My mother captured a moment when my brother and I listened to the symphony of wind shaking sead heads of purple needlegrass in Channel Islands National Park. Photo credit: Auxilia Hsu.
Vogue
Can “Grief Travel” Help to Transform an Aching Heart?
May 22, 2025
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.
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.
