Dealing with death of parents while in Diaspora traumatic

Dr Masimba Mavaza

As one looks at his or her parents, one will never think that one day they will die. Death is something difficult to prepare for.

Imagine the angel of death hoovering over your homestead and landing on either of your parents.

Now, imagine your parent dying while you are abroad. It is more painful and hard to manage dealing with the death of a parent abroad, or family and friends.

It’s hard losing a loved one, but then to live so far away seems to make it even more difficult to deal with.

Death has never been something you get used to and losing a parent is devastating and indeed an emotional feeling.

It took years to go over the death of a parent. It is a sorrowful loss.

But the situation is incredibly hard for those abroad and their families.

The death of a parent abroad is very hard to deal with and you will be feeling both guilty and upset.

While it is difficult, but logical consequence of your decision to live abroad, this choice suddenly takes an unexpected and much more dramatic and tragic turn when your parent dies.

When parents visit you and they succumb to the unknown ailment or actually undiagnosed ailment, you will experience a bunch of mixed feelings during that time.

When you made the decision to move abroad you didn’t have an inkling that you would end up in this situation.

I often think there’s a blessing in not knowing what lies ahead of us.

When you invite your parents to come abroad to visit you, the last thing you think of is sending them home in a coffin.

Certainly from many people’s perspectives, had they known what was lying ahead of them they would not have invited the parents.

The thing is that we do the best we can with the knowledge that we have, and little denial here and there to help us find the courage to fly.

There is no right and wrong in this situation, only the tragic sadness that life sometimes throws our way.

Most times, parents are so silent about their illness, when they visit abroad the sickness is picked by the advanced medical technology.

Sometimes in the process of getting them well, they actually get worse and even die away from their home.

It is obvious that given the choice you would have wanted the parent to live many happy years.

Death and loss leave an aching hole where once we found emotional, physical, spiritual or mental nourishment.

The psyche reacts by ‘looking’ for the missing piece, trying to fill the hole again.

Most people never thought as much about their parents as they did in the months following their death.

Grief is also about the loss of the imagined future that their loss now causes. The worst thing is when those at home start throwing the blame game and blame you for their death.

On the way back to England from her father’s funeral in Zimbabwe, my friend kept repeating to himself: “my father is dead, I have no father”, and mentally trying it out in various conversational settings.

And that adjustment, that recalibration of who we are in the light of the loss that we have suffered, is part of the process of grief.

Doing your grieving abroad is different from experiencing it in the surroundings of a shared village, town or even country.

I think it is fair to say that no one leaves their home country unless they feel a strong sense of independence and a need for freedom.

And despite Skype and Facebook, we become used to the lack of our parents’ and friends’ physical presence in our lives.

We may love or hate the intensity of visits home, but we become used to experiencing the home front in small intensive bursts. That’s a hinder when it comes to grieving abroad.

This situation teaches you very fast to be strong brave and totally grown. You learn to make decisions of life and death alone.

The phone calls you get from home are so stressful than comforting. No one calls to say anything constructive.

A friend told me that his uncle called him and asked why he invited his father to England, only to kill him.

It becomes difficult to make a meaningful arrangement with those at home. You grieve to go home and you will know you are going to face a more like a court session and you will be the accused.

Those who talk too much contribute little in most cases.

And this process might be more supported by the fact that others who also mourn this person are in close physical proximity.

When your parent dies in the diaspora, each phone call from back home will be asking you what happened.

This will be a long record. Nobody wants to give you time to arrange the funeral and grieve. Every caller will be demanding an explanation or labelling you.

When they eventually go back home for the funeral, most people hold their breath, holding back their emotions until they can safely fall apart back in England.

And yet, when they were home they felt so alone and lonely with their grief that they became quite the expert at pretending that they had transcended it altogether and had found rapid inner peace.

Thankfully, there were wise people on their path who knew better, and who teased the grieving process out of them, anyway.

Many may feel regret, or guilt, and suddenly see how the choices they have made, and are making, have great consequences, and this too can be part of a process of adjusting their view of the future.

But it is also important to separate the pure pain of loss from guilt and regret about having invited the parents to the UK and not having a physical presence in their lives in the way they might have had if they had been at home.

The reality is that your parents loved you for choosing your own best life, and would never want their death to compromise that decision.

It is true that staying put in the town of your birth, close to your parents, had given you more shared time with your parents than those abroad.

Death has a way of stripping away the fluff and making us look at what is real and unavoidable.

Death and loss, in many ways, are all about reminding those of us left behind that we need to embrace life, as much as we can, with as much of ourselves as we can dare to be.

And yes, the choices that honour that commitment may require certain sacrifices, from ourselves and even from others.

But rather than letting the resulting feelings of guilt stand in the way of making the most of the relationships that are still there for us to enjoy, let it be the spur that pushes us to cherish and care for the people we love, in the best way we can, within the bounds of our choices.

And then accept that when the time comes, it is what it is.

Losing parents abroad is more painful, the people at home do not make it easy. Inviting our parents to see the other country is not a death trap. The bad things happen, but let’s have our parents medically checked so that we know their true medical situation.

Surprises are sometimes very ugly.

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