My mom died on Mother's Day weekend. It's a painful anniversary, but I've found a special way to honor her.

• My mom and I were both yoga teachers. She died of endometrial cancer just before Mother's Day 2018.
• Now, on Mother's Day weekend, I teach a class for her friends and students. It's also online.
• This tradition makes me feel connected to my mom and has turned my pain into something positive.

When people hear that my mom died the afternoon before Mother's Day in 2018, the reaction is a variation of, "Oh, that really sucks."

Yes. But I've found a way to turn the pain into something beautiful.

As anyone who has lost a mother knows, Mother's Day is hard forever after. So is the death anniversary. And her birthday, and holidays. I feel sad every February 9, the day we learned my mom's cancer had metastasized, and April 16, when the oncologist told us that the last-ditch chemo attempt had failed.

"At least we kill two birds with one stone," my sister said to me in 2019. Our parents married on Mom's 22nd birthday, so we get another two tough days — the birthday and wedding anniversary — out of the way together each August 11.

While my mom was alive, I followed her down the path of becoming a yoga teacher. She believed in making the best out of everything. That included her endometrial cancer diagnosis, shocking for a kale-eating Reiki master who rose before dawn to meditate.

"Well, you could've had a lousy mother for 70 years," she said, prompting our final laugh together on Friday, May 11, 2018. We were at an alternative cancer clinic in Mexico where she died the next afternoon. In the United States, Mother's Day was still a day away, but we had gotten to celebrate Mexican Mother's Day, always held on May 10. I'd take that, and our nearly 40 years together, and run like a thief.

My mom and I connected through yoga

For a decade before her death at age 66, my mom taught a special yoga class each New Year's Day where she guided participants through an intention-setting process. She taught the last one with a cap over her bald head and a friend demonstrating the poses for her as she called them out. As the following winter holiday season approached, the owner of the studio in Hamden, Connecticut, asked if I'd help continue the tradition.

I hesitated. My yoga teaching and journalism careers were on hold as I was slammed with family responsibilities: I had two young sons, and after my mom died, I brought my maternal grandmother to live in my apartment building in Queens. (Bubbi previously lived with my parents.) I felt like a fraud in yoga as I struggled with anxiety and overwhelm; I was just figuring out how to put my battered postpartum body back together.

"People would really love to see you," Jen, the studio owner, said. We would co-teach, along with one of my mom's friends. Nervously, I agreed, and more than 70 people showed up. I asked everyone to write a gratitude list, and specifically to look for good things that grew out of pain. "Like this class," I said.

The experience made me realize that I missed teaching yoga, which connects me to my mom. I didn't want to wait a year to do it again.

I recalled a rare argument that my mom and I had just before she got sick. She wanted me to bring my kids, then ages 1 and 3, to her house in Connecticut for Mother's Day. My husband had to work, and I was exhausted and wanted her to come to me in New York. But she and Bubbi came to help every week. "On Mother's Day, you come to Connecticut," she said.

I decided to teach a class in her honor

I listened then — and now. I told Jen I'd teach another class on the Saturday of Mother's Day weekend, on my own. I called it Remembering the Divine Mother, both a nod to my mom's deep dive into yoga's spiritual aspects and a wish for participants to connect with the essence of motherly love, whether or not they ever actually received it.

This time, nearly 100 people crammed into the room, mats spilling into the hall. My mother was cremated, but if she had a grave, she would have danced on it to see my dad and Uncle Stevie doing back-to-back breathing with each other, and her cousin Maureen practicing alongside them. For decades she'd tried to interest the three of them in yoga. Many came primarily to see Bubbi, who had long attended my mom's classes and at age 92 participated from a chair. I did my best to accommodate everyone with journaling, easily modifiable movement, guided relaxation, and meditation.

A year later, in the height of the pandemic, I taught the class over Zoom from Bubbi's apartment, upstairs from my own. Bubbi was too weak to do the movements herself, but she wrote a gratitude list and beamed with pride while my husband provided tech support. A year after that, Bubbi, too, had died, and I taught from my own living room. I never took money for the memorial classes and made them donation-based to support the yoga studio.

In 2022, I returned to teaching the twice-yearly events live. Jen was taking extra precautions as she was caring for her elderly mother, who died that spring. We limited in-person attendance to 15, required a negative COVID test for admission, and provided a Zoom link to others.

As we continue the hybrid format, participation is less from extended family but more from others who have lost their moms, or for whom Mother's Day is tough for other reasons. I am filled with love and gratitude for everyone in the room and on the screen, giving me a purpose that transcends grief.

My mom knew just where I needed to spend Mother's Day weekend, and now I know just where to find her.

Sara Pam Neufeld is a writer and yoga teacher in Queens, New York City, working on a memoir. This year's Remembering the Divine Mother will be held on Saturday, May 11.