Stop This Train:Embracing Death and the Grace of Letting Go

bertarajayogini
May 28
3 min read

There’s a John Mayer song that plays like a quiet ache in the bones of anyone watching a loved one fade: “Stop this train / I want to get off and go home again / I can’t take the speed it’s moving in.” It’s not just a song about time. It’s about the soft resistance of our souls against the inevitability of death—ours, and that of those we love most.

We try so hard, don’t we?

We try to press pause.

We busy ourselves with doctors, appointments, and hopeful platitudes. We say, “He’s strong,” or, “She’ll pull through,” because we cannot yet let our mouths shape the truth: that this is the final chapter. We whisper in secret corners of our minds, Not yet. Not this.

But aging is not a thief.

It is a teacher.

In the Hindu view of life, death is not the end, but a doorway. A soul, or atman, is not extinguished by the body’s stillness. The Bhagavad Gita reminds us: “Just as a man casts off worn-out clothes and puts on new ones, so the soul casts off the worn-out body and enters a new one.” To the Western mind, this might feel distant, theoretical, even cold. But to the yogi, it is not resignation—it is reverence.

My mother’s hand is not the hand I once knew. It is softer now, thinner, the skin like tissue paper with rivers of blue tracing beneath it. The fingers curve slightly inward, knotted with arthritis, as if time itself has bent them. I hold it gently, afraid of causing pain, and yet I cannot stop holding it. This is the same hand that once buttoned my coat, stirred soup on cold winter nights, wiped my tears with its sure tenderness.

Now it trembles when it lifts a teacup, and I feel the quiet dread of what lies ahead. We are walking the final stretch together, and though she is still here—still laughing, still calling my name—I can feel the slope growing steeper. There is a knowing that lives in my chest now: a knowing that we are stepping into her last years. And I want to hold her hand through every step, even as it changes shape in mine.

We often don’t realize it until we are there, at the bedside: that death is the final asana—the last posture of this life. In yoga, we call the corpse pose Savasana, and it is not morbid. It is the deepest surrender. We practice dying every time we lie back, close our eyes, and release our control. It is not passive. It is an active embrace of what is.

As our parents age—those who once made us feel safe, who drove us home from school, whose voices could stop our crying—we begin to feel the Earth shift. We feel the roles reversing. We cradle them as they once cradled us. And we beg for time.

We regret what we didn’t say.

We wish for one more meal.

We ache to stop the train.

But the yogic path calls us not to fight the inevitable but to awaken to it. In the words of the Upanishads: “From the unreal, lead me to the real. From darkness, lead me to light. From death, lead me to immortality.” Not immortality of the body, but of the spirit that transcends it.

When I taught my son his first tree pose, I told him the trick was not in being still, but in swaying with the wind. And so it is with grief. We will never be unmoved. But we can learn not to break.

If you are sitting at the edge of your parent’s life, stay.

Stay with them.

Touch their hands. Say the words, even if your voice shakes. Bring their favorite music. Ask them the old stories again, even if they forget the ending. Breathe beside them, like two hearts swinging in the same hammock of time.

Remember: we are not meant to stop the train.

We are meant to ride it together, as far as we can,

and then wave as it continues on—carrying the ones we love

into the arms of something greater than we can name.

Call it Brahman.

Call it peace.

Call it the silence that remains after the final song.