Six months after my dad passed away, my mom came to visit me in Amsterdam, where I was studying abroad. She was grieving—we both were— but as she puzzled over maps of the canals and menus in Dutch, I saw a spark in her eye that I hadn’t expected. Underneath her grief were the rumblings of a tectonic shift in her life. The loss had created new space, and while most days I knew it felt like a gaping hole, I could see her beginning to consider how to fill it.

Having been married for 28 years, my mother had expected to have at least 28 more ahead. And as she looked out at the reshaped life that lay ahead of her, travel emerged as a way to reclaim loneliness as independence. In the nine years since that trip to Amsterdam, I’ve watched my mom travel more than ever before—to places like Japan, Argentina, and Hong Kong. I've seen a woman opening up, and getting out, after a life experience I’d worried would shut her in.

According to the 2016 census, 24 percent of people 65 and older are widowed, which is no insignificant number. The statistics on younger generations are limited, but anecdotally we understand some demographic exists—people of all ages and relationship statuses pass away. A loss like the one my family experienced feels impossible to overcome, but as I’ve watched family friends, neighbors, and even college classmates experience this particular kind of grief, I’ve seen others doing what my mom did, often finding a way to get to know themselves again. Travel becomes an important part of that—particularly for women.

Grief therapist Claire Bidwell Smith, LCPC, has seen this pattern. “Community shows up a lot in the first few months, then they drop off," she says. "But [those who have suffered a loss] are still not ready to go back to everyday life.” Travel can become an escape route, she adds, or a liberation from the weight of the loss of a partner. For the avid traveler, it can also be an important return to something they loved before—a way to reclaim a piece of who they are.

As for the gender breakdown, some data does begin to offer an explanation: The most recent census to dive in on the demographics of widows and widowers 65 years and older, in 2011, showed that 40 percent of women were widowed, whereas only 13 percent of men in the same age group were. Another thing to note, Smith says, is what women choose do with their grief. “Women in general grieve differently than men. They’re often more willing to step into their grief and muck around it and really feel it, and travel comes inherently to that process,” she says. “It’s all about self-exploration.”

Travel can be an important return to something you've loved before—a way to reclaim a piece of who you are.

When Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, 50, lost her partner Rayya last year, she quickly saw she had one of two options: to seize her new life, as my mom had, or risk it passing her by. “There is a life that I could only have had with Rayya, and that life is gone,” Gilbert recently shared on Traveler's Women Who Travel podcast. “But there’s also a life that I could only have had without her. The question I was faced with was: Am I brave enough and bold enough to embrace that?”

Coming to terms with the idea of traveling alone, after losing the person you’ve always traveled with, is often the first challenge. “I’d traveled solo before, but when traveling solo comes out of necessity, it changes things,” says Edith Taichman, 41, who lost her boyfriend in the spring two years ago. During the summer that followed, she didn’t leave her home of New York City once—a stark contrast to every other summer, when she’d spent most weekends at the beach or on extended trips. “I was already feeling so disconnected and isolated without my person, so the idea of traveling far from home felt even more lonely. Every place I went, all I could think about was that it was a place he’ll never see," Taichman says.