For me, Bali is a place of memory. A place of sweetness. A place I love dearly. A place of wonder and beauty.
I first visited Bali in 2015 and you could say it was like love at first sight. Since that first visit, I have returned to the island many times, both as a solo traveler and group facilitator.
Bali is a place I also visited with my son. We traveled there together in 2018. Austin died in 2022. He was 26 years old.
Our journey to Bali arrived during an important crossroads in Austin’s life—one that reflected joy, hope, and freedom from suffering after some difficult years of struggling with substances. I will never forget the light in his eyes, the buoyancy of his spirit and how much fun he had on that trip.
Bali is an incredible place of beauty—a lush, verdant volcanic island imbued with steady and soothing daily rhythms of ritualized offerings. It's the offerings that are believed to keep balance and harmony between the worlds of gods, nature, and humans. When visiting the island, you will see them everywhere. Colorful, beautiful, artful creations of baskets made of palm leaves. The incense that burns in them releases a memory-making fragrance. Every single day, every single day, every single day. Bali does something to you that cannot be described, only felt.
The place in Bali I love most is a small village, not so far from Ubud, where my dear friends live their lives with their families and their community.
Time on the island is organized by Balinese calendars full of ceremony, ritual, and responsibility. It is a place of green—a lush and lovely landscape of rice fields and waterfalls, bamboo forests, sunlight, drenching rains, coco palms, motorbikes, geckos, frogs, and calls of chickens in perfect synchronicity every morning with the rising sun. In the early morning you might hear the faint sound of a priest reciting prayers or musicians playing the gamelan.
My friends and their community also continually welcome a seemingly never-ending flow of visitors. They weave all of these comings and goings into their daily rituals as prayers for keeping the balance.
This village is a place where friendships have deepened over time and where my friends have become like family to me. Austin is also part of those relationships—he is held in memory and ritual.
It feels unnatural to be a mother without a living child to mother and out of the “natural order” of life when a child dies.
What do we do with all this love, all this grief? Where do we put it? Who was I without Austin in this world? I had no idea.
After Austin died, questions of identity overwhelmed my days. I have searched high and low for spaces and places to be able to live with my grief and also find a way to live with the physical absence of my only child.
Grief moves in its own way, and though I have somehow—not sure how—lived and survived through acute stages of grief, I still experience days when I am brought to my knees, missing him.
Pilgrimage has become the word for me that best describes the way I’ve been able to live with my grief.
It seems I will forever be seeking spaces and places that connect me with Austin’s spirit, whether it be at home or out in the wide world. This is my life now, with and without Austin. He will always be my most favorite travel partner, so we will continue on in our travels together. Returning to Bali has been an essential part of this new way of living.
Bali is the place where I feel most safe and held in my grief—a place where I don’t feel like my grief is too much or burdensome to other people. I can’t completely explain it, maybe it is also my escape—especially because in Bali, death is part of life too. Honoring the ancestors is in the daily rhythms of Balinese offerings—a kindness to the living and a way of being that holds my deepest respect and highest regard.
So with my broken and hopeful mama heart, I invite you to join Prema and me in creating something sacred, meaningful, and sustaining.
May our time together be supportive and affirming, that, though grief is incredibly lonely we can also co-create experiences to sustain what we cannot change (even though we desperately might want to). Breathing into what we can only do alone—the personal aspect of grief and pain that truly is your own journey—and also being together as collective hearts bearing witness to each other’s pain, loneliness, yearning and eternal love for our children.
Most of all, may our time together celebrate the light and honor the spirit of our children and cherish the legacy of their precious lives.
