When One of You Is Left Behind, Far From Home

Someone is always there, with food and talk and company.

By Neil Solomon · 3 min read

Picture a couple named Walter and Ines. They retired to a small coastal town in Asia and had years of slow mornings, shared jokes with the neighbours and a favourite stall for breakfast. Then Walter died, and Ines sat in a kitchen full of him, in a country where she knew how to say thank you and how much and very little else.

Grief is hard anywhere. Abroad it comes with extra questions. Who do I call first? Who will come? What do people here do, and will I do it wrong? These are the questions I hear underneath many of the stories people write, and I think they are worth asking before they are needed.

Here is how the same loss reads in four different places.

Japan. One writer described funerals for his in-laws as something he was grateful to be part of, and also as a grief he had not expected to carry inside. What stands out to me is the shape the rituals gave him. His own words were thin, but the family knew what came next, and he could stand inside it. For a person who moved, that kind of shape can feel like a gift.

Taiwan. A widower went looking for peace after his loss and, in his telling, kept running into rules and forms that turned him away. I read this with some sadness. A person in mourning has little strength for paperwork. The feeling of a closed door, right when you most need an open one, is what I took from it.

Thailand. A friend wrote a goodbye for a man of 92 who had spent 17 years with his Thai partner. The tone is muted and warm. The people who wrote and read it were a small circle, and that circle seems to have been the thing that held. I think that tells us something. Years of ordinary friendship may matter more than any plan on paper.

Philippines. A man describes his first funeral there, a wake that went on for ten days, and how he came to honour it. A long wake means the house is never empty. Someone is always there, with food and talk and company. For some, that is a comfort. For others it could feel like too much. Both are fair.

Back to Walter and Ines. Years before, on a quiet evening, they had this talk.

"If I go first, who will you call?" Walter asked.

"Don't say that," said Ines. Then, after a while, "The neighbour with the green door. And you will have to tell me her number."

They wrote it on the fridge list that night. I think of that small list often.

None of these stories gives a rule. They show that the same loss feels different when the customs are different, and that the answer to "who will come" is often decided years earlier, in how much a person let others in.