My grandfather and father recently took an Honor Flight to Washington, D.C. with a nonprofit group that celebrates veteran soldiers by showing them some of the U.S. capitol’s most important memorials — and this got me thinking about memorial travel.
What is memorial travel, you might ask? It’s traveling with the purpose to remember.
Memorial travel could happen in a variety of ways: like my grandfather’s Honor Flight, it may be in order to remember and honor a soldier’s sacrifice, as well as the greater sacrifice of those who didn’t return. For others, it may mean traveling to a place for the purpose of healing following the death of a loved one, scattering ashes in the sea or at a place special to them.
Still for others, it may be a trip to a hometown they’d long left behind.
In any case, sometimes people travel to remember. They travel to gain healing or closure over a part of their lives or someone’s impact on it.
I began to consider if I’ve ever engaged in memorial travel without perhaps realizing it, and as it turns out, I had.
When I was sixteen, my grandmother died unexpectedly. She’d had health complications for years, but as my family was living in another state at the time, we hadn’t known just how severe those complications had become until we’d gotten that early morning call that she’d passed away.
We flew up to Wisconsin to her funeral, filled with people who had known and loved her and had been raised by her. At the time, I didn’t know that it would become the first memorial trip of my life, but it was.
And it likely won’t be my last.
Memorial travel means something different to those who travel to remember and to heal than most other types of travel in this world. While travel is often connected with rejuvenation and leisure activities, bumming on the beach or exploring a new city, memorial travel is more personal.
It’s inward-facing and introspective, more about connecting with others than with a specific place.
Or, if it’s about connecting with a specific place, it’s about remembering what happened there, such as those who travel to the 9/11 Memorial in New York City.
As we remember 9/11 and get to thinking about memorial travel this week, here are some things to consider: Have I ever traveled to remember and honor? And if that answer is yes, What have I remembered?
Lastly: Where will I go to remember next...and who — or what — will I be remembering?
Topics From This Article to Explore
