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For Durango Ayurvedic practitioner Amita Nathwani, grief provided a path for learning

Durango author learned lessons about grief and community from loss

Most people in the prime of life don’t think much about death.

So after losing her husband, Eric Colby, in a car crash in 2012, Amita Nathwani, now 41, found herself thrust into a bewildering maze of grief, countless decisions, a reevaluation of some of her core beliefs as an Ayurvedic practitioner and a decision to become an author.

“It definitely went in stages,” she said, “The first thing was mass confusion, being in shock, not knowing what to do from one day to the next. I remember they asked me how many copies of the death certificate I wanted, and I was like, ‘Huh?’”

After the crash, Colby was airlifted to Denver, where he died. Nathwani’s sister met her there, and she flew back to Durango with her.

“We walked in the door, and I immediately said I needed a nap,” Nathwani said. “She said she was going out for supplies. She came back with 50 boxes of Kleenex, 50 bars of chocolate, a case of wine and tons of ‘trashy’ magazines like People and Vogue. I said, ‘This is stuff for emergencies,’ and she said, ‘Honey, this is an emergency.’”

It got worse before it got better.

“I was so debilitated by grief, I wrote on my Facebook page that the only solution was an ice-cream sandwich,” she said. “A few minutes later, Carver (Brewing Co.) wrote on the page that they made their own ice-cream sandwiches, and to come on down. They’d take care of me,” she said. “I walked in, and the bartender said he had something for me.”

He asked her if she wanted a beer, and while she wasn’t normally a beer drinker, she thought that sounded good.

“A man who is a personal trainer and health coach stopped by and told me to try to lay off the sugar,” she said about some well-meant advice about taking care of herself. “He told me to get up every day and work out, then do something more relaxing, like yoga in the afternoon. And then he said, ‘And absolutely, under no circumstances, drink alcohol.’ And then the bartender came back with my ice cream sandwich and beer.”

The man looked a little appalled, she said.

“I told him ‘I can’t even get up in the morning,” Nathwani said. “And he said, ‘Oh, my God, I’m sorry,’ as he got it. Then I told him that if I was still doing this in six months, then he should talk to me.”

The journey included closing her practice for a year, navigating the financial side of death and relying on a core group of five friends who called or stopped by every day at 5 p.m.

“I used to complain about the lack of diversity in Durango,” Nathwani said. “But when the going gets tough, or we’re in need, the community of Durango shows up. For a year I let go, and the community carried me. In that year, I learned this was home, this was my family.”

As she began to heal, Nathwani wanted to do something for the community that had done so much for her. The result was the opening of Surya Health and Wellness next door to her friends at Carver’s, and a book about the lessons learned through loss.

“It was community energy that built this,” she said, looking around Surya, which includes offices, treatment spaces, a kitchen for classes on how to prepare healthful food and a retail shop. “I’d be up at midnight, exhausted, tearing out carpet, wondering why I was doing this. And then I’d think about how much I wanted to give back to this community that had helped me so much, and I would keep going with a smile.”

Nathwani comes from a family of Western medicine-oriented doctors, and planned to go that route herself. But then her father told her he often wished he could treat the whole person instead of individual maladies, and, after research, she elected to study Ayurvedic medicine. A holistic discipline that goes back as far as 5,000 years, it focuses on preventive medicine through diet and lifestyle.

“Once I learned it, I got a little puritanical because I saw it as the ideal way of living,” she said. “I didn’t really get it until I had a life experience, and now I take that person into consideration, everything they’ve been through. Now, if someone walks in carrying a bag of Cheetos and a Coke, I say, ‘We’ve got your back.’”

The writing was cathartic in its own way. She couldn’t finish, she said, until she sold the house she and her husband had built. The title of the resulting book is Finding the Success in Loss, which is in the final stages before publication.

“If people are looking for a rags-to-riches story, this isn’t it,” she said. “I opened a business when I was in debt. Success isn’t something tangible, it’s as intangible as the loss was, as inexplicable as a loss is to anyone who has not experienced it. The book is about a very specific loss, but what came out of it was some real life experience, and every chapter tells a story that may pertain to your loss.”

She has been asked to teach workshops about grief, and isn’t sure what she would say.

“It’s a few hours crying on the bathroom floor; trying to sleep, sleeping too much and obsessing about sleep; having friends over and laughing hysterically over nothing; trying to achieve one task per day, when going to the grocery store for half-and-half is a success; exercising when you can get out of bed; and being OK with whatever emotion comes up,” she said.

abutler@durangoherald.com



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