10 Unique Ways To Keep A Loved One's Memory With You When Traveling

Traveling exposes you to different scenes as you go. Taking all these scenery in can help distract you from the pain and fill you with the beauty of nature and man's innovations. This helps purge the pain of loss and sate the heart to cope with the realities of loss.

It is the perfect healing plan both for young and old who have been exposed to grief. The healing process is long, but traveling can speed it up – it’s that effective.

After loss, it feels like the world has stopped for a moment. In fact, it feels like the world has ended all of a sudden, but that’s not the case at all. Life goes on for the world as it should for you.

Traveling can help you realize this in a more healthy and wholesome way. Jumping on the bus to a different location will open your heart to new parts, and existence of the world and give you the strength to carry on. It’s like taking a breather.

Nature is therapeutic for many things. It has proven to be the best way of recharging our minds, soul, and body. Therefore, traveling around green and natural scenery can develop new and positive emotions inside of you. Examples are empathy, gratefulness, and composure.

It is the best purging element for people struggling with grief. It helps you discover emotions you didn’t know of and give you a new path to take in life.

When the pain gets unbearable, you need to get out of your current location. Traveling is a good way of distracting yourself from all the pain you are feeling. Taking a week or two off work to get on the road to another place would help you focus on something other than the pain you feel.

You get to watch other people on the bus, train, or plane. Observing them can bring you peace and the strength you need to accept that the one you love has died.

Nobody is a stranger to the negative emotions that come with loss. There’s the predominant anger at life and the world for moving on despite your pain. What you need to know is that your emotions are valid.

However, you also need to know that you shouldn’t entertain them. This is what traveling can do for you as you navigate grief. It makes it easier to forgive the world, and the dead. It helps you let go of all the pain, and accept what is.

When someone we love dies, we don’t usually get it. We start to question the meaning of life. This is unavoidable but repairable. When you travel, especially to a place where the dead loved to visit, it helps open your mind to life and how it works.

You get to experience something new, but from a new angle. It’s like you’re seeing things from your loved ones perspective, and get the much desired closure.

In a family, different members get over the loss of another member at different times. If you find out that you’re finding it hard to accept the death of a family member and others have moved on, you tend to feel angry, left out, and depressed.

At a time like this, it is helpful to travel. Your seeming inability to forge ahead will bring the others down and we don’t want to encourage the circle of grief because it only keeps going.

You have just lost a loved one and you’re new to the pain and reality of loss. You wouldn’t want to go far if traveling is suggested to you, so getting out of town to a new location that’s close to home would be good for you. Staying over for only the weekend can do greater things than you can imagine.

This plan is also suitable for old people dealing with grief. For one, your body may not be strong enough to handle long bus or train rides. So getting somewhere close by and staying for only the weekend can help you alleviate the pain of loss. It will only be a couple of days but the impact can last a long time. 

These kinds of programs are organized by churches or friend groups. It involves a group of grieving persons coming together for a defined purpose – to get over the pain of their loss. It is a known fact that people with similar stories tend to find comfort by being together, and that’s what grief retreats promise its participants.

During this program, affected members get to share their experiences with one another. The thing with dealing with loss is that we always need someone to talk to. And this is possible at grief retreats. There’s no better listener than the one who shares your pain.

If you can take longer trips, then this option is for you. You can travel to a friend or family member’s place that’s really far from where you stay. This friend or family member may be someone you get to see only once a year or once in two years. Staying in their unfamiliar environment can help take your mind off the pain.

By simply living with them for a few days or weeks, you get to experience something new and different. It helps you appreciate life more and be more open towards the idea of loss. You can also discuss the pain you feel to them and enjoy their empathetic responses to you.

If you’ve got the financial strength and time, it will benefit you a lot to travel to another country after suffering a loss. There are a lot of things that can happen to you. First, in the new country, you hear a new language or dialect, and you come face to face with a new culture and tradition. This will immerse you into a new experience, especially the food.

The lessons to get from this kind of journey are boundless. You’ll be busy experiencing and taking in new realities that you don’t have time to mourn. Of course, you’ll remember the one you lost but with a new fondness, and not the familiar regret. 

Traveling with other family members can help you deal with grief positively, but travelling solo is more engaging and the repair is usually deep. You can take a trip to a far place alone to get time to grief and reflect. It could be a different location where you meet up with a grief therapist – if you're insecure about the idea of meeting a therapist.

Meeting a therapist shouldn't be something to be shy about, but it involves a lot of courage to make that decision. Hence, taking a trip to another location, alone, either for therapy or something else, is a good option to explore if you're dealing with grief. 

This is the best way to get over loss or any negative emotion at all. Nature has its own way of reaching deep into our soul and soothing whatever and wherever hurts. It could be a trip to the mountains, a trip to the sea, a trip to the forests – anywhere at all.

Spending some time with nature will open up your heart to new emotions like gratitude, understanding, and empathy. It is a very fulfilling experience – the therapeutic powers of nature. Hiking on the mountain will exact physical energy from you and we all know how exercise can improve one's health. This time, you'll be exercising and healing all at once.

Engaging in something else like volunteer work in another state or local government can help ease the pain of loss. You get to engage in meaningful work and heal too. Most times, putting a smile on other people's face helps to alleviate our own pain.

Knowing that you're the reason someone is happy will help you deal with grief. This time you're not cracking jokes, but helping another soul – to either heal, love or eat. It could be a skill acquisition program where you teach others what you know. You may not know it at first, but it reminds you of your capabilities.

Getting spiritual training also helps alleviate the pain of loss. Some people seek solace in their religion when they're saddled with all kinds of difficulties. Pilgrimage is often a sacred and envied experience in most religions. Hence, if this is something you can afford and something you want, you can consider going on a pilgrimage as it would help you a lot.

You get to experience deeper reflections on life and develop a deep sense of appreciation for life and all its forms. You also find peace. You meet people with diverse experiences and backgrounds and your mind opens up to different possibilities. 

This can be a scarf, hat, wristwatch, shoe (if you wear the same shoe size as the deceased), jacket, pants, or shirt. If you can wear their favourite shirt while you travel, it’ll keep you warm. There’s nothing more comforting than knowing that something that keeps you safe once belonged to someone you love.

You get to feel how they felt whenever they wore that clothing item. It’s like an opportunity to relive old memories, only this time they’re not there with you but you can feel them close because you’re wearing something that once belonged to them. It’s an effective way of handling grief.

Getting a snack they always loved to have while travelling would help keep them close. You also get to appreciate their love for the particular snack. It is more fulfilling if you can prepare the snack yourself, but if you can’t, it is not a problem. Instead, what you can do is pay for ten or more of the snack(s) you’re getting and only take two.

The rest can be for other lucky customers. These kinds of charitable actions taken in honour of the one you have lost is a very honourable thing to do. It’s like you’re telling them, I don’t see you anymore but I still respect you. That’s the greatest form of love.

Taking a short photograph of the one you miss can help you while travelling. Pictures are a wonderful way of keeping memories – so take as many pictures as you can of your loved ones while they’re still alive. While travelling, you can carry a picture of your loved one with you and gaze on it from time to time.

You can put this picture in a keepsake jewellery as suggested above, or you can stick a small photograph of them into your wallet. Memories of loved ones should never die. They should be kept alive and recalled fondly. Getting to grief is learning to remember them fondly even after they have passed.

Repeating a travel tradition your loved one never misses will return fond memories to your heart. These can include wearing a particular shade of a particular colour of shirt over a dark jacket. It could be writing their thoughts on the bus. It could be anything. It may be their comfortable look for travelling while they lived.

Repeating this will keep them close to you as you travel. It can bring comfort to your breaking heart and make grieving easier for you. Knowing that they won’t be able to do any of that anymore will make you appreciate their time on earth and feel comforted by the memories you shared. 

Another travelling goal that would beautify the memory of a loved one that has passed is journeying to a place they wanted to visit and never got the chance to. It could be their favorite place – somewhere they've been to so many times, or someplace where they always wanted to go.

It could be a fun place, a quiet place, or a place of history. You will relive memories of moments when you came to the place with that someone. For parents who have lost their kids, this kind of trip would benefit you a lot. It'll help you appreciate the moments your kid was truly happy, alive and free. 

Do you know something your loved one wanted to do while travelling that they never got the chance to? This activity is something they always talk about every chance they get. If you can, you can take it upon yourself to tick this item off their bucket list.

It could be taking pictures of a nice location, or getting off at a bus stop for the sake of pictures. It could be sitting on a particular seat of the bus because some great writer sat there in the past. It could be anything at all. You could pull resources and connections, if you have them, to achieve their travel dream.

You can think of this activity as one where you are a curator. You are putting together pieces of things that your loved one collected and loved. It could be pebbles, a bracelet, empty ball pens, crumpled papers, badly done watercolour paintings, CDs of songs or movies they enjoyed, or a clothing label they thought was too classy to be thrown away.

These items you once thought rather insignificant when your loved one collected them would become a major point of contact for you and them when they're gone. Carrying these items in a box is a good idea you should try. 

While travelling, you can take video footage of your loved one's favourite scenery while travelling. This is possible when you travel through a familiar route that you and your loved one travelled on. This exercise allows you to actively attempt to document the world through the eyes of the one you lost.

Through their eyes because you know they loved those places you recorded. Watching those videos would let you see things in a new light, especially the light of your loved one. You can edit this video or give it to a professional, and post this on your socials.

Similar to listening to their favourite songs, you can read a book they loved so much – if they were the type to bury themselves in a book. You get to experience the emotions your loved one must have felt as they read. You also gain more understanding of them, even when they're gone.

This understanding will help you appreciate the fact that they got to live at least. You also feel grateful that you got to be in their life at some point. What's more interesting is that you can also write a review of the book in their honour. You could publish this online and dedicate it to them. If they saw you, they would be really touched. 

Many of us cherish listening to music while we travel. While grieving, it is possible to enjoy good music and recall fond memories of our loved one. You can curate a playlist of their favourite songs and artists and play it all the way to your destination. Music is a very soft and emotional way of reaching out to people.

By listening to music they loved, you can experience the exact emotions they did when they listened to those songs. You can mirror their expressions as the songs play. You can take it a step further by making it public – this will open an avenue for people to make positive comments on the playlist choice, which is ultimately your loved one's choice.