Mom bends at the waist, her spine curving as she brings her face toward her knees in a yoga pose that is sister to a prayer posture. I do the same but less gracefully, touching my hands to my knees and drawing a deep breath. We rise and kneel in synchrony, then bring our heads to the floor. Mom’s hands are stretched out in front of her in a child’s pose, balasana. I touch my forehead to the comforter and hear my mother whisper the word for this spiritual submission—sajada.

The Arabic words float in my consciousness, but I don’t reach for them. My head grows heavy, as if I am a tipped hourglass and it is filling with sand. I come up slowly into a kneeling position. The desert in me rearranges once more. Sands shift back into place and my chest lightens.

“There’s a saying I heard once,” Mom shares. “Prayer is you talking to God. But meditation is God talking to you.”

The warbling of a bird blends into our thoughts.

“I remember Tilly sitting on the roof of the apartment one day with this wild glow on her face . . .” My words come out in a sputter. When I see Mom wipe a tear from her cheek, I stop. I could kick myself. “Oh, Mom. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Mom insists, her face pinched. She wraps an arm around me. “You know, we’re so damned afraid that talking about the ones we’ve lost will hurt us as much as losing them did. So we just stop talking about them. But that’s when we truly lose them.”

She’s right. I’ve stopped myself from thinking about my family because I’m afraid of spiraling into grief that has no bottom, into a place from which I cannot climb out.

“When I was a kid and I lost my dad, people told me I had to move on. They made me think grief was like a cold,” she continues. “If you don’t act sick, you’ll get better. And if you don’t get over it in a week, then you’re weak or there’s something really wrong with you. But I think it’s okay to mourn people out loud for more than a few days. I never said that to you. I’m sorry, I didn’t know better.”

In that moment, I realize why I’ve lived my adult life feeling like my insides are made of sandpaper. I’m just as culpable as Shair in robbing myself of my family. I have not allowed them to be part of me, failing to understand that their light can be my dawn—that a good day begins with a good mourning.