‘We are beyond heartbroken’: Cindy Crawford, Rande and Kaia Gerber share tributes to Presley

Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber's son Presley died at 27 at a rehab facility in September. The family shared tributes describing him as kind, vulnerable, and deeply loved, with sister Kaia Gerber writing about learning to love him in absence. Presley had spoken openly about struggles with depression and substance abuse.

Teaching:
• Use Kaia's phrase 'learning how to love you when I cannot see you' when teaching students to maintain connection to practice during travel or injury—the relationship continues even when physical form changes
• Her description of Presley as 'inherently good' despite visible struggle mirrors how we meet students where they are, seeing their essential nature beneath current difficulty
• The family's emphasis on 'kindness and vulnerability' as ways of showing up in the world connects to how we frame asana practice as rehearsal for showing up in life with those same qualities
• Kaia's acknowledgment that 'I don't know how to do that yet' models the honest beginner's mind we ask students to bring to unfamiliar territory in practice

Writing seeds:
• Essay on practice as preparation for loss: how daily confrontation with impermanence on the mat (breath ending, pose ending, practice ending) trains capacity to meet larger endings
• Piece on the difference between fixing and witnessing in teaching—when a student is struggling with something beyond asana, the practice becomes about showing up, not solving
• Short post for Shala Daily on 'learning to love when I cannot see'—how practice maintains relationship to teachers, lineage, and our own past selves across distance and time
• Reflection on vulnerability as strength in practice culture, contrasting performance-oriented yoga with the kind of showing up the family describes

Idea map:
• Connects to systems literacy through family as system responding to crisis—how each member's grief is individual but the tribute is collective, mirroring how individual practice exists within larger sangha
• Embodiment theme: Kaia's physical memories of childhood with her brother show how relationship lives in the body, similar to how practice history is stored in tissue and nervous system
• Attention practice: her description of learning new ways to relate to absence parallels how meditation trains attention toward what's not visible or tangible
• Practice as method for the unmappable: 'I don't know how to do that yet' captures how practice gives us a way to be with what we cannot yet understand or solve

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/oct/19/we-are-beyond-heartbroken-cindy-crawford-rande-and-kaia-gerber-share-tributes-to-presley