The Case for a Girls Grief Trip

Reported by Women's Health Magazine.

Grief doesn't wait for a convenient time, and apparently, neither does Paris. When two best friends — one processing a miscarriage, the other mourning a mother lost to cancer — texted each other into a spontaneous transatlantic trip two weeks out, during Paris Fashion Week no less, it made zero logistical sense. It also turned out to be exactly right, according to Women's Health Magazine.

The losses were mirror images of each other: one woman grieving someone she'd loved her whole life, the other grieving someone she'd loved before they ever had the chance to meet. That particular symmetry created a rare kind of companionship — the kind where you don't have to explain why the sky feels gray, because the other person already knows. But shared grief alone doesn't book flights. What finally did it was a mutual refusal to keep deferring joy to "someday." The trip had been on their list for over a decade. After a funeral and a devastating pregnancy loss, waiting suddenly felt obscene.

The Science of Getting Out of Town

Turns out, there's clinical backing for packing a bag mid-breakdown. Lauren Cook, PsyD, clinical psychologist and author of Generation Anxiety, explains that novelty is genuinely nourishing for the brain — new environments force a kind of redirection that creates real relief from grief's physical and emotional intensity. Meanwhile, Rebecca Skolnick, PhD, clinical psychologist and cofounder of MindWell NYC, points out that trip planning alone does something: it gives the grieving mind a forward horizon to move toward. Even the act of researching hotels started reshaping one woman's Instagram algorithm from pregnancy loss content to Parisian travel reels. The sky didn't change. The feed did, and somehow that mattered.

The trip itself — cobblestone streets in the Marais, a cabaret, the Luxembourg Gardens, two days at Hotel Château du Grand-Lucé in the Loire Valley pretending to be royals in floor-to-ceiling pink rooms — wasn't an escape from grief so much as a place to carry it differently. Cook calls this the dialectic, a concept from dialectical behavioral therapy: pain and joy are not mutually exclusive. Laughing until your stomach hurts in a plush robe does not cancel out what you're mourning. You're allowed to feel both, and you don't owe anyone guilt over the good moments.

The trip ended at the original Dior store in Paris, where one woman finally bought the bag she'd been putting off her entire adult life, and the other walked out with a silk scarf printed with the words Le ciel est la toile des rêveurs — the sky is the canvas of dreamers. It's a small, beautiful argument for not waiting: not for the right time, not for the grief to pass, not for life to make sense before you let yourself want things again.

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do while falling apart is book the trip anyway.

Read the original at Women's Health Magazine.