I cannot emphasize this enough. Great advice, OP.

In my case, I changed countries for love 26 years ago. While it has been a wonderful adventure, I am now tied up on train tracks and I can feel the train coming and hear the horn.

My parents are 78 and 77, both have health issues, and I'm a 19-hour flight away from them. My siblings live a 5-hour car trip and a 5-hour flight away from them, and one sibling's children are still very young, so her first obligation is to them. No one is on the spot looking after my parents. Most of the time they cope, but sometimes they don't.

Every time I get a phone call at an odd time, my heart leaps into my throat. I have already the funerals of my beloved aunt and two grandparents, my father's open-heart surgery, and my mother's three stent placements. There was no one to drive them around when my father lost his license for two years due to epilepsy. (My mother drives, but not at night or in bad weather, and there is no public transport where they live.) No one lives close enough to shovel their driveway in winter.

My children have grown up having only intermittent contact with the loving half of their family. This is a real shame because while my parents are truly terrific grandparents, the local grandparents have been a big disappointment. They haven't been to our house for Christmas this century, despite living an hour away. My children's only local uncle has gone to live in another country. Their cousins have their own lives in a different city and don't bother much with us. Every holiday is quiet; it's just us four sitting around the table, unless I invite other ex-pats to join us. Meanwhile, my kids are missing out on fun family parties overseas with 38 people. One sibling recently got married, and none of us were able to go.

tl;dr: Moving abroad has been a wonderful adventure, and I'd probably make the same decision again, but there have been times when it's been very, very hard.