I’m a Fitness Instructor. My Mom Died. I Had to Inspire Anyway.

Two weeks after my mom died, I stood in the lobby of the fitness studio where I’d taught hundreds of classes, trying to remember how to be a person. The air smelled the same - lemon cleaning spray and the faint heat of the last class - but I was not the same. The world, in its usual indifference, had continued without hesitation. Morning commute. Coffee orders. Emails. Small talk. A manager asking if I was available to start the next round of training.

Bullshit, I thought. There is something quietly brutal about realizing you are living your worst days while everyone around you is simply living their “normal” Tuesday.

In most professions, death creates a pause. Out-of-office replies go up. Workflows are reassigned. Grief is acknowledged, even if clumsily. But the fitness profession runs on a different ecosystem. Bodies in motion, schedules in 45-minute slots, entire rooms that rely on you to be both energetic and emotionally available. There is no substitute for the person whose presence anchors the space. You either stand on the podium or you don’t get paid. Sure you can take the time off but someone else needs to take your place while you do. 

And I’ve always been the person who anchors the space.

My classes are known for their intensity - not just physically, but emotionally. People come to sweat, yes, but they also come for catharsis. For honesty. For a kind of drive and invitation to feel something real. There is a strange intimacy to being that kind of instructor - you become a vessel for other people’s breakthroughs.

But when my mom died, the idea of being anyone’s “breakthrough” felt impossible.

I remember clipping in, my legs already shaking before the first pedal stroke. I remember looking out at the room and thinking, I have nothing to give you today. My interior world had collapsed. The person I loved most was gone. And yet the external expectation of the job was unchanged - lead us. Lift us. Inspire us. Even when you’re numb. 

It is an impossible contradiction - being professionally responsible for generating energy when your own has evaporated. It felt criminal. My role in fitness felt so pathetic and unimportant compared to what was happening inside me. I hated it. 

And still, I taught.

Not because I felt strong, but because this was my job and the structure of teaching was the only thing preventing me from dissolving entirely. Movement gave me a rhythm when grief had stolen all sense of time. The room gave me community when loss made everything feel unbearably solitary. Teaching demanded I be present, even when presence felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford.

But there was something else that happened - something I didn’t tell many people, because I barely understood it myself.

During those first two years after losing her, when grief was at its sharpest, the words that came out of me while I taught didn’t feel like mine. They were clearer than my thoughts, steadier than my mood, more grounded than the chaos inside me. Inspiration didn’t require effort. Connection didn’t require planning. Entire phrases would come through me with a fluency I couldn’t access anywhere else in my life.

It felt - and I say this with the humility of someone who still doesn’t have the language for it - as though my mother was speaking through me. Giving me the words so I didn’t give up on myself. 

Not in a mystical sense, exactly, but in an embodied one - as if everything she taught me about resilience, presence, grace under pressure, and how to care for people had risen to the surface and taken the microphone when I couldn’t. There were days I would leave class thinking, Did that come from me? Or from the other side of this loss, stepping in because I couldn’t do it alone? 

I am still grateful for that. Whatever its source, it kept me upright. And even better? My people felt it and received what they needed too. 

Over time, I’ve learned  grief is not a disappearance. It’s an overlay - translucent at times, suffocating at others - that sits on top of EVERYTHING you do. Especially this time of year.

The holidays were my mom’s favorite season. She infused them with a kind of creativity and warmth that made our home feel lit from within. Now, I navigate the same season from an entirely different vantage point - as a mother trying to create magic for my own children, while simultaneously grieving the magic I lost.

This is the part of grief society rarely makes space for - the ongoing contradictions. I can wrap gifts for my daughters while wishing someone were wrapping one for me. I can orchestrate holiday traditions while missing the woman who taught me all of them. I can be profoundly grateful for the life I’m building while still feeling the sharp absence of the person who shaped me.

Motherhood, without a mother, is a particularly unique ache - one that surfaces when everyone else is posting photos of multigenerational togetherness. It is wanting to feel like the adult in the room while secretly longing to be the child again. It is building memories for your kids while grieving the ones you’ll never get back.

Teaching during those early weeks of loss illuminated a truth I’m only now able to articulate - the body remembers what the world forgets. My voice could project energy, but my nervous system was in free fall. My legs could push through intervals, but the grief was cellular - heavy in a way that movement could soothe but not erase. And yet teaching healed me in slow, unexpected ways. It stitched me together in places I thought were beyond repair. It gave me breath, and then routine, and then purpose.

Grief is not a clean narrative arc. It does not resolve. It integrates. It reshapes. It returns. Especially in seasons that hinge on memory. 

I am a mother now. I am an instructor. I lead rooms full of people who look to me for inspiration, energy, and direction. And I also remain the daughter who wants her mom. Both truths are equally real. Both live in the same body.

The sun rises every day whether we feel ready or not. And in time, I’ve learned to rise with it - not because I’ve moved on, but because I’ve moved forward, carrying her with me in every room, every class, and every holiday moment that asks me to make new memories while grieving the old ones.

This, I think, is the quiet genius of grief - it rearranges you, but it also reveals you. I am different now. Softer in some ways and sharper in others. More aware of the invisible weights people carry while having much less room for people who lack perspective. And more certain than ever that the work I do - guiding people through intensity, reminding them of their own resilience - is both my profession and my inheritance.

All these years later, I am still the little girl who needs her mom. And I am the woman becoming someone she would recognize. Someone she would be proud of. Someone who keeps showing up - heart broken but healing, voice steady but authentic - still leading anyway.

I’m a fitness instructor. My mom died. And for a long stretch of my life, I had to (and still have to) inspire anyway. What I didn’t know then - what I know now - is that the person I was inspiring most in those rooms was actually myself.

By: Ashley Basiri