We spend a lot of time talking about what we gain when we move to another country.
We talk about reinvention, opportunity, experiences and adventure. We celebrate the courage it takes to leave behind everything familiar and build a life somewhere new. We swap stories about culture shock, visas, learning another language and finding our place in a different country.
What’s being lost
What we talk about far less is what happens years later, when life back home continues to do what life has always done. The weddings we miss. The birthdays we watch through a screen. Family members growing older. Friends whose children we know only through photographs. The quiet, inevitable stretching of distance that comes with building a life elsewhere.
And then, eventually, for many of us, comes something even harder. We lose the people who knew us before.
My best friend, Kenny, died recently.
I thought I understood what grief would feel like. I foresaw the ache of missing him. I knew I’d reach for my phone to tell him something funny or absurd, only to remember that I can’t. Now I replay memories until they become both comforting and painful.
I expected to mourn someone who knew everything about me and loved me through every version of myself, because that’s what Kenny did. He knew me before I knew who I would become. He knew the awkward years, the ambitious years, the phenomenal ones, the reckless ones and the heartbroken ones. He knew my family, my history, the people I loved and the ones who hurt me. He watched me evolve without ever asking me to be anyone other than myself.
To be fully known and fully loved anyway is one of life’s greatest treasures, and not everyone gets to experience that. I know how fortunate I was, and I will cherish that love and the memories of him for the rest of my life.
Emotional and cultural ties that cannot be broken
But alongside the grief has come something I wasn’t expecting. It’s something I don’t think we talk about enough when we move countries.
Mexico has afforded me more than I ever imagined. I’ve built a beautiful life here. I’m deeply in love with a man who is everything I could have hoped for in a partner. His heritage is Mexican, but he also spent many years living in the United States, as I did between England and Mexico, so we share an understanding of what it means to belong to more than one place.
But there’s still a part of me that belongs entirely to England. Not geographically, but emotionally.
It’s the part made up of shared television references, pub garden jokes, phrases that don’t translate, humor that only really lands if you grew up where I did. It’s rainy afternoons, familiar accents, songs on the radio and tiny cultural moments that don’t seem significant until you realize they’re the building blocks of who you are.
My humor is unmistakably English. The rhythm of it and the sarcasm bordering on blunt truth. The expressions I don’t even realize I’m using. My partner listens. He laughs, and he cares. This isn’t about him falling short, because he doesn’t. It’s simply impossible for him to fully inhabit my history.
Kenny could. He didn’t need context because he was the context.
Connections to a former self
He knew exactly why something was funny before I’d finished the sentence. He remembered people I’d forgotten until their names resurfaced in conversation. He carried pieces of my past with me without either of us ever thinking about it.
And now he’s gone.
What I’ve realized is that I’m not just grieving my best friend. I’m grieving one of the last people who held the keys to a version of me that no longer exists in my everyday life.
Living abroad isn’t simply about adapting to a new culture. It’s about existing in two identities at once. There’s the person you’ve become, and there’s the person who made becoming possible. Usually, those two selves coexist quite happily. But grief has a way of exposing the distance between them.
When someone from your former life dies, it isn’t only a relationship that ends. Sometimes it feels as though a witness disappears. Someone who remembered your story without explanation. Who laughed before you’d finished the punchline because they shared the same references. Who knew the roads, the people, the hangouts, the family stories and the versions of you that existed long before your passport carried you to another land.
People often talk about homesickness when they move abroad, but not this. They don’t talk about the strange loneliness that arrives years later, when the people who anchored you to your first life begin to disappear one by one.
The language of grief and the place that made us
We don’t have much language for this kind of grief.
But I think we should.
I’ve spent years building a life in Mexico that I’m profoundly grateful for. This country has given me love, belonging, purpose and a future that feels full of possibility. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. But grief has reminded me that we never stop belonging to the places that made us.
Home doesn’t disappear because we create another one. It becomes something we carry alongside the life we’ve chosen.
For those of us who’ve emigrated, the people back home become more than friends and family. They become custodians of our history. They remember our voices before they softened or changed. They remember our dreams before they evolved. They remember the person we were before our world expanded.
When one of those people dies, it can feel as though a living archive disappears with them.
Processing the grief of a lost friend
I’m still trying to understand that feeling. And honestly, I’m not processing it particularly well. Some moments I feel disconnected from the woman I was before I crossed an ocean. As though there’s a “before Mexico” that now lies dormant somewhere inside me, waiting for someone to remember her into existence.
Kenny did that without even trying.
Perhaps that’s one of the hidden costs of building a life abroad. We prepare people for culture shock, homesickness and bureaucracy. We tell them how to navigate visas, where to find familiar food and how long it takes to settle into a new culture, but we rarely prepare them for the day they realize that someone back home has taken an irreplaceable piece of their history with them.
Kenny’s death has left me mourning not only my best friend but a living connection to the woman I was before Mexico. I’m still here. She’s still here. But the bridge between us feels quieter now.
I suspect I’m not the only person who’s built a life abroad who’s felt this. Many of us have built extraordinary lives here in Mexico. We have partners, families, businesses and communities that make this country home in every meaningful sense. But when loss arrives thousands of miles from the place that shaped us, it asks us to grieve not only a person but the part of ourselves they carried.
Perhaps that’s what those lifelong friendships really are. They’re not just people who know us. They’re people who remember us. And maybe the work of grief is learning to remember ourselves and to carry both lives. To honor the one we’re living now without letting go of the one that shaped us.
I don’t know how to do that yet. But I do know that I was loved deeply by someone who knew me completely. Kenny remembered every version of me, and because of him, I don’t have to be afraid that she’s gone.
She’s part of me still. And so is he.
Charlotte Smith is a writer and journalist based in Mexico. Her work focuses on travel, politics, and community. You can follow along with her travel stories at www.salsaandserendipity.com.
