The Woman Who Never Stopped Moving

There is a particular kind of quiet that finds you in India at dawn. The light comes up slow and golden, the bells begin somewhere you cannot quite place, and for a moment the whole noisy, blazing, magnificent country holds its breath. I was standing in that quiet, fifty-year-old, halfway through my five-hundred-hour yoga training, when I learned that my granny had died.

She was one hundred and three.

I want to tell you about her, because she is the reason I am the woman who writes these letters to you at all.

My granny was a firecracker. Sharp to the very end, quick with a word, quicker with an opinion, the kind of woman who could put you in your place and make you laugh about it in the same breath. She had a motto, one she did not so much say as live. Never stop moving. She meant it about the body, yes, she was moving until the end, but she meant it about the spirit far more. Keep going. Keep reaching. Keep saying yes to your one wild life long after the world starts suggesting, gently, that perhaps you have done enough now. She never once believed she had done enough. There was always another thing to see, another person to needle affectionately, another reason to get up in the morning.

And here is the thing that has not left me since. I learned she was gone while I was doing the most alive thing I have ever done. Turning fifty in India, on the floor of a yoga shala, unbecoming the woman I thought I was supposed to be and meeting the one I actually am. A beginning and an ending, arriving in the very same breath, in the very same place. For days, I could not hold the two together. How do you grieve and rise at once? How do you weep on a Tuesday and stand in your strength on a Wednesday?

India, it turns out, is a country that knows exactly how to hold a woman who is coming apart and coming back together at the same time. It does not hurry you. The mornings arrive slow and golden, marigolds strung over doorways, the air thick with incense and frying spice and the sound of bells. In the south, the backwaters lie still as glass and the tea hills roll out green and endless, and then the country tips north into rose coloured cities and palaces and white marble that glows at first light. It is loud and tender and ancient all at once, and somehow that made room for everything I was carrying. A place vast enough for grief and wonder to stand side by side, the way they needed to.

Slowly, India taught me that you do not choose between them. You hold both. That is the whole of it.

Grief and gratitude are not opposites. They are the same love, simply turned to face two different directions. The ache I felt was only the size of how much she mattered. And the gratitude underneath it, that I came from a woman like that, that her blood runs in me, that I got one hundred and three years of her, was just as large. I stopped trying to tidy the feelings into something neat. I let them sit side by side, the way they were always going to anyway.

I think this is the quiet truth of midlife that nobody warns you about. By now, we have all buried someone. We carry our losses with us, folded in close, and we keep moving anyway. Not because the moving makes the grief smaller, but because the moving is how we honour the ones who taught us to live. My granny would have been furious if her passing made me smaller, slower, more afraid. The only fitting tribute to a woman who never stopped moving is to refuse to stop moving myself.

So I finished the training. I cried through some of it. I bowed at temple gates that were older than every grandmother who ever lived, and I felt her in all of it, that flinty, funny, unstoppable spirit, nodding at me from somewhere just out of view, telling me to get on with it.

And here is what I have come to understand about this particular stretch of life we are in. Grief at midlife rarely arrives wearing the name grief. It comes disguised as a house gone quiet after the last child has driven away. As the strange, unmoored mornings after a parent you spent years caring for no longer needs you, when the thing that organized your days is simply gone. As the Monday the career that defined you ends, whether you chose it or someone chose it for you. As a marriage that has quietly changed its shape, or a body that no longer moves the way it once did. These are losses too, every single one of them, even the ones that look like freedom from the outside. We are allowed to mourn the women we are leaving behind, even while we reach for the ones we are becoming. No one hands you a ritual for any of this. So we have to make our own.

If you are reading this and you are carrying a loss of your own, and I know so many of you are, this is what I want you to hear. You are allowed to grieve and to rise in the same season. You are allowed to be tender and brave at once. You do not have to wait until you are healed to begin living again, because the living is part of the healing. Keep moving. Not frantically, not to outrun the ache, but gently, deliberately, the way water keeps finding its way downhill.

My granny is gone, and my granny is everywhere. In every flight I take, every woman I gather, every dawn I am lucky enough to stand inside. She is the grit. She always was.

Keep moving, my friends. She would insist on it

in friendship and adventure

Penny

XOXO