Carol O'Donovan on grief abroad: 'There’s a thing that happens when you wake up and find yourself to be a foreigner.' My parents enjoyed travelling and had an “anything is possible if you try hard enough” attitude. ‘There’s a thing that happens when you get that call that every foreigner dreads / When your world ends and spins and spins and you’re dizzy...’The grief was crippling. It must be hard to grieve parents while seeing memories of them round every corner, but it is a different kind of hard to grieve your people in a world that never knew they existed. Would you like to share your experience with Irish Times Abroad, something interesting about your life or your perspective as an emigrant?

Source: The Irish Times December 29, 2025 06:00 UTC