For me, Bali is a place of memory. A place of sweetness. A place I love dearly. A place of wonder and beauty.
I traveled to Bali with Austin a few years ago during a time when he was happy and hopeful. I think he felt a great freedom there. I now find solace there and the pain/grief I feel, softer, more bearable.
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 an incredible place of beauty, a lush, verdant volcanic island imbued with steady daily rhythms of ritualized offering that soothes and caresses my spirit. 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. The incense that burns from them releases a fragrance that opens the heart. 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 family and their community.
Time in this space is organized by Balinese calendars as well as village calendars of ceremony, ritual and responsibility. It is a a place of green, 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 welcomes a seemingly never-ending flow of visitors. They weave all of these comings and goings into their rituals for the past, present, and future.
This village is a place where friendships have deepened over time and become like family to me. Austin is also part of those relationships—he is held in memory and ritual.
My son Austin died unexpectedly on October 5, 2022. He was 26 years old.
Austin was a boy raised in the mountains of North Carolina, and died a young man, his life ended in Brooklyn, NY. He loved mountains and cities. He loved life and traveling. He was artistic, musical and creative. He was funny and had the warmest smile. He loved animals. He enjoyed rich conversations. Making things. He enjoyed dancing and seeing live music. He loved family and had many friends.
Grief moves in its own way, and though I have somehow-not sure how, lived and survived through acute stages of shock, denial, shattering and devastation, I still experience days when I am brought to my knees howling/wailing for my lost child, wondering where he is, wondering if he can hear me, wondering how he is. I don’t care to pretend that isn’t happening, I don’t care to sugarcoat or gloss over or bypass what is now my life, living without him and also with him always, cherishing the grief and love of my beloved Austin.
It’s 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.
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 find a way to live with the physical absence of my only child.
Pilgrimage is a word I like to use to describe the way I have found most supports me. 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. And Austin was always my most favorite travel partner, so we will continue on in our travels through life and death.
Life now is living with and without Austin. Returning to Bali has been an essential part of this new way of living.
Bali has become 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.
Relationship to death in Bali is part of life too. It’s the daily rhythm of offering and unique kindheartedness of the Balinese people that holds my deepest respect and highest regard.
So it is with my broken 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 cocreate experiences to sustain what we cannot change (even though we desperately want to). Breathing into what we can only do alone, the personal aspects of grief and pain that is truly your own and also being together as collective hearts in 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.
