What Death Teaches About Living Abroad

Grief, distance, and what no relocation package prepares you for.

There are many ways to learn about the country you’ve moved to and now live in. You learn it through its food, traffic, humour, the way strangers make — or avoid — eye contact on public transport. You learn it slowly, in small daily doses, until one day you realise you’ve stopped translating everything and have simply begun to live.

Suddenly a friend dies, a colleague who is a central part of your working environment. Now many of us are learning at a different speed in a different register. Grief has a way of stripping the tourist layer from everything. What you encounter during those first days and weeks is the country at its most unguarded, and yourself at your most vulnerable.

Before you move abroad, no one tells you about the bureaucracy of dying. Death in a foreign country — or the death of someone at home while you live abroad — generates a huge stack of paperwork that ignores the fact that you’re in a state of grief. However, within that state we had a wonderful sense of surprise that even in bureaucracy and rules, there is also care and respect.

The Community Around Us

Our colleague was a very private person, with some (as we are discovering, well-founded) distrust of social media, and the many ways details that our private lives are exposed/shared. Out of respect we will not share his name, but through him and our loss, we as a community have learnt a lot. At the time of his death, one of our phone numbers was with the authorities because of an earlier incident, and this was used to contact us. Therefore, we had the blessing (though that feels wrong, saying it like that) of hearing directly of the tragic incident and his untimely passing, rather than reading about it in the papers as a news item. Needless to say, the shock was hard. Many of us in the ACCESS community are still reeling from it and missing him.

Like us, he was an international. But, perhaps not like many of us, he was distant from family – and, sadly, no family was found to inform of his passing. This in itself is tragic, but then come the ‘steps’ of laying someone to rest. Family usually looks after this task, but when there is no family we were all shockingly surprised to find out that in the Netherlands there is actually a law requiring that municipal authorities must ensure that the deceased are buried (gemeentelijke uitvaart) with respect and dignity. And this they certainly did.

Rituals Reveal Everything

Every culture has developed over centuries a choreography for death. Rituals exist precisely because at the moment of loss no one can think clearly enough to invent a response from scratch. The ritual does the thinking. It tells you where to stand, what to wear, when to speak and when to be silent.

When you are an outsider you enter that choreography mid-performance, without the script. But, when the space has been created, to honour someone, say goodbye properly and have the opportunity to share personal words, it touches you. It does not matter whether we knew or did not know what to do. We were given the chance to gather, honour, remember and bid our colleague and friend farewell – because there is recognition in the Netherlands that is the least one can do for the passing of a person.

So, it was not simply that he was buried, but we were given the opportunity to gather at a funeral home, to share some moments of reflection, hear the wonderful words of another dear colleague, walk in silence to his spot, and gather together over coffee, tea, and yes, a cookie. We often smile at that – there are always cookies if coffee or tea is served. This time it gave us a chance to stop, reflect on our friend’s passing, and enjoy a giggle or two with memories of our time with him. All because here, in our host country, there is recognition for their responsibility in this part of life, in saying goodbye with dignity and respect. And as a gathering of more than 25 nationalities we understood that despite the many differences, this offering was accepted with gratitude and respect. Dank U wel gemeente Leidsenveen.

What You Learn, Finally

What we learn is that a country is not made of its landscapes, its institutions or even its people in ordinary times. It is made of how it holds its dying and grieving. That is the deepest infrastructure of any culture — older than its laws, more honest than its politics.

We also learn about ourselves: that we are more resilient than we know, more fragile than we admit, and more connected to people, places, and to the particular texture of our own origins more than any expatriate assignment ever prepared us to understand. We understood that in community there was support and understanding.

Grief, it turns out, is the most comprehensive cultural immersion there is. No one would choose it as a method. But no one who has lived abroad comes through it unchanged or unenlightened.

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