonder if its a bit like birth, when you feel the moment of their arrival near, as if they’ve made the decision to come forth, but either haven’t quite worked out the route yet, or for the simple fact that these things just take time. I sensed Ruby was on her way about two weeks before she broke my waters. I sensed that she was ready to go about three weeks before she passed.

During those three, painful weeks — weeks that I now realise were some of the most sacred of her life, and of mine, her medical team were doing everything in their power, using every last trick in their mysterious and multi-layered bible/grimoire of metabolic medicine, calling in every favour, even praying to the gods that didn’t fit into their neatly organised charts and textbooks — to save her life. A life that she had already decided to let go of.

Looking at photos and videos of her from those last weeks of her life fill me with every possible emotion you could think of, and, when I look at them even now, I feel the sting of guilt. Did we prolong her suffering by keeping her in a body that no longer fit the aspirations for freedom that her soul held? Did I fight too hard for her? Or was my fight just the wrong one? I knew for a while, but it took someone else — one of her doctors, tasked with the painful job of looking me, and my whole family, in the eyes and confirming all of our worst fears. I think letting go was hard for him too.

Thursday June 25th (an excerpt — more of a letter to her)

When did your journey begin, little one? Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you take me with you? I don’t know in what sense I mean that, because I know that, in some ways, you don’t need me anymore. It makes my heart light to know that you are not burdened by that body anymore. It makes my heart break because you don’t need me to care for you in the same way. You are free.

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I took time coming to terms with my daughter’s death in the physical sense, although I will never come to terms with the loss of her as a whole. I found the experience of being with her body moved me in ways that I didn’t expect it to. I suppose there is no way to anticipate such a thing until you go through it. Part of my coming to terms with the loss of her in the physical sense was to see her in the flesh, again and again, until I was certain she had left it, and there was no more of her in there than there was everywhere I else I went looking for her. I also wrote about it, for pages and pages, and I still find myself writing about it now.

Below, I share my reflections, and the ways in which my conscious mind seemed to briefly enter a dance with my subconscious mind, placing different stages of my own self upon my baby as she faded from her own form. This one will be harder to relate to if you haven’t yet sat with someone after they have died, but I hope, nonetheless, it brings you the same strange comfort that it brought me.

Thursday June 18th (an excerpt)

I immediately searched high and low for her soul the second that it stopped breathing her tired little lungs. I grabbed on to her feet, to see if I could catch it that way. I knew it was still here, but I couldn’t hold it in my hands like I could before. You can’t really hold a soul, but you can hold it when it is contained within the body. That is why we get so attached to the body, because we confuse it with the permanent thing. I cried a loud, guttural cry as I picked her up in my arms. She felt completely different and yet she had only just been there a moment before. I remember the nurses encouraging me to bathe and change her, before we took her downstairs. I wondered why on earth they would suggest this, and I also knew exactly why.

When I carried her downstairs, to the floor I had never walked in all our two years at the hospital — the floor you never want to set foot on — I handed her over to a kind stranger who was going to take care of her now. Was my job done just like that? Every inch of that little body needed every last ounce of my care, in all the different ways. I never ran out of ways to love her, but now I found myself redundant. Was I confusing her for her body? She had begged with me for weeks in her own words that I absolutely understood, but didn’t want to understand, to allow her to depart that body. That temporary body that caused her suffering beyond what she was now willing to tolerate. I would see that body again regardless, even if my work was done.

But it wasn’t done, not quite. The next morning I sat with her for the full hour that I could. She was still there because I felt her move between the hand I had placed on her solar plexus and my own heart. I felt like I was giving her smooth passage. I could not give up the role of caregiver even after she no longer required my services in that way. The last time I saw her in this way, I knew that there was no more her in there. Strangely and incredibly movingly, I saw me, and the tears I cried that day were the biggest I have ever known, because they were for both of us.

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I’ve been reflecting recently on how grief gets shared, because usually, when a person dies, more than one person is affected by that loss. In our situation, the most intense loss is felt by me and my husband Steve, and yet our mourning processes look different. He even said one day that his own mourning process looks different day-to-day, sometimes even by the hour. Beyond us, there is our family, there are our friends, there are the many, many medical professionals both within hospitals and our local community still reeling from the loss of Ruby. There are people who never got the chance to meet her, but who feel they know her through my writing - they mourn her too.

In our closer circle, I’ve been observing how these different currents of mourning intertwine, and sometimes collide. Grief is better shared, but doing so is not easy, because sharing grief requires you to witness the raw pain of another to a point in which you may not have yet been able to witness it in yourself. Sometimes it can be quite a rude awakening, and everyone’s capacity is different, and constantly shifting with the tides and the times. There is no concrete guide or road map for navigating mourning in tandem, but I have reflected on it in today’s mourning pages anyway.

Thursday, June 11 (an excerpt)

Whose grief matters more? Whose grief gets more space and when? How is it that some people’s mourning works together like a perfectly synchronised swim in the lake of sadness that she left behind, whilst others create a storm that takes days to recover from? There is no language of mourning - I never learned one and yet here I am speaking it somewhat fluently. Steve’s language for it is different and yet we mostly understand each other, because her love ran much deeper than language. Love doesn’t have one language, so neither does grief, and you can speak your mourning in whatever dialect feels native to your sorrow. Even if people seem not to understand you, they do really.

Grief and mourning are not as alien as we think they are. They are not nice, or pretty, or algorithmically profitable, but they are important and they are often the social glue that we fail to acknowledge. Grief can be about more than death, and less. Grief about lesser things can feel like a source of shame, but it really isn’t. It is the truth. We all grieve and we all need to mourn those feelings; put them through the wash of our collective tears, air them out, not because they are dirty but because they need oxygen. We share oxygen with the trees - the same ones on which we attach the laundry lines of our sorrow, and the trees have mourned for much longer than we have. We could learn a thing or two from trees.

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