Girls' Guide to Dealing with Illness and Death of a Loved One While Living Abroad

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“It’s stage four,” Mom said into the phone. 

And 15,000 miles from her, 12 time zones away, on the other end of the receiver, I dropped to the floor. 

My world crashed alongside me.

My dad had been diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma and given 2 months to live.

“I’ll be on the next flight home,” I blurted out, not knowing or caring about the logistics and financial costs of such a last-minute journey.

Fast-forward to later that day, when I had my flight plan in front of me. Getting from Koh Phangan, Thailand, to where my parents lived in a small town east of Guadalajara, Mexico, was no simple task. 

The itinerary looked something like this:

Koh Samui → Bangkok -- 1 hour + 5-hour layover

Bangkok → Tokyo -- 6 hours + 8-hour layover

Tokyo → Mexico City -- 14 hours + 3-hour layover

Mexico City → Guadalajara -- 1 hour

Factoring in 1 hour to get from Koh Phangan to Samui airport, and 1 hour drive from Guadalajara airport to my parent’s home in Ajijic, Lake Chapala, I was looking at a 40-hour journey. 

Total price for my partner and I: just under $5,000 USD. 

I didn’t want to face the idea of booking a return ticket. But it was not, as we had hoped, cheaper to book one-way tickets. It was the same price for a one-way flight as it was for a return. So, of course, we booked a return for a few months later, thinking we likely wouldn’t take it.

I didn’t have that kind of money, so I borrowed it off a good friend, and booked the flights. 

When you’re that far away from a sick loved one, no amount of money or travel time will keep you from being by their side. There is always a way.

Dad and I enjoying life during my first visit after his diagnosis

Lucky for me, I work online and had an excellent team at the time who really stepped up to the plate, and allowed me to cut my working hours in half while I was in Mexico. My clients were also very understanding, and were fine with me working different hours in this distant timezone. 

Because of that, I was able to keep my business running while still spending time with my ailing father, taking him to doctor’s appointments, making him healthy meals, and accompanying him wherever he needed to go, since he had a lot of trouble walking on his own.

But my dad, a personal trainer, karate instructor, and the strongest man I knew, fought back. He didn’t, as the doctors predicted, succumb to the cancer within two months. He went on cannabis paste and lo and behold, the tumour stopped growing.

What do we do now?

So, there Fraser and I were a month and a half later, in Mexico, with no idea of what to do next.

“Well, you need to get back to your lives,” my mom insisted.

“Don’t just stay around here waiting for me to die, please,” my dad put it bluntly.

So, we took our return flights back to Thailand. 

“We’ll be back for Christmas,” we promised, as we hugged a teary goodbye at the airport. 

And we were. Just four months later, we did the same long, now even more expensive journey (since it was during the holidays) once again. I borrowed more money. 

The tumour seemed stable, but wasn’t shrinking, and dad still had quite adverse symptoms. And there was no way I was going to miss what could be my last Christmas with my dad. 

My dad was sick of doctors. He said he’d rather die than go to one more appointment. But he’d been getting migraines at night, and we wanted to get to the bottom of them. So I convinced him to get one last CT scan, promising that I would go without him to the follow up appointment, and take care of it all.

“No es un tumour.” I’ll never forget the doctor saying this Spanish phrase to me very slowly and clearly. Though I had my bilingual friend with me to translate, I didn’t need her to. He was holding the results of my dad’s CT scan in front of him, and telling me, basically, that there was no cancer. And there never had been. His medical reports had been misinterpreted and misread until then, the doctor explained.

Walking out of the clinic, I fainted for the first time in my life.

Moments after telling Dad he had been misdiagnosed and there was no tumour

We delivered the amazing news to my dad just before Christmas. You should have seen his face light up (photo above taken moments after). It was the best news I’ve ever had the pleasure of delivering, and the best Christmas present I could have ever asked for... or so I thought at the time.

We bought dad a pool table as a parting gift and checked in online for our flights back to Thailand. We hugged him and my mom happily upon our departure at the airport once again, saying “see you soon,” and this time, meaning it wholeheartedly.

And we went back to our lives thinking Dad had a good few years if not decades in him, and tried to put the whole thing behind us. 

Psych!

I was having drinks with some friends who were visiting on Koh Samui when I got the call. 

“Kaila, can you talk?” Mom’s voice was shaky. 

“Yeah just a sec,” I flipped the phone to the other ear as I rose from the table, taking my drink with me as I knew it wasn’t going to be good news, and walking out of the restaurant. “OK, what’s up?”

“Your father fell again, so we went to the doctor. The tumour is back and it’s pushing on his brain which is making him dizzy.”

“But we were told it wasn’t a tumour!?”

“I guess the doctor got it wrong.”

“How!? How can you get something like that wrong!?”

“This is Mexico, sweetie.”

“OK so what’s the next step?”

There was a moment of silence. “There is no next step, Sweetie.”

“Wh-what do you mean?”

“Dad doesn’t want to fight it anymore. He’s done. And we have to respect his wishes.”

“I’ll be on the next flight.”

“I think that’s a good idea, punkin.” 

Hands shaking, I called my business partner who had deep pockets and asked him to book me a one-way flight to Mexico. I didn’t care if it was the same price, double the price, whatever. I was only going one way. I was on a flight within 24 hours of receiving my mom’s call.

And thank god I was. Because I rushed, I managed to make it to Mexico to be with my dad while he was still relatively mobile. 

We went down to the lake, we went out for lunch, I got his brother to come visit from Canada, we chatted on their porch. We made memories. 

He passed away peacefully in his bed a month after my arrival. We scattered his ashes in Lake Chapala, where he loved to sit and sip a cocktail while watching the world go by. We held his celebration of life at his favourite restaurant. 

With the liberty of not having a return flight booked, I was able to stay as long as I felt necessary with my newly widowed mother. We spent time together chatting, going through old photos, and I helped her look for a new house. There were too many memories in her old one. But I wasn’t just staying for her sake. I wasn’t ready to leave because leaving meant it was all really over. That he was really and truly gone. 

Finally, about a month after his passing, I felt like I could go. My mom seemed to be doing OK given the circumstances, and I was coming around too.

When the wheels of my plane lifted up from the ground at Mexico City airport, I remember wondering if I’d done the right thing. If, perhaps, I should have just stayed there with him from the first time I arrived. But I knew that I had done what I needed to do, and I’d been there for him when he’d needed me most. 

I left feeling terribly sad, but with absolutely no regrets. 

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My tips for dealing with a loved one being sick while living abroad

Facing a similar situation? I’m so sorry. It’s like, the hardest thing you’ll ever have to do. 

Here are my heart-felt tips for getting through the illness and death of a loved one:

1. Don’t wait. It’s probably a long, expensive trip home. But can you put a time limit or a price on spending time with your loved one? No way. Go. Don’t think about the money. Beg/ borrow/ steal if you have to. The only thing you’ll regret is not being there in time.

2. Don’t freak out, either. Because realistically, it’s not going to help. And you’ll probably do a lot of things that aren’t going to help (like drinking the pain away... I’m definitely guilty of that one) but freaking out will actually make things worse. For them, for you, for everyone. Take some deep breaths and try to be calm.

3. But let yourself cry and be sad. I’m not saying not to feel. You have to. Some people shut down their emotions in times of crisis like this. Give yourself time to break down and ugly cry. It’s therapeutic and part of the process.

4. If you can’t make it home, help from afar. If you can’t make it right away, it can be like you feel every single second you’re not there. You’ll feel better if you feel like you’re helping. I climbed a mountain and prayed at the top the day my dad went in for brain surgery. It wasn’t helping directly, but it made me feel better. I also devoted my evenings away to internet research on alternative cures for cancer, distilling the information into easily digestible bits to send him suggestions, so I wouldn’t overwhelm him. Didn’t do much for him as he wasn’t interested, but it helped me.

5. Know that your friends may not know what to say, and that’s OK. One of the hardest parts of the process of losing my dad was that people avoided talking about him. They still do, to a certain extent. It’s not that they don’t care, but it can be easy to feel that way when all you want to do is talk about it, and you can’t find anyone who will. People are uncomfortable when it comes to death. They don’t know what to say. Especially when you’re abroad, when they’ve never met the loved one in question. So they don’t say anything. They avoid the topic. Sometimes, it can be helpful to just tell them what you need. “Hey, I just need to talk about my _____. Do you mind listening?” Try that.

6. Try to find others in your area who have gone through something similar. Pretty much the only people I could properly talk to about my dad’s passing were people who had also experienced a similar loss. They just knew what to say, and even better, they knew how to listen. Reach out to them. I reached out to and Skyped with a good friend who had lost her dad to cancer a few months before my dad passed, and she gave me infinite wisdom and advice that really helped get me through it all, just because she’d also been through it, and was coming out the other end. Just because we couldn’t meet face to face didn’t make the experience of talking to her any less valuable to me. 

May you find strength. And I promise, it may take time, but you will.