The global life cycle has turned the full wheel for this particular Third Culture Kid (TCK). At 11 weeks old my granddaughter, who lives in London, became a transatlantic traveller. She came to stay with us in Houston while her parents celebrated a friend’s wedding in Las Vegas. It was the greatest gift my daughter could have given us: a chance, as new global grandparents, to get to know our granddaughter, night-time feeds and all.

After a difficult six years during which five of our family have died, Ava is a reminder that life, no matter where we live, is a wonderful and precious continuum. Along with the realisation that somehow along the way I have become one of the older generation, all my children’s grandparents now being dead.

Many aspects of expatriate life, when the concept is being sold to the new and unwary, are focused on the benefits. There are lots, and not just of the pecuniary type. We see parts of the world that may never have been open to us; we learn of cultures and traditions wholly different to our own; we have the opportunity to speak a new language and to experience truly more than the sanitised version of our new home that the tourist brochures tout. It is a privilege to be invited to someone else’s country, and for a few short years to share, on the periphery, another’s customs.

There are, however, significant drawbacks: educational disruption; familial dislocations; friendships sometimes diluted with distance, both geographical and metaphysical; and death.

Dealing with the death of our parents at a distance is hard, and no matter that we console ourselves with the platitudes of “I could have been in the next room and not been there when he died” or “she wanted us to see the world” or “I went back as much as possible”, there is still a lingering guilt that we were on the other side of the world when death dealt its hand. But because human nature is as it is, we grieve and then slowly let the pieces of our life, that one we have chosen, envelope us as we learn to manage and live with the sorrow.

Contributed by Apple Gidley, a full-time writer, now based in Houston, who has relocated 26 times through 12 countries.  Author of Expat Life Slice by Slice and a former FIGT board member and keynote speaker, she is known to thousands as ExpatApple thanks to her popular blog at the Daily Telegraph.