Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Saying goodbye is never easy and in this expat life we say it more often than the average person – goodbyes when expat friends leave to start on a new adventure, or perhaps it’s you moving on and leaving loved ones behind.
There are also those tearful farewells as visitors return home and those awful airport goodbyes after a long summer with family and friends. The list goes on and on but we adapt and quickly grow stronger over our many years of familiar, sad goodbyes.
Only the other evening, I found myself at my first ‘leaving party’ since landing in Bahrain. Have I really been here that long to be saying goodbye already to a friend?
As I sat listening to my friend reminisce on her early Bahrain days amidst laughter and tears, it made me think – is it harder for the person leaving or harder for the friends they are leaving behind?
I have been on the end of both more times than I’d like to recall. The first was the worst. I remember feeling utterly distraught and bereft at the prospect of our dearest friends leaving whilst we’d be left behind to build new friendships once again.
It was one of those magical friendships when our whole family had formed and built up relationships whilst living in a foreign land; you know those families that you just ‘click’ with. Then suddenly they were gone, just like that, to the other side of the globe.
Yes, it hurts but without this expat journey we would never have found such wonderful friends.
