I recently got that awful phone call: my father had passed away, four thousand miles from where I stood. The news was a shock, though not a surprise. Dad was almost ninety-one years old. A long life, lived on his terms.
No matter whether you live next door or across the world, this is a tough time. But as an expat, one of the first people you talk to after hearing the news is an airline representative. Before you’ve had time to even begin to process events, you must find the resolve to make complex travel arrangements. It’s a good job you can do it in your sleep after so many years abroad. The logistics would otherwise be overwhelming: the first available flight to the United Kingdom, a ferry across the English Channel, a drive of several hours to the small French village Dad called home for the past fourteen years.
Yes, he was an expat too; putting down new roots in a foreign country in his 70s. He didn’t seem to feel hireth as I do. He also never felt the need to learn the language of his host country. In typical English language arrogant fashion, he just gestured and ‘s’il vous plait’d’ his way through daily transactions and social gatherings, leaving it up to the French around him to learn English. Now, there’s a confident man. And a very gracious host nation.
Though I speak reasonable French—due to a former life as a groom for horses in France— I don’t speak the language of funeral directors and condolences. I don’t speak ‘French florist’, as I found out as I tried to obtain a wreath for the casket. I think I told the poor lady behind the counter something like, ‘Father dead. Need flowers for box.’ She may have thought the English rather disrespectful at that moment. She nevertheless produced a lovely arrangement. But the confusion cemented the notion that I was different in a place where Dad was different too. I spun from grief to guilt to regret for all the time we’d spent apart and for how foreign I felt going to see him one last time.
We chose this expat world; Dad and I. We undertook our travels in the full knowledge that connecting grandfathers and grandchildren would be hard, expensive, and exhausting; that birthday parties would be missed and Christmases shared only via phone calls. And we knew a long, drawn-out illness would be impossible to manage with so much distance between us. So, my father and I are grateful for the speed at which the final boarding call came.
It’s not easy, this expat life. But neither my father nor I would have missed our foreign adventures for anything. Having spent time last week at Dad’s funeral, having wandered through his beautiful French village, having met up with my step-mum’s family—themselves from all over the world—having listened to stories from Dad’s ‘new’ friends and neighbours and watched them shed tears for him, I know my father had found home. For that, I’m very grateful.
Bon Voyage, Dad. Fair winds and following seas.
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