Rebuilding Belonging: The Journey Through Migratory Grief and Beyond Homesickness

It’s something I know deeply. It’s part of me, and always has been. Where do I belong? Italy, England, France, Australia?

For someone who has lived and has family in all of these places, it’s no wonder I resonate with migrant families’ grief. Migration grief runs through my heritage, a grief not always recognised, but always felt.

When you move to another country, whether by choice, chance, or circumstance, you don’t just pack your belongings. You carry your entire identity with you. The language that shapes your thoughts, the smells that anchor your memories, the familiar sounds of your community, all stitched into the fabric of who you are.

And then, suddenly, that fabric feels out of place. You become the other. Your language, your look, your accent - gives you away before the person you are can be known. Your gestures, your humour, your way of being, all subtly marked as different.

Even as you stand in a land of opportunity, gratitude, and safety, there is a quiet ache. You may feel blessed, and you are, but you are also grieving.

What is migratory grief?

Migratory grief is the deep, multifaceted sense of loss that comes with leaving behind a familiar world. It’s not just about geography; it’s about identity. It’s the loss of proximity to loved ones, of belonging to a community that understood your being. It’s the loss of cultural familiarity, the way people greet, celebrate, comfort, and grieve together.

Psychologists refer to this as ambiguous loss, when something is gone, but not gone entirely. You can video call your family, but not hold their hands. You can watch your home country’s festivals online, but not feel the pulse of it in your chest. You can belong to two worlds and yet feel fully claimed by neither.

The grief within the grief

There’s another layer, one that many migrants know too well.

It’s the grief of bereavement from afar. When a loved one dies overseas, a grandparent, an uncle, a parent, a cousin, or a lifelong friend, you grieve alone. You weren’t there to say goodbye. You couldn’t hold their hand, or stand shoulder to shoulder with those who understood what they meant to you.

I remember the Christmas my dear Nonna died. It was Christmas Eve in Italy, but already Christmas Day here in Australia. While my husband, children, and in-laws celebrated around me, my whole heart, mind, and spirit were on the other side of the world. I cried inside and out, caught between two realities: one filled with celebration, the other with sorrow.

That night, I felt the depth of migration grief more than ever. The distance between life and death, between love and loss, became painfully real. That feeling has been compounded with every significant bereavement of those I love. It pains me to reflect that I have never attended the funeral of so many of my family overseas. I carry a quiet anxiety deep within me for the day when my parents’ and siblings’ time will come, knowing that the ache of absence will return even stronger.

You might stay awake through the night waiting for updates from a different time zone. Then, when the message comes, the world keeps turning around you, your new world, where most people never met them and cannot fully understand what you’ve lost.

There is no funeral you can attend, no shared meal, no collective mourning, only a quiet, solitary kind of sorrow.

And then comes the compounding grief, the accumulation of all those unacknowledged losses. The friends and family around you in your new country might offer sympathy, but it’s often fleeting, uninformed by the depth of connection you once had.

Sometimes, there’s also dismissive positivity. “At least they lived a long life.” “You can always visit their grave when you go back.” “They knew you loved them, that’s what matters.”

These comments might be meant to comfort, but instead, they diminish the reality of loss. They fail to see the emotional fracture that occurs when your life is split between two worlds, when grief has no shared place to land.

What they miss is that grief is not logical. You can hold gratitude and longing at the same time. You can feel love for where you are and still ache for what you’ve left behind.

This lack of empathy can create a quiet apathy around you, leaving you feeling even more unseen. The message is subtle but painful: your grief isn’t valid here.

Apathy builds walls where compassion should have been. And in that space, isolation grows.

That is one of the most difficult truths about migratory grief. It is so often invisible to those around you.

The paradox of gratitude and grief

Many migrants wrestle with guilt for feeling sad when they’ve gained so much. They tell themselves they should be grateful, and they are, but that doesn’t erase the longing for what was.

This is where understanding grief matters. Grief doesn’t disappear with time. It doesn’t shrink. Instead, our life grows around it. We learn to hold the ache, to weave it into the story of who we are becoming.

We don’t get over migration grief, we build around it.

So, how do we build a life around migration grief?

1. Acknowledge what’s lost. Name the ache, the friends, the language, the traditions, the self you left behind. Grief unspoken is grief that grows heavy.

2. Create continuity. Keep rituals alive. Cook your childhood meals. Speak your language. Tell your children your stories. Continuity keeps identity breathing.

3. Seek connection beyond sameness. While it’s comforting to gather with others from your homeland, belonging expands when we open ourselves to shared humanity. Listen, learn, and let others learn you.

4. Allow duality. You can be both proud of your new country and ache for the one you left. You can be grateful and grieving. These emotions can and do coexist.

5. Redefine belonging. Brené Brown reminds us that true belonging is not about fitting in. It’s about being so grounded in who you are that you can stand alone if needed. Belonging starts within.

6. Practice empathy, for yourself and others. Every non–First Nations Australian has ancestors who once arrived here through opportunity, necessity, or loss. If we recognised that collective migration story, perhaps our conversations about culture, identity, and immigration would sound less like us versus them and more like we.

A call for empathy

Australia, for all its beauty and opportunity, is still learning how to talk about belonging. There is tension between gratitude and grief, between cultural pride and cultural fear. Yet grief is the bridge that can connect us all, if only we see it that way.

When we acknowledge that loss is universal, that grief is the price of love and change, we begin to humanise migration not as a policy issue, but as a deeply emotional one.

So perhaps the question isn’t “How do we overcome migration grief?” Maybe it’s “How do we build a life that honours it?”

Because belonging isn’t about erasing where we came from. It’s about bringing it with us, letting it shape how we see and serve the world we now call home.

A reflection on lived experience

I am fully aware that as an English-speaking person who chose to live here, many would invalidate the depth of my grief. But there lies the empathy gap. Can we only have compassion for people who walk, talk, or look like they are in despair all the time?

I know that I am not as isolated or disenfranchised as so many others. So if I feel this ache of belonging everywhere and nowhere, I can only imagine how much deeper that isolation must be for those who face language barriers, cultural disconnection, and the invisible weight of being misunderstood in their new home.

Migration grief is not just about missing where we came from. It’s about longing to be fully seen where we are.

✨ If this helped you see migration grief differently, please share it. Empathy grows when we talk about it.

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