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For all of travel’s noted benefits, the scientific evidence around how it might help us cope with grief is shockingly limited. As Mary-Frances O’Connor, the first scientist to study grief with neuroimaging, explains in The Grieving Brain, “grieving requires the difficult task of throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives.” It makes sense, then, that journeying to a far-off destination in the aftermath of a loss could help re-make that map.
Personally, travel has helped me navigate plenty of losses of my own. Most significantly: The loss of my mother, a few weeks before I turned 21, to the same cancer that claimed my eighteen-year-old brother the year before. While my father grieved according to the Chinese tradition of “saving face” (面子, miànzi)—a complex social currency in Asian cultures that measures social standing—and quickly replaced what he lost with a new wife and another son, I wanted the whole world to know what I lost. As soon as my mother was buried, I left to heal on my own at Glacier National Park—my favorite of nearly fifty national parks my family had explored together.
Of course, you don’t even have to be recovering from the death of a loved one to be experiencing the intense grip of grief. In O’Connor’s new book The Grieving Body, she broadens the definition to include any “loss of a part of our self,” whether from a breakup, illness, injury, divorce, estrangement, an empty nest, retirement, natural disasters, and even aging. It seems we’re all grieving something, sometimes.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, grief has been declared a public health crisis and its own kind of epidemic. Even before that, in 2018, the World Health Organization added prolonged grief disorder—defined as “persistent, distressing and disabling yearning for or preoccupation with the deceased person, in addition to loss of meaning and identity disruption” to the International Classification of Diseases for Mortality and Morbidity Statistics.
Perhaps this is why “grief-related wellness” is on the rise; it’s even been named a 2024 wellness travel trend. And, contemporary grief theories seem to legitimize the role travel can play in grieving. According to Dr. Robert Neimeyer, the longtime editor-in-chief of Death Studies, travel can help as we oscillate between the two domains of coping: loss and restoration. A pilgrimage to a place that allows us to give attention to our grief can help us process the flurry of emotions, while traveling with surviving friends and family members can help us deepen the relationships we rely upon, thus restoring and rebuilding other forms of connection we may have lost.
Still, a griefcation should not be conflated with escapism. Neimeyer warns against using “travel as a form of avoidance… as a desperate attempt to diminish or erase the loss in some way.” Otherwise, it could become “a compulsive defensive strategy rather than growth-oriented one.”
Dr. Charlotte Russell of the website “The Travel Psychologist,” flags warning signs of escapism like booking trips when feeling overwhelmed, a tendency to avoid emotions and problems in general, the failure to reach new insights during travel, behaving out of character whilst traveling, feeling dread upon returning home, not making other proactive life changes, and never feeling like any amount of travel is “enough.”
Types of grief travel
So, how can we use travel as a healthy way to cope with our grief instead? And, how can we ensure a “griefcation” helps more than it hinders? According to Dr. Karen Wyatt, host of “End-of-Life University” podcast, grief travel should accomplish at least one of six goals: restoration, contemplation, physical activity, commemoration, information, and intuition.
Find a place or community where you can rest or retreat. Russell recommends not planning too many activities during a restorative trip, and instead, connecting with nature and yourself.
After losing several aunties who adopted us after my mother’s death, we recovered in Sedona, Arizona where natural-occurring energy vortexes are said to rebalance chakras. L’Auberge de Sedona offers sound healing meant to honor the “passing of a loved one, endings of relationships, and completion of careers” as part of their Pursuit of Peace package. In a candlelit room, the resonance created by several crystal singing bowls realigned and rebalanced biological systems that had been disrupted since their deaths.
To cope with the first of our four kids leaving for college, we rented a van from Outdoorsy that could negotiate tight campus roads and accommodate six of us on a road trip. Camping at Crater Lake National Park the night before and after we dropped her off, in an old-growth forest, eased us into empty nesting. Stripped of artificial light and the pollution of noise, the dark skies dilated our eyes until we could see constellations millions of light years away.
Honor your feelings through mindfulness and self-compassion practices. It’s about connecting with your higher self—activities like journaling, meditation, hiking, and painting. Anything that allows you to reflect and just “be.”
That might include restorative yoga, reiki, and tarot card reading, as I discovered at Clairvergence, a wellness center in Breckenridge, which helped my 17-year-old recover from the betrayal of a friend the day before she competed in boardercross at Copper Mountain. After the race, a glass blowing class at Breck Create kept her mind off the outcome.
Grief inevitably brings up a swirl of thoughts and emotions. Keeping physically active can help channel those feelings into something productive—and release some of the tumultuous energy.
“Traveling is therapeutic to the grieving process, because traveling is a process just like grief,” says Alice Ryan, board member at Wild Grief, a nonprofit that offers campouts, backpacking trips, and hikes for young grievers. “It is an adventure. The point of travel is to keep going. You don’t stop. You’re moving through it.”
Mariyana Castleberry, founder of YOLO Dream Adventure Travel, agrees. When she contracted a debilitating form of COVID before she was supposed to depart for Kilimanjaro, she grieved the canceled climb and the time lost to treatment. When she finally summited the mountain, she also released the grief that remained from her father’s passing decades earlier. Now she designs excursions like this for her clients.
Honor a loss through commemorative grief travel by visiting places that were important to your loved one, incorporating rituals, or even retracing the past. For example, The Grief Cruise allows grievers to scatter the ashes of loved ones into the ocean, join support groups, and attend workshops run by grief experts.
As Russell suggests, however, it’s important to do this mindfully. “You may be drawn to visiting this place, but it is important that you feel ready to do this, and it is not ‘too soon’ for you.”
After my mother and brother died, I avoided Huntington Beach, where I grew up.. But this winter break, I felt ready. My older two kids were now around the age of my brother and I when he died. We kayaked in Huntington Harbor, did yoga on the beach with Chanda Halpin, and surfed with Rocky McKinnon—adventures my mother and brother never had the chance to experience. At Disneyland, we introduced our youngest to my mother’s favorite ride, Pirates of the Caribbean, and while Avengers Campus proved too emotional to enjoy—my brother would have loved it—the Waterfront Beach Resort’s heated outdoor pools, waterslides, and hot tubs restored us. On New Year’s Eve, Beach Bros Sharing reset my family’s tradition of bonfires on the beach by taking care of everything: setting up beach chairs, lighting the firepit, and stocking a smores bar with allergy-safe chocolate, making it possible for our allergy-prone kid to taste her first.
Broaden your perspective and learn something new. Russell suggests that if you are a task-focused person, you might find value in a goal-oriented solo trip that includes volunteering to help endangered turtles or a snow leopard expedition.
This can help refocus your attention and lend a new perspective. Jennifer Hoddevik, founder of The Travel Yogi, connected her client Mike, a veteran in his 70s, to a Peruvian family who taught him how to dance and harvest crops. He said, “I get depressed with the state of the world which seems to be in a constant state of turmoil…travel pulls me out of the rut, broadens my perspective and reminds me that life is worth living.”
Embrace the unexpected—and ideally, embark on an adventure while keeping an open mind. Be willing to take risks and learn to become comfortable with unstructured travel.
At Melimoyu Lodge, set in a remote part of Patagonia, Chile in the middle of a rainforest with views of a volcano, three national parks, and world-class fly fishing on the Palena River, I learned to do just that. I was greeted by a team trained to handle the 1%. Francisco Escobar, the host at the time, sensed that I was so accustomed to everybody else’s needs coming before mine that I had no idea what I needed.
Without ever asking me “what would you like to do?”, Escobar gifted me several days of fly fishing, hot spring hunting, an empanada cooking class, and my last day in pajamas. While a light rain fell, I sipped a cocktail in their riverside hot tub. After a long shower, I was getting dressed for a feast of traditional spit-roasted lamb, when a Chilean Swallow slammed into my window. Running outside, I found it breathing heavily in the grass, blood on its beak. I placed it in my palm and soothed its metallic blue feathers. Tiny bones trembled. Heart rate slowed. It had no choice but to close its eyes and trust me.