About six months ago, (wow, honestly can't believe it's been six months), I lost one of my best friends in life - my grandpa. It was sudden and unexpected, tragic and confusing - I didn't know where to turn, what to do. When you lose someone that close to you, it's honestly hard to even imagine what you're going to do within the next hour without them in it. When you spend so much time with someone, and they have been a part of your life for so long, what do you do when you suddenly can't have dinner with them or talk about your day or go to the movies... What do you do when you see someone everywhere but they are literally nowhere?
You get an internship across the Atlantic Ocean for six weeks for a "get away" from the grief.
Granted, I had been considering this internship for some time. However, I had never left the country before. This was a big step, and before 2019, big risks weren't exactly my thing. But not too long after I felt like my world crashed around me, I knew this was something I needed to do. Life was too short to not take the risk, I had learned, and it felt like maybe the grief wouldn't follow me all the way to Ireland.
Without ever consciously realizing it, I was using traveling as a coping mechanism.
Here's what I learned:
The beauty that you become engulfed by, the experience that you get to carry with you for the rest of your life, the peace that accumulates in your heart - it works wonders. It eased the pain a lot of the times and never failed to be a gloriously beautiful distraction. And no doubt, it helped to not be reminded of him with every memory that would inevitably come up in a simple ten-minute drive back home. Nonetheless, it helped to know that while I was doing this for me, I was also doing this for him. For us. It was our adventure.
However, grief doesn't go away just because you go to a different country or even a different continent. Sometimes, it was harder. Harder than driving by our favorite restaurant on the daily or walking into his house and not seeing him on the couch or the other million things that remind me of him back home. Sometimes, being so far away from that is the hardest thing. Most of all, being away from the people who understand you, understand your grief, understand exactly what you're going through, your family, is truly the hardest thing of all. I learned that maybe I went too far, too soon - especially since his Heavenly birthday came and went during my time away. I felt lonely during those times. Being reminded of your grief is hard, but is it harder than dealing with it alone? That's a question I'm still searching for an answer to.
I learned that traveling can bring a new outlook, a new sense of peace to a grieving heart. It can transform the pain into beauty, the longing into an adventure. But it never goes away, not even if you run thousands of miles away just a few months after. And sometimes the only thing on Earth that can truly help you conquer these nasty emotions are the people closest to you.
I have no regrets about traveling while grieving. Although it was admittedly very soon after my grandfather's death to take this leap, it was an amazing experience. One I know he is proud of me for taking, and I can only hope he got to see it with me. But my most important lesson of all is that home is where your heart is, and my heart is with my family.
No matter how far and wide I may go in my life, I hope to always circle back to the ones who have been there since day one. Traveling is therapeutic, but my family is strength. They're the ones who will help me over the most devastating obstacles. Traveling gives you a new sense of peace, yes, but home is where you actually conquer those tough battles.