Episode 7: Two Weddings and Two Funerals

Whether you're close to home, wherever that is, or have moved across the world. Life still happens, but how do you deal with it when you are far away. This week Chandra tells the story of (unexpected) deaths in her family as well the celebration of lives coming together, all starting before she had lived in Italy for even six months. She also shares a strategic way in this episode's "Chan Select" for being able to be financially prepared for those events. Listen in!

• This episode's "Chan Select": The Total Money Makeover and Dave Ramsey's 7 Baby Steps.
• Follow on Instagram: @Expatriotical
• Episode Reference: Episode 2: Redefining "Trailing Spouse" and Episode 4: Hospitalizations: Child Edition

"Live and Travel in the Know" with Expatriotical!

Transcript

Expatriotical- Episode 7: Two Weddings and Two Funerals

Bienvenue, Benvenuti, and Welcome to Expatriotical, the podcast for expats, travelers, and other adventurous souls. I’m Chandra Alley and after living as an expat with my husband and 4 children in two different countries for almost 6 years, I’ve learned the arts of pivoting during pitfalls, travelling tastefully for less, and soaking in amazing new cultures without loosing your own.

Join me, as we dive into the joys and challenges of travel and the expat life in every episode!

Hey everyone! Today we are going to tackle some tough and also joyful life events. Ones that we go through, regardless of our locations on this Earth. Because life goes on, even when you move away from those that you love.

For my family and I, the first realization of this came suddenly and unexpectedly. We had gone, at the end of January to Genova (also know as Genoa to most English speakers) because Lilliah, our five-year-old, had a three-day weekend from school and we hadn’t been there yet. It was only about an hour and a half or little bit more with some traffic, from our house to see Genova and see the Sea (which if you should know is one of my favorite things favorite places on Earth, anywhere I can see the ocean), so we headed that way in hopes to do some exploring.

The first night there we enjoyed a beautiful sunset and I was introduced to my favorite Italian tree (trees are another thing that I love), the Italian Stone Pine, which is tall and has it’s foliage arrayed like an umbrella at the top. As the Pine’s dark shadows framed the photos of the seaside sunset that we took, we enjoyed a delicious dinner to finish our evening.

The next day we explored the aquarium, which to this day is one of the best if not the best aquarium I’ve ever been to, so much so to myself and my children, that it is the “Chan Select” in Episode 2 of Expatriotical. So if you want to know more about it, I recommend listening to that episode! We did some more exploring that day and then went to bed, as we planned to go see Christopher Colombus’ house in the morning and then head back, so Chris could relax a little at home, as the following day would be Monday and he would have to go to work and Lilliah would have to go to school.

The next part for me is honestly a little bit blurry, as I can’t remember if I had seen my mom calling, or if I had happened to see that I had missed her call in the middle of the night, but as she was still getting the whole time difference thing figured out, I didn’t think anything of it that she had called me.

I awoke around 5:30 in the morning and looked at my phone again and saw that she had texted me, asking me to call her. She also, had left a voicemail. As soon as she started speaking I could hear that she had been crying.

In her voicemail she told me that my stepdad, Jerry, had suffered a heart attack in their home and died. He was only 70-years-old. I was of course stunned. I felt sad, bewildered, and guilty that I had not answered the phone in the middle of the night. To this day, I check my phone first thing, when I wake up in the morning. I guess I just don’t want my mom or anyone that has called me with hard news, so have to wait too long for me to respond.

As soon as I hung up the phone, I turned to Chris and told him the news. He of course was shocked. We got up, got the kids ready had breakfast and headed straight home. The next couple of days consisted of getting Caleb an emergency passport from the U.S. Consulate office in Milan (which in itself was stressful and funny, as we tried to hold his 9-week-old body still and properly placed, without our hands showing, in a passport photobooth) and also booking flights, and a rental car to get to Colorado for the funeral.

It is important for me to interject here that Chris’ employer paid for our airline tickets, as it is their policy, in the case of the death of a parent, stepparent, or child; they will fly the family to their home country. Thank God, because it would have taken a huge bite out of the budget to have to cover those tickets.

The time in Colorado was full of mixed emotions. Loss and grief and yet hope, as Jerry was a Christian, like ourselves, and we knew that he was and is, in Heaven with Jesus, where he is full of joy and has no more pain.

There was also joy and merriment that day, as Jerry’s funeral was held on the afternoon of Carson’s 4th birthday. And so we went home from the church and Carson opened gifts and we smiled and were happy. My mom, my uncle and aunt, and my grandma, Grammy is what I call her, got to meet Caleb for the first time. And it was a beautiful, but hard day. 

And there was more, as we took the opportunity to see Chris’ family as well, they all also met Caleb for the first time and we celebrated both Carson and Isaiah’s birthday (as Zay’s birthday is just five weeks after Carson’s). Joy and delight mingled with loss and sadness. It was weird to feel all of those things at once, but it was also necessary I think.

We returned to Italy, and my mom followed less than two weeks later, for a trip that had been planned for a few months prior to Jerry’s passing. To me this was God looking after my mom. Giving her a bit of joy, comfort, and something to look forward to. And it was this visit that she and I and baby Caleb took trip to Rome. (You can also listen to more about that trip in Episode 2.)

It felt really good, to have my mom there, so that she didn’t have to grieve alone, as both my brother and myself no longer lived in the same town as my mom. But it was even more wonderful to see her eyes light up at seeing the Coliseum, and the ruins of the Roman Forum. Taking in with her own eyes what she had learned about as a child. A dream come true, in the midst of her nightmare. A gentle reprieve from the gnawing grief.

After my mom left, we had a couple of months of “chill”. Still trying to get acclimated to living in Italy, making friends, and settling in and then at the end of April, Caleb and I saddled up and flew back to the States, this time for my brother’s wedding.

We were able to use my points and transfer points accrued (by the kids to me) through the airline rewards program to pay for my ticket. Honestly, I highly recommend signing up with your preferred airline for their rewards program, and also encouraging any loved ones that will be visiting you often to do so as well, if they haven’t already. It costs you nothing, to be clear I am not talking about an airline credit card, but a fidelity program, if you will, where you earn points or miles in this case every time you fly/make a purchase.

Anyway, back to the story, I am happy to say that Caleb, at the age of 4-months-old, was a great traveler and also acclimated to the time difference rather quickly, allowing his mommy to sleep until 6:30 in the morning that first day, instead of waking up at 1:00 a.m. or 2:00 a.m. like his siblings had done several weeks before.

This was a mainly joyous time as my brother, Shane, was marrying his beautiful fiancée, Lyndsey, in San Antonio, one of my favorite cities in Texas, if not in America overall! Not only were we celebrating their union, but Caleb was once again getting to meet more family! My dad and stepmom, my aunt and cousins and also ex-stepsiblings (that explanation is a complicated story, but let’s say it was SO amazing to see all of them)!

We saw The Alamo, took a boat tour of the San Antonio Riverwalk, and ate delicious Tex-mex food, along its waters. At the reception we danced the night away and laughed until it hurt! And though there was still the pain of Jerry not getting to be there, the joy remained.

Caleb and I returned to Italy, and we all enjoyed our first Spring in Milano. Which is absolutely my FAVORITE season in Italy! It’s warm and sunny. The spring blossoms are beautiful and their fragrances fill the air!

Spring quickly passed and with the exception of my daughter, Lilliah, breaking her arm, see Episode 4: Hospitalizations- Child Edition, for more on that story, things sailed along pretty smoothly. Our dear friend, Tasha, came to visit at the end of the school year, with a trip that will be in an upcoming travel episode, and then we headed back America for our first annual “home leave” trip.

We started that trip with a few short, but amazing, days in London, as that was a big bucket list item for me and then flew to America. Stopping in LA for a few days seeing all of my dad and stepmom’s side of the family. Then heading to Colorado seeing all of my mom’s side of family, as well as Chris’s entire family. This included for both of us my Grammy, and Chris’s Grandmother and Granny and Grandpa.

When we got back to Italy, we had been there maybe a couple weeks when we got the call that Chris’s grandpa had passed away. Since we all had just been there, even though we would’ve loved to be there as a family, it didn’t make sense due to the cost of buying five tickets, only five because Caleb was still under two years old. So we began looking at flights, in preparation for Chris to go back for the funeral.

This time there weren’t enough points remaining, so we had to dig into savings to pay for the plane tickets and rental car, and so just before Chris left for Colorado, we sat down to review our budget and decided to make a sinking fund for emergency travel. Because we still had (and still do have- thank the Lord) three grandmas (all who were in their 80s at the time) and we also knew we had a couple of very close family members that we figured would be getting married in the next few years and we didn’t want to be caught off guard. So on August 14th, 2019 we created the Emergency Travel envelope, which was really just a page on my budgeting spread sheet, and then began adding to it once a month.

This fund steadily grew and about two years after its inception, we dove into to it for my cousin Kristina’s wedding. She is one of my best friends and had been my maid-of-honor at my wedding (along with another best friend Jen, who was my matron-of-honor, yes you can have two), so it was only natural for me to go to her wedding.

As school was starting at the same time as the wedding, and our Emergency Travel budget had not yet amassed enough for a family of six to fly, I flew solo from Italy to Mexico, via Chicago.

And it was such an incredible experience! The location was beautiful, the festivities and activities were all fabulous and carefully curated by my cousin herself, that time with family of exploring, dancing, and cliff diving (more of my favorite things) was so cherished, and the actual wedding ceremony itself- held with the beach and rolling waves as it’s background- was stunning. And I feel like I was more able to fully enjoy it, since there was no guilt of taking funds from something else, or wondering how we were going to pay for it later.

Still today, Kristina’s wedding is one of my most cherished memories and I am so thankful that we had saved and prepared so that I could drink in every last moment more fully and totally guilt and worry free!

I suppose the moral of these stories is that life still happens, even while you are away, and even though you can’t prepare for everything, you can prepare a little here and there to help make the hardships a little less hard and the joys even more joyful.

Oh, and this is a random tangent, well it’s not completely a tangent, but it just popped into my mind another envelope or sinking fund that we created was called the “Because It’s Italy” Fund.  Since moving to Paris we have renamed it the “Because It’s International” fund. But we found in moving abroad, there were constantly small costs that caught us off guard. For example, how long it took for us to get paperwork done or processed with having to go into the city. We would end up needing to eat out for lunch, and that would cut into our family eating out budget, which didn’t make sense to us. Or, as is prevalent in Europe, the hidden traffic cameras, that ping you even when you go only 2 km/h over. For my American listeners that’s about 1 mile an hour over the speed limit. So you would get a surprise ticket or fine in the mail for €50 or €75, and those really can add up.

The “Because It’s International” (or B I squared) fund, helps to cushion those blows if you will.

So that’s it for the storytime portion if you will, ladies and gentlemen of this episode of Expatriotical. And now it’s time for our weekly “Chan Select”. This choice honestly came as a surprise even to me, because I hadn’t really chosen anything until sitting down and starting to write, but it just naturally seems like the right choice since the moral of all of these stories is being prepared, especially financially, for her the things that catch you by surprise when you’re living as an expat.

Again, I must reiterate that I am not an affiliate nor am I being paid to promote this, at the time of this recording. This is just something that has worked incredibly well for Chris and I, beyond just creating sinking funds and stuff like that. And that is budgeting in the Dave Ramsey style.

Now I know that some of you have never heard of this, but some of you have and usually you either love him or hate him, but following the 7 Baby Steps (not perfectly- mind you) that Ramsey lays out in his Total Money Makeover book, helped Chris and I immensely when it came to finances.

I will put the link to the Ramsey website and the book in the show notes if you would like to learn more.

Ok guys, it is now time to wrap things up with our quote of the day. Today I am going to change things up a bit and give a slogan as quote. This slogan comes from the airline Virgin Atlantic, which I’ve actually never flown before, but really like this slogan; since a major topic today was about flying places.

Virgin Atlantic was founded by Sir Richard Branson, who though I don’t agree with all of his personal beliefs, is a great story of success. Even though he is dyslexic and did poorly academically, he was entrepreneurial, that’s a hard word for me to say, at a young age and wasn’t afraid to get back up after he failed at something, thus enabling his to create the Virgin named empire he has today. He is a very active humanitarian and a champion of the employee. 

And this slogan pretty is much how I hope to fly every time. It goes like this… Let me do a good “radio voice”. Virgin Atlantic: Fly like a CEO, pay like a temp.

Does that make me sound cheap? It probably does, but oh well, I like a good deal and I also like quality!

That’s it for today folks! Thank you so much for joining me again this week. It is my pleasure to know you are listening, which, by the way, and no pressure, but if you are just listening and not downloading, I actually can’t see that on all podcast apps. So, I would love it, if you don’t mind, if you could download the Episode, so that it shows up that you are listening. This is not only encouraging to me, truly so encouraging to me to see that you are out there, but it can help others find Expatriotical as well, by moving it up in the algorithm formula, however that works, when people are searching.

Thank you once again and I can’t wait to meet you back here next week. Until then, this is Chandra Alley reminding you to “Live and Travel in the Know with Expatriotical”!