Sitting With The Dead

Our owner & founder Frances Geoghegan shares her thoughts on the subject of grief and how Healing Holidays can help you to deal with it.

Sitting with the dead, it may sound like a morbid theme, but to me it’s an intriguing one. I’m Irish by birth and heart, though London has been my home for more years than Ireland ever was. Despite its modernity, Ireland still carries its old customs close to the heart. In Ireland, death sits beside you. You make tea for it. You talk over it. The body lies there in the room, still and stubborn, while the living shuffle in and out with sandwiches and sorrow. The kettle never cools. Someone tells a story. Someone laughs. Someone breaks. The smell of lilies, whiskey, and damp coats hangs in the air.

It is brutal, really. You are flung into grief like cold water, no time to tiptoe around it. The corpse is right there, the silence enormous, the finality unavoidable. It is a few short days of sleeplessness and raw nerves until the earth closes over. Then, almost suddenly, life resumes. The dishes are washed, the house empties, and the world moves on.

Elsewhere, death has become more polite. We let professionals handle it. The dead are taken away, made neat and still in a place where no one has to see too much. The mourners arrive in clean clothes, cry softly, and return home to quiet houses. The shock is less. The wound is neater. But I wonder if, in making death bearable, we make grief less real. The Irish way doesn’t allow for denial. You see the body. You touch the cold hand. You whisper the words you didn’t get to say. It tears something open, but that openness lets the grief move through you instead of festering in the dark. There is a strange mercy in the brutality.

Other faiths understand this too. In Jewish custom, the dead are buried within twenty-four hours, shrouded simply, without makeup or display. The family sits shiva for seven days, letting the loss fill the house. In Islam, the body is washed and wrapped by loved ones before being laid into the earth, an act of tenderness that faces death head-on. Hindus light the pyre within a day and watch the body turn to smoke, returning it to the elements.

Even where time is stretched, in Japanese Buddhist mourning, where forty-nine days mark the soul’s journey, the rituals keep death close enough to touch. Grief is not postponed; it is given a shape, a rhythm, a way to breathe.

So what heals faster? The clean wound or the messy one? The one you hide or the one you tend to, publicly, painfully, until it closes on its own?

Perhaps the truth is that we need both. We need to see death ,to confront its finality, to let it burn through us. But we also need space to breathe, to let the numbness soften into understanding. Too much brutality can shatter us; too much distance can leave us hollow.

Maybe mourning, like love, asks for balance, the courage to look, and the grace to look away. To sit beside the dead until they are truly gone, and then to let the living carry us the rest of the way home.

How Can Healing Holidays Help You Deal With Grief?

The Best Wellness Retreats For Dealing With Grief

If you are too depleted to fly long haul, at Preidlhof in the South Tyrol, spa manager Patrizia has amassed a team of healers worthy of any Eastern destination spa. This hodge podge hotel, tucked amidst the apple orchards, isn’t sleek and glossy like the Eastern spas but for nurture, it is unparalleled. There is ancient healing with a master in Chinese medicine, crystal singing bowl sessions that pierce your heart and the piece de resistance, sessions with Stefano Battaglia. For those looking to deal with grief, we recommend the Integrated Wellness Retreat, which is a journey of transformational wellness that encourages one to accept and transform the past, enjoy the present, and open up to the future. As part of the programme, you'll enjoy  integrated healing massage sessions that may include ancient healing methods such as Traditional Chinese Medicine or Ayurveda.  

Set on the gentle slopes of a lychee and mango plantation, the dense Sal forest to the west and the hills of Mussoorie to the north, Six Senses Vana was without doubt a real game-changer that knocked traditional wellness off its perch. It was so progressive and comprehensive, suiting those who needed to sort their weight or have a detox alongside those who needed help to heal or grieve. We love their Tibetan Healing programme, which is ideal with anyone dealing with grief. Available over various durations, it focuses on balancing emotions and soothing traumas through a combination of meditation and Tibetan Yoga, Tibetan singing bowl therapy and Ku Nye massages using salt packs, cups or stones.  

Grief can follow divorce, the end of a relationship or any major life change. Speaking from experience, the most important step is to stop burying it – instead reach out for help, lean on those who love you, and give yourself the time you need. Only then can peace begin to return.