We've done all the practical planning but nobody talks about this bit: leaving the grandkids. I'm thrilled about the move and grieving it at the same time. Anyone else sat with this? How did you make peace with it?
Yes. Completely. What helped was reframing it — we're not leaving them, we're giving them a place abroad to visit. The first video call in the new kitchen was hard; the tenth was just normal.
We set a rhythm before we left — a standing weekly call and one visit each way a year, booked in advance so it's real, not "someday". Having it in the calendar made the goodbye feel like a comma, not a full stop.
Different life stage but the distance-from-family ache is the same. Be gentle with yourself — feeling joy and grief at once doesn't mean you made the wrong choice, it means you love people.
Thanks for opening this up, Helga — it's one of the realest parts of moving and it gets skipped. If the low moments get heavy, a lot of the country guides list local English-speaking support and community groups in the daily-life sections; worth knowing they're there before you need them. And threads like this are exactly what the forum's for.
"A comma, not a full stop." I'm keeping that. Thank you all — this helped more than the spreadsheets did.