The Longest Goodbye
Losing someone you love is one of the most difficult challenges you can face, but yoga's healing power and wisdom can help you heal.
By Phil Catalfo
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For the better part of a decade, Susan Marchionna has arisen every weekday morning in her Berkeley, California, home and done a modest asana practice: a few seated stretches, a few Sun Salutations, and some additional standing poses, with occasional variations in the 20-minute routine.
What distinguishes Marchionna from countless other people who start their day with yoga is that she committed to a home practice when her husband, Lee Jacobson, was diagnosed with what turned out to be terminal cancer. "My practice was my lifeline," she says. Amid days suddenly full of medical tests, arduous treatments, and research into experimental therapies—a time marked by frustration, rage, and pain—her yoga practice saved her. "It helped me maintain my sanity and my balance," Marchionna says. On one level, her practice was physically enlivening: It awakened her senses, increased her awareness of her body, and made her feel better. But on a deeper level, yoga fortified her and gave her perspective. "In the course of Lee's illness," she recalls, "I realized that if I could stay with what was
happening at any given moment, I could handle it. It's like staying with your breath in a difficult pose: In any situation, if you can breathe through it, you can handle it."
Maintaining a semblance of mindfulness as she rode out the moments of profound stress, fear, and sadness became a refuge. "When I strayed from my focus on the present—venturing off into memories of our life before Lee got sick or the possibility of his condition worsening or of him dying—that's when the grief and additional suffering began," Marchionna says. "I'd ask myself, 'What if he's not at [their son] Aron's high school graduation?' And I realized I was anticipating all these losses that hadn't happened yet. So I learned to stay in the right now. And that's where Lee was."
That's not to say that the process was easy or straightforward. Far from it. "Everybody was relying on me—Lee, the kids, the doctors, friends—and sometimes, under the weight of it all, I'd break down," she says. "But I always knew I had to come back. And I came to see that staying focused on the moment was the way to get through it."
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