It Was Their Time: Grief Lessons Learned In India
The anniversary of my late father’s death hit me differently this year. I credit Ali and a sound bath in India two years ago for rewriting the grief narrative in my head that played on repeat year after year. ****** I spotted the shop’s wooden sign: Alibaba Arts , tucked just around the corner from our hotel, and found myself barefoot, stepping into a large metal bowl as if this were the most natural thing a 51-year-old mother of four could do halfway around the world with a total stranger. I had to trust the moment, and the odd, magnetic force that pulled me into Ali’s shop. I stood still, eyes closed, as Ali banged the brass-looking bowl with a cloth-covered mallet—ten, twenty times, without pause. I could sense him moving around me as the vibrations rose from my feet, up through my legs, my chest, my teeth. In his other hand, he held a smaller bowl, which he tapped as he circled it around my head. Tapping alternated between the bowl beneath me and the one above, the sound shifting f...
