Dear Dad,
You vowed that you would do it differently than your father—and you did. You were the first person in your family to graduate from high school. And college. With careful savings from your school teaching job, you swept us away to a small, suburban town—to a world of safety, order, and security.
How hard it must have been to see your one child grow wild with wanderlust.
A child who dreamed of skyscrapers and safaris and everything beyond our townhouse fences. A child who skipped, fell, danced, stumbled. Grew up. Discovered yoga. And then questioned every rule of an orderly world.
But it was yoga that saved me when you checked yourself into the hospital. The day before I was to take my test to be a yoga teacher, they cracked your heart wide open. And that became my true test—that was what you prepared me for all along.
I guided mom through gentle breathing exercises while we sat in the waiting room.
I swaddled her in yoga blankets at night and placed her in restorative poses to help her sleep. I read the Bhagavad Gita. Not the scripture you would’ve chosen for me, but I studied persistently, as your schoolteacher ways taught me.
You survived your open-heart surgery, and your heart, did in fact, open even more. For what felt like the first time, you accepted me in all my fire and defiance. A gate was unlatched. You did it differently. Just like you vowed you always would.