It was April, and we were in a market in Bali, buying vegetables for a cooking class we hadn’t especially come for. That’s how grief trips work, I’ve learned. You book the itinerary as a container. You put the temple and the rice terrace and the cooking class in the calendar because grief has no shape and you need something to hold it in. Then you show up and stand in front of a pile of long beans in the humidity, and something entirely off-schedule cracks you open. Ours cracked open next to a stall of what I thought were fans. They were beautiful: gold-edged, stiff, arranged in fanned rows like a display of something you’d wave at yourself on a hot day. I picked one up. I probably would have brought it home and hung it at home. Our guide watched me for a second and then said, kindly, that they weren’t fans. They were decorations. For the dead. “The Old People Walk Around and Tell Us What They Want” Our guide explained that in his village, elders don’t leave their funeral to chance or to a lawyer. As they get older, they walk. They move through the community, through the compound, the lanes, the market, and they say what they want. This colour. Those flowers. These decorations. That’s what I want at my celebration, when I’m gone. Not a document. Not a phone call to a funeral home you found on Google at 11 p.m. A walk. Out loud. In public. To their neighbours. In my world, a death is followed by a scramble. Somebody finds a folder. Somebody says I think she would have wanted and somebody else says No, she hated that, and the conversations that follow are never really about the flowers. It’s about the fact that we didn’t ask. We had years, and we didn’t ask, because to ask would have been to admit it was coming, and we’ve built an entire culture around the fantasy that it isn’t. So I asked him the question I thought was the hard one. What happens if someone doesn’t get the chance? What if they die young? What if it’s sudden? He didn’t pause. He said: We ask them. “We Ask Them” We said, “sorry, what?” He said it again. We ask them. We can still talk to them. And then, standing between the funeral decorations and produce, he told us about his uncle. His uncle had been murdered. Poisoned, he believed. And so the family did what families there do when something is unfinished: they went to someone in the village who can carry a message across, who can let the dead speak through them. They asked what he wanted for his celebration. He told them. And then he told them who killed him. Nobody in our little group said anything for a second. All of our jaws dropped. Somebody’s motorbike went by. We all looked at one another. We were in awe. What Is Nunas Baos? The Balinese Ritual of Asking the Dead I looked it up when I got back to the villa, because I needed to know it was real and not a story softened for tourists. It’s real, and it has a name. Nunas baos, from nunas, to ask or request, and baos, words or speech, is a Balinese Hindu ritual in which a family consults a medium in order to speak directly with a deceased relative or an ancestor. The medium is usually a balian (a traditional Balinese healer) or a jero dasaran, who enters a trance state; the ancestor or spirit is understood to speak through them, and the family present is invited to ask their questions. And the questions are not abstract or ceremonial. Families ask about the cause of a death. About illness that won’t resolve. About the message the person didn’t get to deliver. About what, specifically, they want for their own funeral rites. It is not a fringe practice or a museum piece. It is used by modern, professional, urban Balinese people when they hit something that logic can’t dispose of, a strange illness, a family rupture, a land dispute, a death that arrived wrong. The dead, in other words, are still reachable. Still consultable. Still, in some meaningful sense, part of the household. Why Balinese Funerals Are Celebrations, Not Just Grief The other half of what our guide described has a name too: Ngaben, the Balinese Hindu cremation ceremony. A few things about it that reframed everything for me: It’s a release, not a farewell. The purpose of Ngaben is to free the soul (atma) from the body so it can continue its journey, toward rebirth, or toward liberation. That’s why it isn’t structured as an hour of sadness. It’s structured as a send-off. It takes weeks or months to build. Families work with their banjar, the local community organization, and with temple specialists to prepare offerings, build effigies, and organize the whole thing. Nobody does it alone, and nobody does it in three days. It’s physically enormous. A bade (also called a wadah) is a tall, multi-tiered tower of bamboo, wood and paper, decorated and painted, in which the body is carried through the village. The lembu is an animal-shaped sarcophagus, often a bull. Dozens of men carry the tower. There’s gamelan music. At crossroads, the bearers may spin the tower, a gesture meant to confuse any negative forces trailing the soul. It’s expensive, so it waits. A full private ceremony can cost thousands of U.S. dollars. Many families temporarily bury the body and hold the cremation later, sometimes years later, as part of a communal Ngaben organized by the banjar, which brings the cost within reach for everyone. The community makes death affordable. Together. As a standing arrangement. Nobody is quietly ruined by a funeral. What the West Traded Away I’ve been turning this over since April, and I want to be careful here, because I am not interested in the version of this essay where a Western woman goes abroad, finds Wisdom, and brings it home as a souvenir. That’s its own kind of taking. This is his culture. It isn’t a technique I get to extract. But I’m allowed to notice what we don’t have. We outsource death. We move it out of the house and into the hospital, out of the community and into an industry, out of conversation and into a folder nobody opens until they have to. We replace ask them with I think she would have wanted. We (aka society) give ourselves three bereavement days and a casserole and an unspoken deadline for being normal again. And the cost isn’t spiritual, or not only. It’s practical. It’s the sister and the brother who no longer speak because of a decision made in a hallway at 2 a.m. It’s the widow who finds out at the reception that he’d told someone else, not her. It’s the entire second grief that arrives underneath the first one, the grief of not knowing, of guessing, of never having said the thing while there was a face to say it to. Bali hasn’t solved death. Nobody has. Their dead are gone too. A medium in a village didn’t bring anyone’s uncle back. But the relationship didn’t end at the moment of death. That’s the part. The conversation stayed open. There is still a door, and a form of address, and a room you can go sit in and ask. I came home from that trip, and I did the one thing I could actually do with it. I wrote about it. I thought about it. And my curiosity opened even deeper. XX Blair P.S. Have you travelled somewhere that changed how you think about grief? I’d love to hear it — reply, or leave a comment. Where’s Blair? * August 3, Birmingham, Alabama Alana and I have been invited to be the keynote speakers at Integrating the Pieces: A Workshop on Resilience, Loss and Grief for the University of Montevallo. * August 23-29, Porto, Portugal I will be co-facilitating the Portugal Grief Trip alongside Rachel from Happy Grieving. There is still room for you. Learn more and book your spot! * September 8-10, Champneys Tring, UK Often dubbed the “Glastonbury for business,” this two-day outdoor networking event is for founders and entrepreneurs. It features keynotes, startup finals, and wellness programming, running 9–10 September 2026 at Champneys, Tring, Hertfordshire. Enter to win a free ticket and join me! * October 2-4, La Le Jeune, BC Join me, Kayla and Simone this May at the Regulated Retreat. I’m stoked to be speaking at Regulated - Autumn Exhale, a three-day nervous system reset retreat for people who are done surviving and ready to feel steady again, because most of us don’t need more motivation; we need regulation. And that’s what makes this experience different. This retreat blends nervous system science, movement, nature, and honest conversation to help your body downshift and reset. I’m honoured to create and be a part of this experience and would love to share it with you! SECURE YOUR SPOT * January 3-9, 2027, Marrakech, Morocco Join me and Happy Grieving for the Morocco Grief Retreat to kick off 2027. Grief can make the world feel small. Morocco does the opposite: it fills the senses without demanding anything from you. The souks, the spices, the calls to prayer, life continuing everywhere, in colour. And then there’s the stillness to balance it: a traditional hammam to let your body release what it’s been holding, pottery in the medina, a full day in the Agafay Desert where the horizon gives your thoughts somewhere to go. Daily grief workshops thread it together, always optional, always held by facilitators who have walked the path of loss themselves. Learn more and book your spot. How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe
