I was smiling when the monk lifted his finger, and I knew what he was going to do; I jumped up. Sadie grabbed my arm. “Ellie,” she whispered.

I looked at her. “No,” I said, and moved in a half step to stop this monk from obliterating what had taken days and meditation and practice and skill to create. Something visceral and broken in me wanted to stop this monk from sweeping away the sand, the art, the sacred beauty they’d created. I didn’t want him to destroy what I hadn’t known existed an hour ago.

Faces turned toward me, and I was back in my body, back in that chapel. I sat, knowing I couldn’t stop or change what was about to occur. The monk took his forefinger and ran it across the sand from the far left corner toward the center. He divided the mandala into six pie-shaped pieces and then used a small handheld broom to sweep the entire structure into a miniature pile in the middle of the table. The other monks joined him and swept the sand into small bags to then distribute to the audience “for healing.”

“Why do they do that?” I asked.

The woman next to me turned to me and smiled. “It represents the impermanence of life; of everything. Letting go. It’s a healing ceremony.”

“How can destroying their art be healing?”

She smiled and stood, looking down at me. “This is my favorite mandala design. The Mother.”

“Excuse me?” I stood to face her.

She explained the mandala’s meaning and symbols from the center to the outside, the vessels, how it was meant to engender compassion, healing, and purification. But I couldn’t hear her words because the only word that reverberated through me was “mother.” I turned to Sadie, but she was gone.

I searched the crowd and then went outside to gulp fresh air.

Mother.

The dissolution. The dissolving. The destroying. The letting go and healing.

I found a stone wall and sat, stared out across the wide lawn. Sadie found me, and she sat, handing me a plastic bag with a teaspoon of sand in it. “I got you one,” she said.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Whatever you want, I guess.”

I walked alone to Mother’s grave and spread a few granules onto the dirt in silence. But inside I knew: I was letting go of expectations and demands—not only the ones I had placed on her, but the ones she had placed on me. I tucked the bag into my purse and knelt before her grave and whispered, “I love you.”