Expat grief is real, but nobody talks about it
You chose a new life abroad, so why does success feel like sacrifice? The guilt, the missed moments, the love split between two worlds – this is expat grief.
My mother died in November 2019 after a long battle with cancer. I flew home from London knowing she was about to die. My father phoned me while I was standing in passport control at Cape Town International to tell me my mum had just died. I was 20 minutes too late.
That’s the kind of grief people understand. They say “I’m so sorry” and they mean it. What they don’t understand is the other grief, the one that started years before that phone call.
The grief of watching her age through FaceTime. The grief of missing Sunday lunches and school plays and the thousand small moments that make up a relationship. The grief of knowing that when I chose London, I also chose distance.
The loss that isn’t really loss
Psychologists call it “ambiguous loss”, grief for something that isn’t technically gone but feels unreachable. Your parents are alive, but you’re not there to help them navigate their smartphones or notice they’ve started walking slower.
Your nephew is growing up, but you’re experiencing it through WhatsApp photos with a seven-hour time delay. Your best friend from university stopped calling because the time difference made spontaneity impossible.
You chose this life. That’s what makes the grief so complicated. When people ask how you’re doing in London, they expect you to say “great” because, objectively, you are.
But that success feels like it was bought with something precious. Every promotion, every lovely weekend in the Cotswolds, every moment of feeling genuinely at home here, comes with a whisper of guilt.
The grief nobody wants to hear about
The problem is you can’t really talk about it. Say you’re struggling with being away from family and people back home think you’re having regrets.
Mention you missed your dad’s 70th birthday and colleagues say “but you can visit anytime”. Post something melancholic about South Africa on social media and someone will comment “then come back” as if it’s that simple.
So most expats just carry it quietly. We WhatsApp our families every week and pretend the screen doesn’t feel like a barrier.
We book flights home and pretend two weeks a year is enough. We watch our parents age in annual increments and tell ourselves it’s fine, everyone deals with this, stop being dramatic.
Living with both
Twenty years in, I’ve learned you don’t resolve this grief. You learn to hold it alongside the joy. I love my life in London and I grieve what I’ve missed in South Africa.
Both things are true. The mistake I made for years was thinking I had to choose one feeling or the other.
Missing my mum’s last moments was devastating. But the real grief started long before that flight.
It was in every milestone I attended via video call, every crisis I couldn’t physically help with, every “I wish you were here” that hung in the air during family gatherings I saw in Instagram photos later.
This is what nobody tells you about being an expat. The grief doesn’t come all at once. It accumulates in small doses over decades.
And sometimes, standing in passport control holding a phone, it all arrives at once.
What have you grieved as an expat? What losses do you carry that are hard to explain to people who’ve never lived this split existence?
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