I learned my uncle, my father's older brother, died the other day: my cousin reached out to me and asked if I'd heard the news. I hadn't. He'd passed away on my birthday, and I had no idea.

A fair amount has been written about the grief of being a third culture kid (TCK). You grow up in a country you're not from, and that your parents are not from. For me, that meant growing up in the UK (which I am not a citizen of) to a Swiss-Dutch-Indonesian father and a Ukrainian-American mother. We traveled around a fair amount - a year in Vienna here, a year in Durham, NC there - but it was nothing like the experiences of army brats, who grow up uprooting their lives every couple of years. I was lucky to have a consistent set of friends throughout my childhood, even if sometimes I wrote to them over long distances.

TCKs often form attachments to people over places, which is certainly true for me. Adult TCKs rarely repatriate successfully, and while we feel like we can relate to many different kinds of people, few people relate to our experiences. As much as people might want me to assimilate, I never will, even if I wanted to (which, admittedly, I don't). The same goes for our blood: although my nuclear family is arguably closer for having had to be each other's allies in a series of strange cultures, my extended family doesn't always feel as close.

I grew up thousands of miles from my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. We saw each other every couple of years, and we have a lot of love for each other, but I always felt a weird sort of distance, too. It's hard to have the same depth of relationship as cousins who live in the same country and see each other many times a year when you come from what might as well be another planet, and see each other every few years at best.

I've been in California for a decade, and while I want to be closer, I don't know how to be. Like any relationship, I need to put in the work and reach out - we can all text - but patterns were set in motion decades ago.

I am resolving to try and do better, but it's impossible to patch over every gap. My uncle lived in Zurich. No matter where I am, I'll have family who is in some other universe, who I'd love to be closer to. I have family I dearly love who live in Melbourne, Australia, where I've never been. We're all aliens to each other. Aliens who love each other, but aliens nonetheless.

So, there's where the grief comes from. Connectedness is important to all people. But when your network of loved ones is spread out across countries, cultures, and universes of understanding, you can never connect enough, and you'll always wish you had more.

The truth is, I didn't really know him. Not well. But I wish I had.