How Travel Helped Me Heal from Grief: A Personal Journey

Nine years ago, my mother passed away. It wasn’t sudden, but it was heartbreaking. She had suffered for years and deep down, I knew this moment would come. But knowing something is inevitable doesn’t always make it any easier to face. Dealing with travel and grief during this time was incredibly challenging.

We weren’t close, she struggled with alcoholism and my childhood by all accounts was perfect up until my parents divorced. When she decided to make the move to California after my parents split, I didn’t quite understand what that entailed. I had felt instability as a military child with constant moves but this was instability I couldn’t reckon with. Living with her as a teenager was hard. I never knew what to expect.

At 17, my junior year of high school, I moved to Texas so I could finish school. I was on a rocky path already and getting into all sorts of trouble. It was a decision I had to make for myself, but it didn’t come without guilt.

For years, my relationship with her was distant, limited to sporadic phone calls and the occasional letter. I heard her pain through the phone, but I also heard her love.

It came in the form of small gifts, cards, and reminders that she still thought of me. I knew something different was up when she started sending me momentos. Something she was suffering from was emerging and she didn’t quite tell me I could hear it building.

The Rumbling

When she started to struggle, I wasn’t there. I got a phone call one day saying she was in dialysis for a few weeks and then she stopped showing up. I was living in Georgia and it was December of 2015, my husband deployed to Afghanistan and I was left to take care of our dogs. Trying to balance all the things. When I finally got the call that things went south it was January of 2016 and she was in a terrible state. She could still have conversations but they were exhausting for her.

Her nurse called me one evening and told me things had gotten worse, I contacted cousins that I still talked to to ask about arrangements for me to come out to help make decisions about an amputation. When I did come to Sacramento, and made it to her side, I was the one making the impossible decisions. I felt like everything was in tunnel vision. My grandmother and others were still bitter and upset with me because I had “left” her. They treated me with cruelty and one remarked on y choice of hospital cafeteria food “Oh Pizza, huh? Can’t eat healthy” This was when I was a fitness instructor and in my prime. So I didn’t understand the remarks.

It compounded the grief I had already felt. When my mother passed weeks later, I didn’t just lose her– I lost whatever chance I had at fixing a fractured relationship.

I buried myself in work, avoiding the emotions that threatened to unravel me. But no matter how much I pushed them down, grief has a way of resurfacing when you least expect it.

How Travel Became an Unexpected Therapy

When my husband was assigned to Poland I saw it as just another move. What I didn’t realize was that it would be the place where my grief would finally catch up to me and where I would begin to heal. I started to travel more and I would take trips around Poland and other places by myself just to explore.

One day, my husband assigned group announced they’d be hosting a Hail and Farewell for several regions that they oversaw in Geilenkirchen, Germany- the very place where I was born, and where my mother had found solace years before.

My godmother Doris and her kids still lived there and this was the place I knew I needed to get back to. On August 10th, 2018, my mother birthday– I found myself sitting across from Doris for the very first time in 30 years. This woman raised me and watched after me when my mom and dad would go on long vacations and she would help out my mom with so many things.

This was like a full-circle moment. My godmother had known my mother in a way I never truly had. She had been there in her happiest days, long before the weight of constant moves and relocations weighed her down.

As we talked tears began to surface. In the moment, I wasn’t just grieving my mother’s death– I was grieving the version of her I never got to know. I was grieving the love she had for this place, for my godmother an, for a life that once brought her joy.

The Tour to Afghanistan

In 2019 my husband received deployment orders to Afghanistan. I would be left alone in Poland for seven long months. My polish friends and my NATO friends rallied behind me and helped me through the process. I was also planning side trips, to get out of the house and step out of that worrisome state that deployments often put spouses in.

Iceland, Nice, Bosnia, The UK to see the Spice Girls, Romania, Greece, Germany to see my Godmother, Sweden and Croatia. I went to all these places. I was working through immense loneliness but what I found was that when my anxiety would creep up, travel came to save the day.

I could focus on things other than grief and anxiety.

The Healing Power of Travel

After that moment in Germany, I realized something: travel had the power to help me process my grief in ways I hadn’t been able to before. It gave me the space to reflect, to confront emotions, and to escape the heaviness of my thoughts when needed.

• In Iceland, standing before towering waterfalls, I felt small in the best way possible. Nature has a way of reminding us that we are part of something much bigger than ourselves.
• In Taiwan and Korea, I immersed myself in cultures so different from my own. I let go of expectations, allowed myself to be present, and learned how to quiet the anxious thoughts that often consumed me.
• In Poland, learning a new language and embracing an unfamiliar environment forced me to focus on the present rather than dwell on the past.

And then, there were the Dolomites.

The Reckoning in the Mountains

Last year, I found myself hiking alone in the Dolomites, surrounded by peaks that stretched endlessly into the sky. It was here, in the stillness of the mountains, that I finally let go.

Grief has a way of lingering in the body. It hides in clenched jaws, in tension held in the shoulders, in the exhaustion that never fully goes away. As I climbed higher, I felt the weight of my emotions rise with me. The air grew thinner, but my thoughts became clearer.

At the summit, I sat down and breathed. For the first time in a long time, I felt peace. The mountains didn’t erase my pain, but they offered me something else—perspective. They reminded me that grief doesn’t have to define me. That I can carry my mother’s memory with me without letting it consume me.

Final Thoughts: How Travel Helped Me Heal

Travel didn’t take away my grief.

But it gave me space to feel, to reflect, and to grow. It reminded me that even in loss, there is beauty in the world. It showed me that healing doesn’t happen all at once—but in moments. In standing before waterfalls, in reuniting with a loved one, in climbing a mountain, and finally allowing yourself to exhale.

To anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed by grief, I want to say this: there is still so much of the world waiting for you. And sometimes, stepping into the unknown is exactly what we need to find our way back to ourselves.

Have you ever found healing through travel? let’s talk about it!

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