When the distance becomes a body: Caring for our Parents from another country

by Annalisa Malaguti

This post steps slightly away from the themes I usually write about, at least on the surface. But if you give it a few minutes, I think you'll see it touches something essential for any family that has chosen a nomadic life far from the home country.

The question is simple and very hard: how do we cross physical distance in order to be close to the people we love when their bodies, or their minds, become fragile?

I'm thinking of parents. But also, of brothers and sisters, aunts, cousins, the wider family that keeps a particular place in the heart of anyone living abroad.

The moment it arrives

A sudden health crisis. The slow, then suddenly visible, passage of a parent into old age. These things rarely announce themselves. And when they land, many of us who live "elsewhere" discover that we don't know how to react at all.

Emotion arrives first. Worry, then the particular helplessness that comes from geography: you cannot simply be there. You cannot sit in the corridor, hold a hand, ask the doctor the question no one else thought to ask.

The frustration deepens when leaving immediately isn't possible. The distance is real. Work doesn't pause. School terms don't pause. And often the law itself doesn't help, the rights available to someone who wants to fly home and care for a sick relative are thin. Bureaucracy has its own timetable, and in most of our societies only the most dramatic event of all, a death, is considered reason enough for an urgent return.

What I learned about holding the line

So, what do we do?

If you have siblings, they become your anchor in those first disoriented hours. But they cannot carry everything. They are the front line, they're the ones in the hospital, in the meetings, in the parking lot at midnight. Part of your work, from wherever you are, is to hold them: to think about their sleep, their fear, their own families, and to protect them in the weeks before you can arrive.

And there's usually someone in the rear, too. The parent left at home with their worry and no task to occupy them. That person needs you just as much, and is often the last one anyone thinks to call.

Meanwhile, the systems we grew up trusting have thinned out. Even in countries where auxiliary and rehabilitative services were once robust, resources have been cut back; rehabilitation is increasingly routed toward private facilities, or toward partial arrangements with the public system, in the name of cost containment. Not every family can absorb that expense. And more to the point, not every family has the time, the language, or the energy to search for an alternative that actually fits the patient and the people around them.

Why I'm writing this now

Because over the past few weeks I have been living it.

A serious medical crisis hit one of my parents, who is in his eighties, and I was abroad, unable to leave immediately. My good fortune was my sisters, who held the hospital front with extraordinary steadiness. My father, still in good health, did everything he could not to add to their load. My own work, from a distance, became something else: finding resources that could secure my mother's stay and recovery, protecting the mental and physical health of the caregivers exposed daily to the hospital, and keeping my 89-year-old father from carrying his fear alone in the rearguard.

My husband was essential. So were our daughters. So were colleagues who made space for me so that I could set the administrative and medical machinery in motion, and make sure my mother received both emotional safety and appropriate care.

I'm sharing it because it might help someone else. In fact, in these very days, the path I stumbled through has already been useful to another family facing something similar.

What stays with me

What remains is a certain bitterness.

We read more and more often about families and patients driven to despair, people who had no access to the kind of support I was able to improvise, and who reached for extreme measures. My own experience showed me something uncomfortable: the obstacles sit inside the very system that is supposed to prevent those outcomes. Gaps in the process. Professional blind spots. A structural failure to recognise that holistic care of the patient and of the family context around them is essential to a good clinical course, whether or not recovery is the outcome.

When people feel genuinely heard and valued in their wholeness as human beings, even the social costs attached to these situations can be better managed. That isn't sentimentality. It's arithmetic that no one seems willing to do.

The fragmentation of expertise has turned health workers into specialised mechanics. Each one competent, each one responsible for a single part, and no one holding the whole person.

Caring for people should be something else. And in the training of health professionals, that understanding needs to return to the centre, not stay where it is now, secondary to a managerial logic in which cost containment outranks everything.

 If you are going through something similar right now, holding a family together across time zones, carrying worry that has nowhere to land, please remember: this space is here for you. Not to have all the answers, but to sit with the questions alongside you, and to remind you, when you need it, that what you're doing from far away still counts as showing up.