Grieving far from home

Most of the families we work with are grieving across a border. A father who died in London and was buried in Lagos; a mother who died in Bacău while her daughter was on a shift in Leeds; a son who came home to Poland in one of our vehicles while his brother stayed in Birmingham with a visa that would not let him leave. Grief is grief, but grief far from home has four things in it that ordinary grief does not, and this guide is those four and what helps, in the words of the people who told us.

The funeral you missed

The commonest wound, and the deepest. Many traditions bury quickly, within a day or three, and a flight, a visa, a shift pattern or the money can make that impossible. The family at home gathers, the rituals are kept, and you watch it on a phone or hear about it afterwards. Missing the funeral leaves the death unfinished in a way that is hard to describe to someone who has never done it: there was no day when you saw the coffin, no moment when the earth went in, nothing to mark the line between before and after.

What helps, and families say this consistently, is to hold something of your own. Not a second funeral, but an hour, here, with a candle, a photograph, the prayer or the song your family used, the food, and two or three people who will sit with you. Saying goodbye when there is no funeral to attend is about that hour, and it applies here exactly.

The rituals you cannot keep

Every culture has things it does after a death, and most of them need the family and the place. The forty days, the year’s mind, the visits to the grave, the meal on the anniversary, the black worn for a season. Far from home you can keep some and not others, and the ones you cannot keep leave a gap where the grief would have gone. Keep the ones you can, in the form you can: the candle on the fortieth day, the prayer at the time the family is at the grave, the phone call during the meal. Ask the family at home to tell you when they are doing each thing, so that you can do your part of it here.

No one who knew them

In the country where you live, no one knew your mother. Your colleagues are kind, and they are kind about a stranger. There is no one to say “she would have hated that” to, no one who remembers her kitchen, no one who will say her name unprompted. That absence is a large part of why grief far from home is lonelier, and it is the part a phone call to a sibling cannot fix.

What helps is finding the two or three people here who did know them, or who know your world: the church or the mosque or the community here, a cousin, a friend from home who is also here. And telling the people who did not know them about them, which people are usually glad to hear.

The guilt of having left

Nearly every migrant who loses a parent at home carries this: that you were not there, that you had left, that the years you spent here were years not spent with them. It is not rational and it is not answerable and it is nearly universal. The people at home rarely feel it about you; they know why you left and what it cost. It helps to say it out loud to someone who has felt it, which in a migrant community is almost everyone.

The practical weight, if you arranged the repatriation

If your loved one died here and you were the one who arranged for them to go home, you carried the paperwork, the consulate, the coroner and the vehicle on top of the grief, and often did it alone while the family at home waited for a date. That work delays the grief rather than replacing it, and it tends to arrive when the vehicle has left and the phone stops. Coping with grief in the first weeks is for that point.

The anniversaries, alone

The first Christmas, the birthday, the anniversary of the death, all fall on days when the family at home is together and you are here. Grief at Christmas and on the first anniversaries has the general advice, and the particular advice for grief far from home is to arrange to be on the phone at the moment the family is doing the thing, and to do your version of it at the same hour.

Where to find help here

The UK’s bereavement services do not ask where the death was or what passport you hold. Cruse’s helpline and Sue Ryder’s online counselling are for anyone in the UK who is grieving, and both have worked with people grieving for a funeral on another continent; when to get bereavement counselling, and where to find it in the UK lists them. If English is not the language you grieve in, say so; Cruse can bring an interpreter onto the helpline call and has its written guidance in thirteen languages, and a counsellor from your own community, through the church, the mosque or the cultural association, may understand the rituals without needing them explained.