What You Leave Behind: Family and a Guilty Conscience
There are things about emigrating that you don't like to discuss. Not at barbecues with your new neighbors, not in Facebook groups where you exchange tips about health insurance and tax brackets, and not with yourself if you can avoid it. You've done all the math so carefully: the job, the quality of life, nature, the new language, the adventure. And it's all true. You didn't dream it. But there's something else. Something that can't be calculated away.
Family.
Not the one you might build new in your new country. But the one you left behind. Your mother, your father, your siblings. Your old home, which you no longer see every day. Which once seemed natural and is now behind a long drive, behind a plane ride, behind a border crossing that once barely mattered.
When You're Young, You Don't Think About It
And that's understandable. When you emigrate at thirty, your parents might still be active, still mobile, still able to visit you or travel themselves. You call, you write, you see each other at Christmas. It works. You don't think about it. Your parents aren't getting older. Or you simply don't notice because you're not there.
That's the point. You're not there.
You don't see your father getting slower climbing the stairs. You don't see your mother having to visit the doctor for the second time this year. You hear it on the phone if you're lucky, and sometimes you only hear about it after it's already happened. When it hits you, it hits hard. Not just emotionally, but very practically. What now?
The Questions You Don't Like to Ask Yourself
How do you handle it when a parent dies? When you can still make it to the funeral, but have to manage everything around it, all the small and big things that need to be sorted out afterward, from far away? When the other parent is now alone, maybe sick, maybe no longer able to live independently?
How do you handle it when you can't just take four weeks off to go to Germany because you also have a job here, because you also have responsibilities here, because life here has become just as real as life there?
How do you handle it when doctor's appointments need to be scheduled, when forms need to be filled out, when assets need to be divided and decisions need to be made that you should really be part of?
These aren't abstract questions. These are questions that cost you sleep. That wake you up at four in the morning with that pointless worry that leads nowhere.
When Solutions Are Missing, the Fighting Begins
What happens when you haven't made arrangements before it comes to that? Then often exactly what you need least happens: your siblings are overwhelmed, responsibilities are unclear, communication breaks down. You argue about things that shouldn't be arguments, and behind it all lurks the unspoken question: Who is actually responsible? Who takes care of it? Who deserves to decide?
This can tear families apart. Not the grief, not the loss, but the chaos around it that you could have prevented.
What Can Help: Clear Agreements Long Before They're Needed
The most important thing is a person in Germany you can trust blindly. Someone who knows your interests and acts in that sense. Someone who is loyal, who is fair, who doesn't act on their own initiative but on the basis of a mutually agreed arrangement. Whether that's a sibling, a close friend from the old days, or a lawyer with power of attorney.
There are professionals who do exactly that for a living: act on your behalf when you can't. A power of attorney, an advance directive, a clear arrangement for the case of inheritance. It sounds bureaucratic and cold, but it's the opposite of cold. It's foresighted care.
For your parents. For your siblings. For yourself.
Not an Easy Topic
I'm not saying this because I have the perfect solution. I'm saying it because it concerns me too. Because I know that the distance isn't just spatial, but can feel like guilt over the years. Guilt you sometimes talk yourself into, sometimes rightfully so. And because I believe that talking about it is important. Among us emigrants. With the family. Maybe especially when everything is still good.
You choose a new life. But the old life goes on. And sometimes it takes a long breath to hold both.
If you're not just reading this but going through it yourself right now, let me say: it helps to write it down. Even if nothing changes afterward.
