BROADCASTS.com

Happy 2021 everyone! Today I'll be talking about a situation we all immigrants fear. Losing a loved one while living abroad. Welcome to the first episode of 2021. I want to start this episode by stating that I planned this episode to come a week early and be about new year's resolutions and how to achieve our goals. I will release that episode later, but I decided to change this one due to something that happened recently. Unfortunately, on Christmas eve, we received a call that we wish we had never gotten. Around 9 PM, just as we were getting ready for Christmas dinner, we learned that my father in law had passed away. He had been diagnosed with COVID two weeks before and admitted to the hospital just a few days later. Honestly, we never thought things would end like this. We knew he would spend Christmas at the hospital and maybe the New Year as well, but, as we learned the hard way, none of those things happened. As I record this episode on the morning of Sunday, January 10th, the pandemic has taken 1,928,872 lives worldwide. This may be a small percentage of the almost 90 million people that have been infected, but numbers bring very little comfort when one of those is someone you love. Losing a loved one while living abroad is a matter of WHEN not IF Regardless of the pandemic, one of the things that we, as immigrants, sign for when we move to another country is that someone we love will die, and we won't be with them. It's a matter of WHEN not IF. When we decided to move to Canada, that was one of the biggest fears we had. That one day, out of nowhere, we would get a call from Mexico telling us that one of our loved ones had passed away. And one of the reasons we picked Canada over other countries was that we knew that we would be a four-hour flight away from our families when that happened. We've done it before, we get a redeye flight, and we are there the next morning. It's not the first time we are away when we lose someone we love. But, this time, because of the pandemic, we didn't travel. Even though there are daily flights from Toronto to Mexico City, we decided not to go. Two main reasons drove our decision. The first one was that we had just lost a loved one to COVID, so we didn't want to risk losing another. My wife and I are both healthy, but you never know if you're going to catch the virus at the airport or on the plane. And the second one was that it wouldn't even be possible to be with our family because of the whole situation. We wouldn't be able to hug them, mourn with them, nothing. Because we would have to quarantine as soon as we arrived there. The second reason was that, because it was a COVID death, there would be no funeral at all. Our family received the ashes from the hospital without any ceremony. A hard situation made even worse by making it feel that it's just a transaction. Fortunately, our family organized a few gatherings online and a mass for religious people, which, at least, brought some comfort. I remember interviewing Marta Batiz for Episode 8, she was one of my first guests. When I asked what had been the most challenging situation she had faced as an immigrant, she told me the story of when her mother passed away. She took a plane to Mexico, and she told me it was the longest flight she had ever taken. She said, and I'm quoting, "the worst thing about migrating is, is not being able to teleport yourself for those crucial moments." I'm not sure that I really got what she meant back then, but now I do. Don't get me wrong, I always knew something like was going to happen, and I was trying to prepare myself for a situation like that. But I didn't really prepare for this specific situation. There was no redeye flight, there was no funeral, we just had to mourn my wife's father from a distance. I mean, we talked to our families every day over, but it was not the same. Not at all. For me, the worst part is that we are only one of the almost 2 millio...