I’m keeping this outside of the paywall, as I imagine I am not the only one struggling with grief as we enter the holiday season.
Three weeks ago, I started having nearly nonstop panic attacks. As soon as one would end, I could feel the building wave of another one coming for me.
It’s been one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.
I was in the US visiting my husband for a month, and the panic attacks started a week before I was to return to Italy. I was gripped with absolute terror and would wake up in the middle of the night shaking, something I had never experienced before. Then started the cycle that is familiar to all anxiety sufferers—my sleep became disrupted, and the anxiety got worse.
I hadn’t had a panic attack since my twenties, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
I was almost completely non-functional. In fact, this is the first time in weeks that I’ve been able to actually write or do anything other than just try to manage the waves of panic, terror, and sadness.
I had been experiencing low-level anxiety in Italy that seemed reasonable for having moved to a new country. It would come and go, and it felt manageable. Until the waves of panic struck me, I didn’t have any sense that I had pushed myself too far, too fast.
While I saw no obvious trigger to the panic attacks, my therapist explained that we all have an internal clock that tracks things like death anniversaries or when we should start dreading the holiday season. While I was not consciously thinking about the December 26 anniversary of my mother’s death, somewhere in my body an alarm went off and sent my body into flight or flight.
My therapist also explained that it’s common to not fully start grieving a death until you get to a year, as you tick off milestones you no longer share with your deceased loved one. The fact that I was facing down my first Thanksgiving, birthday, and Christmas without my mother tripped some wire.
Even though I had done plenty of grieving since she passed, the fact is, I hadn’t faced down the holiday season without her.
I think for many people, no matter how many years pass, it is still hard to be without loved ones during the holiday season.
My body’s extreme reaction had a lot to do with the fact that I had taken on way too much right after my mother’s death.
It’s not like there wasn’t anyone trying to get me to see this. My friend Grace Kelly (Graceful Coaching) who hails from Northern Ireland but has lived in Puglia for the last 15 years, did her best to get me to see I was putting my nervous system in peril almost from the get-go.
In addition to being a wonderful, wise person, Grace is a successful coach who is terrific at diagnosing problems. Almost from the moment we became friends, she expressed concern about what I was taking on while loaded up with fresh grief.
“Darling, you moved to a country where you don’t speak the language, without your husband, two weeks after your mother passed, and have no grounding because you are hopping from one Airbnb to another,” Grace patiently explained and re-explained to me whenever I would experience anxiety.
On top of that, she would always note, “I was renovating a trullo (a hundred-year-old conical structure indigenous to Puglia),” which brought on unrelenting stress for myriad reasons.
I recognized she was right, but I also felt that these were inconveniences, and things I couldn’t do anything about. My therapist has since identified this kind of thinking as “gaslighting” myself. I was denying that I needed the most basic kind of stability after my mother died.
When I had booked my travel to move to Italy in January, I obviously had no idea my mother would pass away weeks before my departure. Once she did, I felt that going to Italy was actually a good idea because it would be a distraction, and I would be in beautiful, natural surroundings, which are very healing for me. I thought being alone would be good because I needed space to process all my complicated feelings about the death of this complicated relationship.
But what I realized is that what we need in these times is the presence of people.
It’s not so much what these people say; it’s just the fact that they are there. It’s that they drop off food for you to eat, the way my friend Amanda did in the weeks after my mother died and before I went to Italy. It’s friends just sitting with you or inviting you to watch a movie or binge a show. It’s just being near my husband, even if we aren’t talking.
While I’ve made really lovely friends in Italy, we don’t have the familiarity that I have with my husband or my friends in the US. If I had been living here for years, settled into a home, and had some history with these friends, the experience almost definitely would have been very different.
For that matter, if I had even had a home at all in Italy (rather than one Airbnb after another), it likely would have been much easier to navigate.
When the panic attacks started, more than a few of my friends thought it was being in the US that was causing them. That was when I got back to Italy, that things would settle down. I was hopeful that was the case.
It was not.
My therapist (and others) noted that while the Trullo I moved into in July is in fact a magical little space, it is not a home. It is a 300-square-foot guest room that I thought I could live in until our house was built. This was a bad decision and that would be true even if my mother hadn’t passed. But now that I was truly grieving, living in this tiny space out in the country was not going to be very stabilizing for me.
Unfortunately, we sold our home in DC back in March because the market was cratering and we were worried about getting stuck in a neighborhood that had seen rising crime and had changed a lot since we moved there. We also knew we would need the money for the Italian house we planned to build.
So, we sold our home, and my husband moved into a tiny apartment that doesn’t feel like a home to me in any real way. Again, were I not entering the holiday season with the anniversary of my mother’s death, it wouldn’t be an issue.
I want to be clear that none of this takes away from the many wonderful experiences I’ve had in Italy, and I don’t think this represents the average expat experience. Many expats create stability as soon as they move there; I was unable to do this because the people I trusted with my project led me to believe repeatedly I’d be able to imminently move in, which in fact it took six months.
In fact, I know my experience isn’t representative because I’ve been interviewing dozens of expats and immigrants for my book about what we can learn from how people live outside the US. There are great communities in many places; it’s just hard to start building those relationships weeks after you lose your mother — at least for me.
So what now?
Working with my therapist, the panic attacks have come under control, but there is still a lot of anxiety. I feel deep sadness, grief, and fear as I face down the holiday season and the anniversary of my mother’s death. I’ve returned to the US for this period to be with my husband, rather than trying to white-knuckle it without him.
Not having our home has compounded the problem, but my friend Cherie, who is a literal angel on Earth, managed to find a beautiful house for my husband and me to house sit through the holiday season while the owners are away.
I’m also realistic that, even if we were in our home that we sold, it would still be an incredibly difficult time. This is a time of year that is very hard for people—regardless of their living situation—as winter closes in and the long March of compulsory celebrating begins, no matter what may be going on in your own life.
If you are someone who feels dread, panic, fear, or deep sadness this time of year, please remember you are not alone. Ask for help; let your friends know you need extra support. For those who love the season and aren’t in mourning, please be sure to check in on your people who might be struggling.
Kristen, from another expat in Italy, I feel so much care for you. We deeply understand the trauma to the nervous system of moving- we arrived full time in February after selling our only home in the US. This is after we spent about 6 months here in 2024 in our home in Italy. And still… our nervous systems are just beginning to settle. I can drive in our town mostly with out an anxiety attack. But my husband cannot. He has not been able to drive after a couple accidents. Just panics. And the language! I have a tutor 2 x a week and still so hard. At least we have each other. And a home , fully ready for us. But , you have taken on so much. And your friend is wise. She is full of Grace! Our therapists continue to be boggled at what we have done and taken on. (We are 72 and 74) And, clearly your load is so much heavier with the loss of your mother, the absence of your husband and sense of rootlessness without a home. When you return to Italy, maybe you would consider being our guest here in Tuscany in Pistoia for bit. It is like a spa. Space, privacy, nature. I have suffered panic attacks and understand. They are like an alternate persona has taken over. Just to say…. I know something of what you are experiencing. And then there is the grief. Pace, amica.
I send my warmest hopes that you find some grounding and soul soothing in these holiday months. Personally, as an American who immigrated to France (ex-pats seem wealthy, I am not) almost 8 years ago, I can't say I have ever met a single person who relocated their life internationally and fell into some semblance of stability immediately.
Since 2020, I have lost both grandparents, two of the three pets who moved with me here, a sibling, an uncle, one American friend here, and three close friends back in the States. The waves of grief have been relentless and incredibly painful, and doing it in a place so far from my place of origin has been extremely challenging. I recommend Francis Weller's beautiful book, "The Wild Edge of Sorrow," for some deep personal grief work. Community is the hardest thing to cultivate in a new country, and it can take years to feel anything remotely like the richness of old, rooted relationships we leave behind. Be kind to yourself, and be patient. All these processes take time.