Homesickness, Guilt and the Ones You Left

Nobody warns you that the hardest part of emigrating is not the paperwork, the money or the winter — it is the people. The guilt about your parents, the friend who has gone quiet, the funeral you watched on a phone screen at three in the morning. Here is the honest version of the emotional cost, written for people who have already decided and now have to live with the decision.

Guilt is not evidence that you chose wrongly

Start here, because most people get this backwards. When the guilt arrives — and it arrives, usually somewhere after the first excitement burns off — the instinct is to read it as a verdict. If this were the right decision, I would not feel this bad.

That is not how it works. Guilt is what a person feels when they have chosen between two things they genuinely love. You did not choose Canada over your mother. You chose one future over another future, and your mother happens to live inside the one you left. The feeling is proportional to how much you care, not to how wrong you were. Families who understand that stop interrogating the decision every time they feel the ache, which frees up an enormous amount of energy for actually living.

It is also worth saying plainly: some of the guilt is not yours. Some of it was handed to you, sometimes gently and sometimes not, by people who did not want you to go. You can accept that they are grieving without accepting the invoice.

Ageing parents: the calculation nobody says out loud

This is the heaviest one, and it does not resolve. Your parents are getting older on the other side of a very long flight. Every phone call carries a small background question you never ask: how much time is this.

The families who handle it least badly seem to do a few unglamorous things. They talk about it explicitly before the move rather than after, including the parts nobody enjoys — what happens if there is a fall, who is nearby, who has the medical aid details, who holds the spare key, whether there is a plan for the house. They build a small network of local people around their parents: a neighbour, a cousin, a church friend, someone who will phone you if something is wrong rather than waiting for you to phone them. They keep a written list of the practical things — doctor, pharmacy, bank, the person who fixes the geyser — because in a crisis at a distance, information is the only thing you can actually contribute.

And they decide in advance, roughly, what would bring them home on an emergency flight and what would not. That sounds cold. It is the opposite: making the decision once, calmly, in a kitchen with everyone present, is far kinder than making it at two in the morning in a panic while looking up airfares with shaking hands.

One more thing. Many parents will tell you to go. Some will mean it entirely, some will mean it mostly, and a few will say it while quietly hoping you refuse. Take the permission at face value anyway. It is the last gift they can give you before you leave, and refusing it does not make them less alone.

The friend who feels abandoned

Friendships do not usually end in a fight after emigration. They end in a series of unanswered voice notes, a birthday remembered late, a group chat where you are increasingly reading rather than writing.

Some of that is logistics and some of it is something less comfortable: you and your friend now live in materially different worlds. You are describing snow tyres and school registration; they are describing a burst pipe in a street you can no longer picture. Both of you are being polite about how much of the other's life you actually follow. That is not betrayal — it is what happens when shared daily context disappears, and the same thing happens to people who move from Durban to Joburg, just slower.

What survives, in most people's experience, is a smaller number of friendships than you expected, held together by deliberate effort rather than proximity. Two or three people who will still pick up in five years. The rest thin out into warmth, which is a real thing and not nothing. Grieve it once and stop auditing it monthly.

Be prepared, too, for the friend who is angry — often the one who is stuck, who wanted to go and could not, or who feels that your leaving was a comment on their staying. Sometimes the friendship recovers, sometimes it does not. You are allowed to leave without it being an argument you have to win.

Funerals, weddings and the events you watch through glass

You will miss things. Not hypothetically — certainly. A grandparent's funeral, a wedding you were meant to stand up in, the birth of a niece, the last Christmas in the family house before it is sold.

The particular pain of missing a funeral from abroad is that grief needs a room full of people, and you are in a kitchen alone. A video link is better than nothing, but it puts you behind glass while everyone else is holding each other. If it happens to you, do something physical and local: light a candle, cook the food they cooked, phone the person who is most alone, tell someone in Canada who they were. Attending a death only through a screen and then going straight back to work is how people end up ambushed by it months later.

For weddings and the happier things, the honest advice is to be a real presence or an honest absence and not a guilty half-measure. Send the long message, record the video properly, phone at the right hour even if the right hour is inconvenient for you. Half-attending everything from a distance leaves you exhausted and everyone else vaguely disappointed.

Defending the decision to people who did not make it

Sooner or later you will be at a braai back home, or on a call, and someone will say something with an edge to it. That you gave up on the country. That it is fine for some. That you will be back. That you must think you are better than everyone.

You do not owe anyone the essay. A short, non-defensive answer — "it was the right call for our family, and I miss you" — refuses the fight without conceding anything. Long justifications tend to sound like you are still arguing with yourself, which is often exactly what is happening.

The mirror image is worth watching too: the emigrant who cannot stop running South Africa down, because constant criticism keeps the decision feeling justified. It is corrosive, it hurts people who are still there and doing their best, and it usually signals unprocessed grief rather than genuine conviction. You are allowed to have left a place you still love.

Missing a place that has also moved on

Here is the cruel structural fact of homesickness. The South Africa you miss is a specific one — a particular year, a particular light, particular people at a particular age — and it is already gone, including for the people who never left. The shop closed. The friends' children are teenagers. The road has a new name. Your old house has someone else's furniture in it.

This is why going back sometimes makes homesickness worse rather than better: you have been missing a time, and time is the one place you cannot fly to. Recognising that reframes the whole feeling. It is not a problem with Canada. It is not solved by returning. It is ordinary human grief for a chapter that ended, and it belongs to everyone who has ever grown older, emigrant or not.

What homesickness actually feels like, so you recognise it

It rarely announces itself. It comes sideways, usually through the senses and usually at inconvenient moments.

• Smell does most of the damage — rain on hot tar, braai smoke from a neighbour's yard in July, a Christmas-time whiff of something you cannot name.
• Light. The quality of a Highveld late afternoon has no equivalent, and a grey February gets under people in a way they did not expect.
• Sound. Someone speaking Afrikaans in a shopping centre and your whole chest reorganising itself.
• Sport. A national team playing at an hour that requires you to be awake alone.
• Food that is not about the food. Nobody actually needs a rusk at that price. They need the person they used to drink coffee with.
• Competence. Homesickness often spikes when you feel stupid — a form you do not understand, an accent you cannot place, a joke you missed. Missing home is partly missing the version of yourself who knew how everything worked.

What genuinely helps

None of this is a cure. Homesickness is not a bug to be fixed; it is the price of having loved a place. But it becomes livable.

• Ritualise the contact. A standing call at a fixed time survives; spontaneous contact across a time gap does not.
• Build local, unglamorously. Nothing reduces homesickness like having somewhere to be on a Tuesday and someone who notices if you are not there.
• Keep the culture in a form you can practise, not just miss. Cook the food, play the music, teach the kids the words. Nostalgia you act on hurts less than nostalgia you only feel.
• Let each person in the house dip at a different time. One of you will be fine in month three and wrecked in month nine. Do not require the family to feel the same thing on the same day.
• Do not make permanent decisions inside a bad week. Especially not in the dark months, and especially not straight after a trip home.
• Know the line between homesickness and something clinical. Ongoing sleeplessness, a low mood that does not lift, loss of interest in everything, drinking more — that is a doctor's territory, not a mindset problem. Canada has family doctors, walk-in clinics and provincially funded mental health services; find out what exists where you live before you need it.

The short version

The guilt is not a verdict, the ache is not a mistake, and neither of them fully goes away — they just stop running the household. You will miss things you cannot get back, you will disappoint people you love, and you will still, most days, be glad you went. Those facts sit in the same chest at the same time, and learning to carry all of them without resolving any of them is most of what the first years are.