Stephanie Hare
I am writing this post in the hopes that it will reach someone who is currently grieving a loss while managing as a young academic (e.g., PhD student or postdoc). I am not a professional grief counsellor (as will become evident), so take any advice I give with a grain of salt and scrutinise it against your own judgment and/or against that of a real therapist, if you’re lucky enough to have access to professional help right now.
As a 28-year-old, I have all of the nuclear family members, as well as aunts and uncles, that were on this earth when I was born. In fact, at the time I’m writing this, I even have all of my grandparents—at an impressive 92, 90, 88, and 87 years old. Unfortunately, my Oma (who is the eldest of the group) was taken to the hospital last night with a very low heart rate. She is one of the people I admire most in this world, and even if she does make it through this particular event, I will inevitably have to confront losing her soon. I’m writing this post to attempt to organize my thoughts on experiencing traumatic loss alongside finding your footing in academia (or at least, share my personal experiences in this regard).
The first time I experienced a traumatic loss was in 2015, as a second-year PhD student. I was extraordinarily lucky to have made it that long (though it probably does no good to think that way). My first year of grad school was basically an extension of undergrad + teaching responsibilities + trying to figure out what research to do. There was a lot of chaos, but the constant was the cohort of students that all joined the department at the same time. We were a relatively tight-knit group, and considered ourselves to be more-or-less family from the start (sibling rivalries and all). From this cohort, me and one other student (we’ll call him V) joined the research lab from which I ultimately got my PhD. We weren’t super close, but I attributed that to the fact that we were at different stages of life: He was married with a newborn, and I… what was I? A prototypical 23-year old?
And being a prototypical 23-year old, I was figuring a lot of stuff out. As I was preparing for my qualifying exam in my second year, I was expected to do an arrow-pushing mechanism (a la your favorite intro organic chemistry class) on the whiteboard and I just absolutely could not figure out where to start. Everyone was waiting for me, some people (including my advisor) were getting very impatient, telling me to just start. So what did I start doing? Crying, silent tears, facing the whiteboard, feeling embarrassment starting to compound the anxiety. It felt like a nightmare, which thankfully eventually ended. When I went home that evening I found a message in my inbox from V. I’m actually going to quote the whole email thread because it’s so grad school:
V: Hey Stephanie, sorry about earlier I didn't realize you were getting upset or I would have tried to be more helpful. You should try not to be so hard on yourself though, you're pchem and a new grad student so no one expects you to get everything right, and the mitsunobu is a hard one to get if you haven't seen it before, there are a lot of steps. […] If mechanisms were easy they wouldn't be any fun, the point is to learn something from them and build your reasoning skills by thinking about them.
Hope any of that is helpful.
Me: Thanks V. I really don't feel justified getting so upset, which makes it even more stupid and embarrassing. I guess I just feel pressured to be much better at mechanisms because I made the choice to join this group, and I don't always want to be the slow one that holds everyone back. I just need to work harder at them and try to get over the feeling that everyone thinks I'm a big idiot. Thank you again, I promise not to be such a Debbie downer tomorrow.
V: Hey someone has to be a big idiot with me. And next year we'll have idiots to replace us as we get better lol.
Me: Haha obviously you are not a big idiot. But here's to hoping our replacements make us look like geniuses. :)
V was really supportive and had a really good heart when he saw other people struggling. However, he was having some personal and mental health issues that I only ever got a glimpse of. He stopped showing up to lab, he didn’t participate in our cohort’s group activities, nor our research group’s social events. It sucks to think about because, looking back now these were such obvious red flags, but at the time there was… I don’t really want to say it, but almost a resentment that he wasn’t participating. We (his peers) seemed to all see it as a choice to not take the ~grad school experience~ seriously enough.
And then one day, my boss emailed the research group to say that V had taken his own life. We all said the same thing: We knew there was a problem, but we had no idea it was bad enough to end up here: To leave behind a wife and a baby, to not make good on his implicit promise to be a part of our research group throughout our academic journeys. So the group leaned on each other. We went to dinner together. We wrote letters to V’s baby together. We went to the funeral together. There were so many tears, and it felt novel yet natural to mourn together with my research group. We had endured so much professional stress together, we felt a structure to managing our grief as a unit.
A couple of months later, while we certainly hadn’t “completed” the grieving process (because, spoiler: there’s no such thing), we were, as a group, making professional progress again. One morning, I got up to go to work and I swear, as soon as I got up, I felt my heart pounding way too hard, way too fast. I’m not a spiritual person by any means, but I swear, when there’s something wrong in your family, you can feel it before you actually get any news. Just as I was about to head out the door, I got a call from my mom. She said a childhood friend, neighbor who grew up with me, like a brother, had drowned. She told me the story of him swimming in a river and ending up in a place where he couldn’t get out. I remember thinking it just wasn’t true—they’ll get the rescue crew out there and he’ll be fine. My mom reiterated that no, that’s not really the stage we’re at. There is no possibility that he survived. So I said, “… okay. Thanks for letting me know.” And hung up. I walked outside, got on my bike, started biking to the lab when about ten minutes into my ride I could not breathe. I stopped my bike, went to the side of the trail, and spent a good five minutes trying to catch my breath. I caught it enough to continue to work, but when I sat down at my desk I just stared at my computer without doing anything. A coworker came up and said “Hey Stephanie, how’s it going?” And I just said, “A friend of mine just died.” And he said, “… are you okay? What are you doing here? You should really go home.”
I felt so sad. And so confused. I knew I couldn’t physically get enough air in my lungs to bike all the way back home, so I spent the next few hours sitting in the arboretum nearby, sunglasses on, staring off into space and just feeling terrible in a way I can’t describe in words. The next few days felt similar and are now largely a blur in my mind, but I distinctly remember feeling hideously guilty for not being able to focus on my research. I remember thinking, how does anyone get work done in a world where grief like this exists? I have known so many people who have experienced loss, and they’ve been able to resume working. Am I really so weak that I’m not going to be able to move on from something everyone experiences?
After about a week of feeling completely lost, I met with my advisor who told me I should make use of the free counselling services available on campus. He told me the counsellors there were actually specialised in dealing with grief. Apparently grief is a particularly common mental health issue for the university-aged population. So I went to one counselling session, where I talked about both of these losses I’d recently experienced and what specific aspects of these losses were continuing to rattle around in my head and make it difficult to think about anything else. I won’t go into detail of that session here, but I had a realisation that day that there was so much I was holding inside and not talking to someone about because I didn’t want to burden others with my own personal grief, which I thought I should be “strong” enough to move on from on my own. Turns out, having someone who is paid to listen to you unload your grief is a brilliant solution to this problem. I am now a huge advocate for therapy and highly recommend it particularly for people who are trying to move on from a loss, as I was.
My main point in telling these stories is to say this: Life doesn’t stop when you’re in grad school. I know, this is painfully obvious to some. But I think I had expected grad school to be difficult in a very one-dimensional way, that the difficulty would come primarily from academic challenges I had never faced before. Yes, there were many difficult academic challenges I had never faced before. But the hardest part of grad school to me was managing to put my heart and soul into research while managing all other aspects of life. You only have so much heart and soul to give, and particularly when you’re going through a loss that feels like it is in fact ripping out the heart and soul you thought was reserved for your research for the next 2/5/10/20 years and has simultaneously taken over and completely destabilised your world… What do you do?
All I can say about loss is that it’s hard. The truth is, you’re probably not going to be prepared and you’re just going to have to feel bad for a while. Accept it. Once a loss happens, you’re not going to be able to swiftly get back the feeling you had prior. Accept it. Your research is going to need to be put on hold to give your brain time to recover and your energy bar to refill. Accept it. There are no shortcuts, there is no rule book, no grief manual with step-by-step instructions about what you need to do, so do what you feel when you feel it and don’t feel guilty for any reason for the time being. You’ll know when the time is right to get back to work. Relax.
Loss is an aspect of life that we cannot escape. It is more or less guaranteed to happen in your lifetime and it is likely to occur at a time when you’re trying to make it as an academic, whether you’re a PhD student, postdoc, new PI, whatever. You cannot prepare emotionally for future loss, so don’t try. It’s a waste of energy. Save your sadness for that day. Grief looks different from person to person and from loss to loss, and boy do I wish there was a way to predict what it will look like. There isn’t. But being a successful academic in the wake of loss doesn’t mean ignoring the loss and cranking out research papers despite it. You are a human. And I would argue that research papers actually benefit from being written by a human who has experienced a wide range of human emotions. These experiences are unlocking new and vitally important aspects of yourself, as well as your personal, and yes, your professional journey. They should be treated as such; they should not be dismissed or hidden.
If loss is something you’re dealing with right now, you would be surprised how many people in your professional and social circles have gone through similar traumas. When you feel ready to, don’t be afraid to reach out to them.
I hope the information I have given here is useful in any way. Feel free to contact me, Stephanie Hare, at share[at]uw.edu if you have any questions or comments.