While the World Kept Moving: Grieving Across Borders

There is a phrase I have heard before: “the tax of immigration”. That would be a loose English translation of the original Arabic phrase: “ضريبة الغربة”.

People often use it to describe the obvious sacrifices when living far from home: the missed birthdays, the weddings attended through a screen, the holidays spent thousands of miles away.

But there is another part of that tax that takes the cake: The cost of grief.

The phone rings. Or perhaps a message arrives.

Someone you love is gone. Just like that.

Recently, I paid this tax in a way I still cannot grasp.

A random Thursday evening. A dinner with friends I am seeing again for the first time in eight years. Laughing, talking, enjoying that kind of gleeful reunion moment with your 20+ year best friends. But also the kind of moments where life suddenly divides itself into a before and an after.

One moment I was giggling with a 2-year-old. The next, my grandfather had passed away.

Suddenly. No long illness. No final goodbye. No gradual preparation for what was coming.

His heart simply stopped.

*---*---*

You are thousands of miles away when you hear the news. There is no family gathering in the next room. No familiar faces. No shared silence. No funeral preparations. No collective mourning. There is only you, alone, staring at a screen, trying to understand what you have just been told.

The first feeling is shock. Then confusion. Not only because someone you love has passed away, but because the world around you continues as if nothing has happened.

You still have work in the morning. You still have meetings to attend. You still have groceries to buy, emails to answer, trains to catch.

You wake up the next day, and the city around you looks exactly as it did before. The coffee shops are open. The buses run on schedule. People laugh in the streets.

And somehow, you are expected to continue moving with them.

Back home, your family gathers. They cry together. They remember together. They sit in the same rooms, share the same memories, and carry the same loss.

But abroad, grief becomes strangely solitary.

You mourn in fragments. Between meetings. During lunch breaks. While walking home. In the few quiet moments before sleep.

Sometimes it becomes difficult to even understand what you are feeling.

A couple of days pass, and you wonder if you are recovering too quickly. You wonder if something is wrong with you. "Why am I functioning? How am I working? Why am I laughing at a joke? Why does this loss not feel real?"

Then you call home. And suddenly you hear it.

The trembling voices. The tears. The exhaustion. The silence that follows every conversation.

You see the grief on the faces of the people you love, and you realize that while you have been moving through your routine, they have been living with the physical absence every single day.

The empty chair. The empty room. The empty place at the table.

You are grieving too, but from a distance so great that sometimes the reality of the loss struggles to reach you.

At this point, you might start caring more for your loved ones back home than for yourself. And the next emotion hits: powerlessness.

You want to be there. You want to hug your mother. You want to sit beside your father. You want to help carry the burden, receive visitors, share memories, or simply be present.

Instead, all you can offer is a phone call. A few minutes each day. Words that feel inadequate. Weird efforts to make your grandmother smile. Support and love that must travel through cables, satellites, and screens.

No matter how often you call, you cannot close the distance. And that distance hurts. Because it stretches you thin. Thinner with each mile and with each hour of time difference.

*---*---*

Perhaps this is one of the most difficult parts of living abroad. At least for me.

Not the moments of celebration we miss, but the moments of sorrow. The moments when the people we love need us most. The moments when we need them most.

This is the tax of immigration. A price paid in missed embraces, unfinished goodbyes, and grief experienced across oceans.

Yet somehow, despite that distance, family remains. And I will never stop thanking God for the one I was blessed with. Across borders. And time zones. In every phone call, every message, every memory shared, despite being scattered around the planet.

*---*---*

Nothing will ever fill the void left by our recent loss, and no one will ever be quite as kind, generous, and loving as my grandfather was.

Yet in his sudden, peaceful departure, he reminded us of something profound: the strength of the bonds that hold us together.

The very bonds he spent a lifetime teaching us how to weave and nurture, strong and solid like the roots of the olive trees that have anchored our family for generations.

Deep, enduring connections that remain intact even when branches grow far apart.

Rest in Peace, Baba. Thank you for 37 years of love and joy. I miss you every day.