In conversation after conversation in my long-term life abroad research, the distance from aging parents or family members eventually enters the room.
It’s not necessarily a crisis. Sometimes it’s a passing mention — a small fall, a slower voice on a call, a detail in a photo, or a voice note that lands harder than it should. And then there’s a private arithmetic that starts running in the background: how many flights away, how many hours until the next one, how much of a parent’s actual daily life has become difficult to picture with any accuracy.
Nothing has to have happened yet for something to have already shifted.
The math nobody prepares you for
Long-term life abroad comes with a kind of belonging math most people only think about horizontally — the friends you’ve kept or lost, the communities you’ve built or haven’t. There’s a whole other axis to it that gets less airtime: belonging isn’t only sideways, to the people around you now. It’s also vertical — the line that runs backward to the people who raised you, and who are aging in a country you no longer live in year-round.
Watching family members age from abroad is a different weight than homesickness. It is closer to an unresolved question that does not come with an established language or framework: what does care look like now, from here?
There isn’t a clean answer, and part of what makes this research pattern so heavy is that it doesn’t behave like other kinds of migratory grief; it doesn’t resolve with time abroad. If anything, this type of grief tends to compound — every year settled somewhere else is a year further from being able to picture, in any concrete way, what an aging parent’s daily life actually looks like now, for those who are still in contact and still weighing what that means.
The grief that arrives in waves
There’s a second layer to this that rarely gets named directly: the grief for the version of your own life you can’t hand down the way it was handed to you.
A parent who left home young, or built a life abroad, sometimes carries grief not just about aging parents left behind, but about a childhood — a proximity to grandparents, a language, a set of rituals — that they wanted to pass on to their own children and simply couldn’t, because of the geography their life took.
For people whose families have moved across countries, this can include more than concern for aging parents. It can include the relationships altered by borders long before anyone is old: the grandparents known through visits rather than ordinary afternoons; the language that belongs to the family but does not always reach the next generation intact; the rituals that become occasional rather than assumed.
I still remember when my Lola — my grandmother — was dying in California.
Before she and my Lolo immigrated to the United States from the Philippines, a bureaucratic error meant their youngest daughter could not join them. In the years that followed, my aunt was repeatedly denied a tourist visa to visit her family in the US. Somewhere in a file, she had been judged likely to overstay.
When my Lola was near the end of her life, even a letter from the doctor overseeing her care was not enough. The US Embassy in Manila denied my aunt a visa to say goodbye to her mother.
A few years later, when my Lolo died, the same thing happened to my aunt — and to our family — again.
Some distances are measured in miles. Others are made by paperwork, borders, and decisions made by people who will never know the family story they change.
That is one version of the weight. Not every family is divided this way, and not every relationship calls for closeness. For some people, distance is protective; for others, contact has limits or has ended. But for those carrying loving relationships across borders, aging can turn an existing distance into a more urgent question: what does care look like now, from here?
The grief of being far away from aging family members may not announce itself. It may arrive as a sudden awareness of time passing, a changed voice in a voice note, an ordinary photo that makes you notice how much you have missed.
It is not proof that someone made the wrong choice in building a life elsewhere. It is evidence that a life across distance can carry costs alongside everything it has made possible.
The care that happens in between
Most of this does not arrive as one dramatic decision.
It happens in the smaller acts of staying connected: remembering the time difference before you call. Asking the same questions about a medical appointment because you are trying to build a picture from fragments. Sending photos of an ordinary Tuesday. Learning which sibling knows the most, which neighbor has a spare key, which relative will tell you the truth when someone says, “Don’t worry, it’s nothing.”
For some people, care becomes practical from a distance: researching services, coordinating visits, sending money, translating forms, making contingency plans no one wants to name yet.
For others, it is simply the ongoing effort to remain emotionally present in a life they can no longer witness firsthand.
None of these gestures erase the distance. But they complicate the idea that being abroad means not caring enough, or that proximity is the only measure of love. Sometimes care is the effort of continuing to turn toward one another across a distance neither person chose.
Death, at a procedural distance
There’s a practical dimension to this too, one that catches people off guard specifically because no one warns them about it: dying, and the process of grieving and handling logistics after a death, works differently in every country. Sometimes that difference isn’t just paperwork. Sometimes it’s the immigration system itself deciding who gets to be present.
The paperwork, the timelines, the customs around a funeral, the practicalities of even getting somewhere in time — none of it is intuitive from a distance, and most people living abroad don’t think about it until they’re suddenly needing to know it, in the middle of the hardest week of their year.
For example, my Spanish in-laws were floored when I told them funerals in the US happened anywhere between 2-4 weeks after someone passed. Likewise, the first time I attended a funeral here in Spain, I was floored by how quickly it went from passing to wake to funeral — all in a span of 48 hours.
This isn’t meant to be alarming. It’s meant to be one more piece of the actual shape of this experience: not just the emotional weight of distance, but the very real logistical weight that distance adds on top of grief that would already be hard up close.
Space to sit with this
None of this comes with a tidy resolution, and it isn’t supposed to. This isn’t something to fix — it’s a research pattern that has shown up in different ways across my conversations. When death remains a taboo topic for so many of us, naming it allows the weight of it to stop feeling like something wrong with you personally, and starts feeling like what it actually is: the real cost of a life built across distance, carried by people who love their family members and also don’t regret the life they built somewhere else.
You don’t have to choose between those two things being true.
And you don’t have to make sense of it alone:
If this is a weight you are carrying — with parents or loved ones aging in a country you no longer live in, and no template for what care looks like from here — Expat Orientation Conversations offer a structured, non-clinical space to sit with what that actually feels like, without being rushed toward a decision about moving home, staying put, or anything in between.
You can read more or book here:
Let’s keep walking the edges together.
Onward,
Kay✨
Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?
I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor‑in‑training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross‑cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. I was good at it. I was also quietly burning out from being the bridge. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition‑based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.
If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.
If you want to access to the guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my long-term life abroad research I send to paid subscribers, you‘re welcome to upgrade your subscription at any time.
I lost my mom 2.5 years ago suddenly - I had talked to her not 12 hours before the coroner chose as the hour of her death. My grieving and marking the anniversary is not just the day she died (because it was already the following in Spain) - it is the day she died and the day I found out. It. Sucks.
Most of my conversations with my sister are about our kids, our upcoming rendezvous, sending memes about the 90s. But we also have to talk logistics of death, of the trust we need to nudge our father about, on what account uses which phone number is what what address. It is so, so messy. Just yesterday she asked me, "do you want your non-US husband as your primary beneficiary, or your kids?" Adding in a foreign spouse and residence abroad just complicates the whole thing.
My mom died suddenly, and I am grateful for it now. There was no coordinating long-term care or feel guilty that I was abroad. It happened, and then it was done. We thankfully did have that last phone call, where she could tell me kids she loved them. I am grateful for that, too.