Memento Mori. How Travel Can Help Us Deal With Death And Grief With Dr Karen Wyatt

Sometimes we need to get away in order to heal, to take ourselves out of the routine and recognize how short life is, and how precious. In this episode, Dr Karen Wyatt explains how travel helped her face grief and embrace living well in the face of death. Dr Karen Wyatt is a hospice physician and best-selling author of books about death, loss, and grief. She’s the host of the End-of-Life University podcast and an inspirational speaker who teaches how to live a life that really matters, by embracing our mortality. Today, we’re talking about how travel, in particular, can help with grief and reflection on our mortality. Show notes * The personal loss that inspired Karen’s grief travels to Italy, Spain and France * How traveling can help you realize that you are not alone in grief * Why Herculaneum in Italy is such a powerful place * Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris * The difference between cemeteries and death culture in Europe vs the USA * Depictions of death in places of faith, and the European tradition of ossuaries and displaying bones publicly * Why memento mori and being aware of the shortness of life helps us to live more joyfully * Book recommendations for grief travel You can find Karen at www.karenwyattmd.com and her podcast at www.eoluniversity.com, and on Instagram @kwyattmd Transcript of interview with Dr Karen Wyatt Joanna: Dr Karen Wyatt is a hospice physician and best-selling author of books about death, loss, and grief. She’s the host of the ‘End-of-Life University’ podcast and an inspirational speaker who teaches how to live a life that really matters, by embracing our mortality. And today, we’re talking about how travel, in particular, can help with grief and reflection on our mortality. So welcome to the show, Karen. Karen: Thank you so much, Joanna. I am delighted to have a chance to talk with you today. Joanna: Oh, I’m so excited. And I think we’re friends now, we talk about death together. So that’s cool. So today, I wanted to talk about your grief trips, which you call them. So you’ve been to Italy, France, and Spain on grief trips. Tell us what prompted these journeys and why you decided that travel might help. Karen: Well, my first grief trip was actually inadvertent in a way. It was a trip to Italy my husband and I had planned, but the morning we were leaving for our trip, a patient of mine died, a young patient died of the H1N1 flu. It was back during that flu epidemic. So I left on that trip feeling a great deal of grief, having lost a patient. And I really didn’t even want to go, I thought the trip would be a disaster because I was so sad and carrying so much grief. And yet, I got to Italy and, everywhere we went, I found comfort because I was just learning so much about grief and death and how it has shaped history really and culture and art. And so, everywhere I went, I actually felt comforted on that trip. And that’s when my eyes were opened that travel can be a really powerful way of facing our grief and actually dealing with it. Joanna: Well, it’s interesting because so much of Europe is about history, and people come here and travel and look at places built by dead people basically. So I wanted to ask particularly, you went to Normandy tracing your dad’s footsteps, so tell us about that because that’s quite different to the patient who died.