The Phone Call You Were Dreading
For many South Asians living abroad, grief begins before it officially starts. There's the dread that builds every time an elder's health declines. The calls that come at odd hours. The mental arithmetic of flight times. And then — the call that makes it real.
What follows is a kind of grief that doesn't fit neatly into Western frameworks. It carries extra weight: the grief itself, layered with guilt about distance, disrupted rituals, and the particular loneliness of mourning someone who belonged to a world your coworkers will never fully understand.
This article is for anyone navigating that kind of loss.
Why Diasporic Grief Is Different
Grief is universal. But how we're allowed to grieve — and what complicates it — is deeply cultural and situational. For South Asians living away from their families of origin, loss comes bundled with several factors that compound the pain:
None of these are small things. Together, they can leave you feeling like you did grief wrong.
The Guilt Underneath
One of the most common things South Asians describe after a loss — especially the loss of a grandparent or parent who stayed "back home" — is guilt. Not just sadness. Guilt.
*I should have visited more. I should have called last week when I kept meaning to. I built my life here, and they died there, and I wasn't there when it mattered most.*
This guilt is often outsized and rarely fair. You moved abroad for reasons that made sense. You built a life under real constraints. The distance was structural, not a sign of love withheld. But guilt doesn't respond to logic, and in South Asian families, where sacrifice and presence are deeply entwined with love, that guilt can be especially corrosive.
If this is something you're carrying, it's worth naming clearly: You loving someone and being far away are not contradictions. You can have done everything reasonably in your power and still feel the ache of what wasn't possible.
What Research Tells Us About Complicated Grief
Psychologists sometimes distinguish between "normal" grief — which is painful but moves through stages and gradually integrates — and "complicated grief" (also called prolonged grief disorder), which gets stuck. Signs include persistent difficulty accepting the loss, inability to trust others or engage with life, bitterness that doesn't ease, and a sense that life is meaningless without the person.
Diasporic grief has specific risk factors for becoming complicated: unresolved guilt, absence during rituals, unfinished conversations, and the absence of a community that truly understood who the person was. When your colleagues didn't know your naani, and your closest friends have never been to the village she lived in, the grief can feel isolated and unwitnessed.
Grieving in Ways That Actually Help
There's no correct timeline or method. But some things tend to help:
The Loss Within the Loss
Sometimes what you're grieving isn't just the person — it's a whole world. The grandmother who kept the language alive in your family. The uncle who connected you to the village, to the stories, to a lineage you didn't know well enough before it was too late. The loss of a direct thread to your roots.
This grief has no clean name, but it's real. It's mourning a person and a belonging at the same time. It deserves acknowledgment, not just as sentiment, but as a genuine form of cultural and identity loss.
You don't have to resolve that grief quickly. You don't have to perform okayness at work or stoicism at home. You're allowed to grieve the whole of what you lost — the person, the world they held, and the version of yourself that existed in relation to them.
That's not weakness. That's love that didn't stop when they did.