For Giebs

I’ve lived and worked abroad for much of my adult life. As an expat teacher in Brunei, I’ve learned to adapt to different customs, languages, time zones, and climates. I’ve made peace with missing weddings, funerals, and Sunday lunch with the family. Or at least I thought I had.

But nothing prepares you for this kind of phone call.

Forty-eight hours ago, I got the news that my brother-in-law 65 years old, still working in Riyadh as an executive after twenty-five years there, had suffered a stroke. The prognosis is encouraging, and we are hopeful. He's under medical observation. We are waiting. Watching. Praying. Thousands of kilometres apart.

And in that moment, the distance wasn’t just physical. It was a punch to the chest. A reminder of the cost that no expat contract ever mentions.

People think the hardest part of this life is culture shock, or the loneliness, or raising kids far from home. But the real fear, the one that wakes you up in the middle of the night, is that you won’t make it back in time. That something devastating will happen, and you’ll still be on the other side of the world, checking WhatsApp for updates, living on a six-hour time delay while life and health scares unfold without you.

That’s where I am now. Stuck in the in-between. And it hurts in a way that’s difficult to explain.

I always imagined retirement as a kind of homecoming. I held tight to this picture in my mind: us, finally together again. Sitting on the stoep under a wide verandah, rocking gently in old chairs. Grandbabies tumbling around at our feet while the smell of a slow-cooked feast drifts from the kitchen. The girls and boys indoors, arguing lovingly over spices and stories.

We’d gather at a long wooden table, elbows touching, Mikhail telling his tall tales as though the years hadn’t added any weight to his voice. Mashie twirling like a ballerina, the Greenies jiving to the old-school tracks ... Laughter so full and guttural it would shake the walls. Zainab and I slapping each other on the back in pure delight. Giebs lost in another one of his wild theories. Shahied hovering, making sure I was okay, fussing in that quiet, constant way he does.

Later, the girls would get us dolled up, put lipstick on our tired lips, fluff our greying hair, pluck the chin hairs and make us beautiful again. And we’d all laugh at the years that had passed, the continents that once kept us apart, and we’d celebrate the fact that somehow, we had found our way back home.

That’s the dream I carry.

It lives in my chest like a small, flickering lamp. And most days, it's enough to keep me going. But today, with my brother lying in a hospital bed in Riyadh, fragile in ways I cannot touch or soothe, that dream feels unbearably far away.

I don’t know what the next few days will bring. I only know that love, real love, stretches across oceans. That the bond between siblings doesn't weaken with silence or space, that it just waits, patient and enduring.

And even if I’m not there to hold his hand right now, I’m holding him in every thought, in every prayer, in every beat of this broken, hopeful heart.

Because the truth is, we expats live with one constant ache: that we might miss our chance. That the goodbye might come too soon, or without warning.

But we also live with deep intention. With love that makes no excuses and carries no expiry date. With a vision of home so vivid, it becomes sacred.

And maybe, just maybe that's what will carry us all the way back to each other.