We, the editors, have known one another since 2011. We were fortunate enough to share mutual friends who introduced us and gave us the opportunity to know, learn from, and love one another. Our relationship shifted substantially in 2014. In July, Nicole’s world upended when she and her family lost her father, Marc Sieben; four months later, Stephanie’s family lost her father, James “Pedro” Shelton. The circumstances were different. Nicole’s loss was sudden—the heartbreak made all the more devastating by the shock and confusion. One day he was healthy, making plans for family vacations and setting new career goals, and the next day he was gone, a fatal medical episode ending those plans. Stephanie’s father had, over several years, transitioned from ICU to limited independent living to a nursing home—the sorrow tinged with exhaustion and a small sense of release. Our fathers’ deaths continue to tug at our hearts and minds, and they brought us closer in ways that were painful but remain important. As we have healed, our friendship has helped us to slowly, cautiously, gently find hope. That hope never replaces the grief, the two often co-exist, but the hope does thread through the sorrow in ways that help us to grow and to consider ways to help others. This book was born from that grief, that hope, and that desire to support others’ sorrows.
Higher Education and Grief
We are both academics in tenure-track positions at universities, and we know from experience that higher education is not equipped to support grief. To be clear, we both have had incredible support from colleagues, mentors, and others. Stephanie’s dissertation chair, Peter Smagorinsky, drove all the way to a tiny country church in rural Warthen, Georgia to attend her father’s funeral, for example. And, Nicole’s dissertation committee members, though she had graduated from her doctoral program the year prior to her father’s passing, showed up for her in meaningful ways too. As we’ve both experienced, the people within the institutions are often thoughtfully present for one another during times of loss; however, it is the institutional structure itself that does not seem to allow for space to mourn. Due dates have limited, and sometimes no, flexibility. Conferences carry on whether we are able to present in our sessions or not. Students deserve to learn, though their instructor’s tears might prevent teaching. Tenure and promotion responsibilities remain in effect, and the timeline is rarely adapted to provide more time in these instances. However, despite the academy’s resistance to providing space and time to simply grieve, various forms of grief are inevitable components of experiencing higher education. Approximately 35–40% of students experience the death of a loved one (Whitfield, 2019), whether significant other, family, or friend, though certainly not all grief is due to a loved one’s death. And, as this book emphasizes, grief has many forms. No matter the form, higher education remains aloof and impervious to the hurt.
An element of that detachment is that, within higher education, discussions of and support for grief are severely lacking, or even nonexistent. Numerous “how to” texts advise ways that those in academia might navigate grief (e.g., Peterkin, 2012; Whitfield, 2019; Zakeri, 2019), but their suggestions are largely detached from the realities of higher education. For example, a sweeping “take care of yourself” (Zakeri, 2019, Para. 4) is a sound suggestion, but it elides situations such as academics and students often being geographically far from support systems, or lacking the time to both “lock yourself in a room for the night and cry” and meet various career-essential deadlines. Taking time off from classes is often financially impossible for students or faculty, and grief persists long beyond the allotted number of “bereavement days” that HR policies allow. Additionally, though these discussions regularly encourage that those managing grief access campus-based support resources, the fact is those resources vary widely across institutions. Some colleges and universities offer extensive support; some offer none, with a student, for example, “encountering a professor who tells them, in so many words, to suck it up” (Peterkin, 2012, Para. 7). Most fall in the middle, with some, but ultimately insufficient, help.
And, within these inadequate conversations, the focus is consistently on students. There are incredibly few considerations of what grief looks like for and means to faculty or staff. Any discussions centering these individuals typically either consider the ways that supporting students’ trauma affects faculty (Kafka, 2019) or focus on the aftermaths of tragedy for a campus, such as an academic’s suicide (Pettit, 2019). Much as we discovered in our own experiences, higher education regularly fails to offer sufficient support to grieving students, and it is utterly unprepared and uncertain of how to support faculty and staff members’ pain.
This book is an effort to humanize grief experiences within higher education, and in doing so, to consider ways that academia might do more than simply acknowledge or cursorily support grief. And, importantly, these chapters explore possibilities of finding hope in the midst of that heartache. Certainly, navigating grief is inevitable to the human condition, but finding hope while doing so is essential to healing, and to moving forward in meaningful and empowering ways. Each chapter found in this collection explores grief with the effort of finding sources of hope. To be clear, hope is not a panacea. As is often noted regarding grief, there is no single way to grieve; similarly, there is no one way to hope. Hope calls on multiple pathways toward healing, and it activates our motivations to want to heal in the face of hurt, trauma, and loss. Hope also acknowledges that there will be obstacles to healing, that no pathway toward healing is challenge-free, but that the ways in which we navigate those challenges can make all the difference in surviving our losses and ultimately experiencing full lives of meaning and thriving.
In this collection, each author’s narrative is a personal journey for them, woven through with threads of grief, and of hope. The purpose is not to provide tidy, happy endings. That is rarely the way that—even with hope—grief works, after all. Instead, the authors examine grief as a reality in higher education and in doing so assert the possibilities of searching for, and at times finding, hope and healing.
The Chapters
As we both worked to recover from our losses of our fathers (and navigate new losses we both experienced during the writing of this book), we noted the absence of open, vulnerable discussions on grief in the academy. The reverberating silence was not, we knew, because either of our experiences was unique; instead, it was because higher education has not afforded individuals spaces or opportunities to openly share and, in doing so, to heal and form communities of understanding and support across academia. Additionally, what few discussions existed were often steeped in the jargon of mental health services rather than in everyday language. In response to the silence and the babble, the authors in this collection write in narratives. The goals are to make their experiences of grief and hope accessible and human. These are not detached and clinical discussions of loss; these are heartfelt stories, full of open, honest explorations of hurt and of efforts to heal. As a collection, our goal is to companion others in the academy during grief and to allow a community of connection and understanding to emerge as a space for hope to grow within.
Part I: Sorrow and Strength Following the Loss of a Loved One
As we noted, this book began as part of our individual and shared efforts to process our grief when we each lost our father. This first section continues that thread. Each author opens their lives and hearts to share the ways that the loss of a loved one shaped their trajectories in higher education. The section opens with doctoral student Shelly Melchior’s chapter, “A Qualitative Reckoning.” In the chapter, Shelly shares her complex and sometimes broken relationship with her mother, cut short in their efforts to make amends by her mother’s cancer diagnosis. An important portion of Shelly’s healing came unexpectedly but unquestionably from her qualitative research courses and her efforts to teach undergraduate education students. Terah J. Stewart, now an assistant professor of higher education and student affairs, reflects on the challenges of finishing a doctoral degree while grieving the loss of his mother in “Hard Grief for Hard Love: Writing Through Doctoral Studies and the Loss of My Mother.” Through support systems and loving, grieving letters to his mother, he finds moments of hope and celebrates the ways that his successes honor his mother’s life and memory.
Deanna Day’s “Losing (and Finding) Myself Through Grief” shows the contradictions that are sometimes inherent in moving through grief to hope. While a faculty member, Deanna lost her husband Boyd to brain cancer, and then, because of the trauma of grief, their daughter through the nine-year-old’s inability to process her father’s death. Rather than being consumed by the sorrow, however, Deanna used her teaching to find purpose and an individual strength that she had not needed before the grief. In doing so, she was better able to support her daughter’s efforts at healing, and to find joy that had seemed imp...