Adam Levy 00:04
Hello. I’m Adam Levy, and this is Off Limits: Academia’s Taboos, a podcast from Nature Careers.
In this episode: loss and grief.
Death is a contradiction. On the one hand, when we experience the loss of someone in our lives, it’s an earth-shatteringly exceptional moment. But on the other, losing people is something we all know we will experience at points throughout our lives. But when it comes to dealing with these moments, our academic institutions are often woefully under-prepared.
Today, we’re going to speak with researchers about the losses that they’ve experienced and how they learnt to raise their voices, despite how uncomfortably silent we can so often be when it comes to death.
Later in the episode, we’ll hear from two researchers on the pain of losing a colleague. But now I’d like to introduce you to Krista Harrison, a social scientist at the University of California San Francisco in the United States. Her work has spanned multiple disciplines within the social sciences.
Krista Harrison 01:16
In addition, I was a hospice administrator for a few years, so I’ve had quite a bit of experiential training in palliative care as well.
Adam Levy 01:25
A few years ago, Krista experienced a series of losses that sent her reeling.
Ultimately, she authored multiple pieces about this period, and the lessons she drew from it.
One was titled simply Making Space for Grief in Academia and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
I called Krista up to find out about the profound challenges of this time.
Krista Harrison 01:51
Let’s see. This started in 2018 when I was on my second year on faculty. And my stepfather was sick with a serious illness.
And he was admitted to hospice. And this was across the country from me in the United States. So it meant that I was flying from California to Florida every time that there was an emergency to provide support to my mother and my stepfather.
A couple of months after my stepfather was admitted to hospice, we started what I now refer to as a multiplicity of loss where just a number of hard things happened, the first being that my father was hit by a car while he was cycling. He was a very experienced rider. He rode with his friends. He was incredibly careful. He wore all of the bright-coloured clothing. And I say all that because often the articles immediately after blamed him and his friends for doing something wrong.
But it was a 95-year-old driver who hit him and his friends.
And he was the only one who didn’t survive. So there was five days in the trauma ICU and assessing whether there were improvements. We did the extubation the day after my son’s second birthday, and that was, as you can imagine, a pretty shocking loss.
Every death is hard in its own way, but the unexpectedness of sudden losses that are from accidents have their own particular flavour.
It takes time to figure out which way is up in those circumstances, and during that the additional losses that occurred were that so my closest collaborator had a great opportunity to go to another institution, which was wonderful for them. And then, unfortunately, it meant that I was losing my day-to-day infrastructure.
What had been a sort of status quo space all of a sudden started to unravel. I got that news right before my stepfather was then kicked out of hospice, which was another emergency to have to manage.
And all of this becomes sort of additionally complicated when you study it, and you know how it’s supposed to work, or what ideal care should look like. And it’s just infuriating when you experience all the ways it falls apart.
So in the sort of classic thing that happens when you get kicked off hospice, you scramble to re-establish care.
Then something happens. In his case, it was an infection, and things get really hard, and then you have to make the decision: do you re-enroll in hospice or not?
We re-enrolled in hospice, and he died a couple weeks later.
So essentially, six weeks after he had been kicked off hospice for not dying fast enough, he died anyway, and that was right before my birthday.
So now we have these death anniversaries that are really closely tied to birthdays, which have their own complexity.
It didn’t stop there, because that brought us to early 2019. Every five months thereafter, we had a family member, friend, neighbour, die for the subsequent two or three years, and amazingly, very few of those were from COVID.
Every additional loss, after particularly that first traumatic loss of my father, just was incredibly destabilizing and had to be metabolized.
Adam Levy 05:49
You used the word destabilizing and earlier you referred to yourself as not knowing which way was up. How was this affecting your ability to just do the kind of day-to-day functioning, to get through, yet, just to get through?
Krista Harrison 06:06
Yeah, everybody responds differently and sometimes unpredictably to grief. My particular manifestation was that outwardly I was coping incredibly well in that I was able to get up in the morning. I was able to go to the office. I was able to do some semblance of my normal job. I did make changes for the first couple of months where I stopped going to meetings because I tried to go to a couple of meetings, and somebody would say something, and I would just freeze not knowing how to deal with it.
Like: “How was your weekend?” And I’d say, “Well, my dad died on Monday.” And they’d look at me like, “What is happening?” But nobody would say: “Go home. And here’s a list of things you can do.” I wrote a manuscript because that was something that I knew how to do.
I didn’t know how to grieve this kind of major before-and-after kind of loss.
So it took probably three months of this sort of just gutting it out, trying to do whatever the next thing was before a couple people, including my spouse, said, “Okay, it’s time to change course. You seem really angry, and you actually have to deal with this, not just ignore it,” which I think was about the right timeframe, and was also just ahead of some other losses.
So each loss, subsequent loss became a setback, but it was my manifestation, ultimately, was over-performance at work, rather than disappearing, or under-performance, and a lot more emotional volatility.
Adam Levy 07:54
And did you have conversations with colleagues at work, or was it very much just you shared this information, and people kind of met you blankly and didn’t really know what to say back?
Krista Harrison 08:00
So thankfully, because I work with palliative medicine physicians, palliative care clinicians and geriatricians, they were probably better than your average person at knowing how to respond, and yet they also sometimes didn’t know what to do or what to say. Because of course I wasn’t their patient and I was a colleague, and I didn’t know how to ask for things I needed.
I think sometimes when you go through these really hard times, people end up erring on one side or another, either sharing too little or sharing too much. And because I was surrounded by doctors who knew all the medical jargon, I tended to share too much about what was happening.
And I eventually learned people were, you know, careful about disclosing this. But eventually I found the people who had also been former entrants to the dead parents club, as I irreverently call it.
And they were able to share what they did and could do and couldn’t do, and started giving me the sort of shape of what our reactions to grief look like in these circumstance.
But it definitely takes time to figure out “what do I feel comfortable saying to other people? What do they feel comfortable saying to me?” And colleagues are pretty reluctant to give advice unless you ask for it, particularly again, physicians,
I think people gave me space to figure it out and then answered questions when I asked them, but that all depended on me asking the right questions. And there weren’t services, there weren’t supports, there wasn’t automatic things that people helped funnel me to. And that was hard because, you know, as I said, I was using all the executive function I had, but it still takes more to find new services and do different things than you’re used to.
Adam Levy 10:15
You said that it took you a while to formulate the questions to ask for what you needed. What was it that you needed from, from your colleagues, from your work environment?
Krista Harrison 10:26
I actually needed advice and directions, and resources. I eventually stumbled my way into experimenting with how to grieve, with grief being a verb, the things I actively needed to do to metabolize this loss.
But I wished I had a grief group, and I eventually founded one for colleagues, years, a couple of years later, in the pandemic, as a number of other colleagues and friends had sudden losses themselves, parental losses.
And the other thing I needed was I work in a soft money environment, and that means if there aren’t grants to cover my salary, I don’t have a job.
So pragmatically, I had to write grants or keep all of that machine of academia going to ensure that I still had a job to support myself and my family. And I wish I could have had a year off from having to think about those things. And you know, in retrospect, my colleagues did try their best to make it easy on me, but also just wasn’t as easy as I would wish for other people.
Adam Levy 11:43
You speak there about what your colleagues were and weren’t able to provide you with at the time. Did this period of grief affect how you interacted with your colleagues, with your relationship with your colleagues, and does it affect how you approach your colleagues now?
Krista Harrison 12:00
Every time I’d have to write an email explaining why I was late on an assignment or something I’d promised somebody right, a manuscript, a grant. How do I write the email? When do I write the email? What level of detail goes in the email?
I kept disappearing to go to funerals and hospitalizations and, you know, the hospice discharge and all of those things, And trying to figure out, how do I write these emails, and then having to make up for, or rebuild relationships after missing the mark, essentially.
What I now tell the people I mentor is, “I want to know sooner than later if you are going to not be able to do something, if you need to renegotiate deadlines, I don’t want you to just disappear on me.”
And I have learned to say “Thank you for your patience,” instead of “I apologize.”
You know, fundamentally, I actually think the mix of a little bit of vulnerability, a little bit of honesty, and then a whole lot of trying to show up and being a good scientist, but also a compassionate human, makes a big difference in those professional relationships.
Adam Levy 13:21
It’s strange. I mean, of course, there are many aspects of your story which are unique, but the experience of grief is something so universal, something that we all go through at one point, at several points in our lives.
Why do you feel that it’s so difficult to talk about it, and those systems that you needed weren’t in place, given that these are things that we, we all are going to need at some point or another?
Krista Harrison 13:50
Yeah, the eternal question. It’s true, mortality rate is 100% none of us are going to escape it, and if we live long enough, we aren’t going to escape grieving either.
Some of us hit grief earlier, and some of us encounter more of our losses later, but we can’t predict it. But we don’t like to think about that. It’s the same way we don’t want to think about our family members dying or getting sick.
We don’t want to make plans for the future needs we have. We like to live in the moment.
So I think it’s all of a piece with that that we don’t want to have to have systems to deal with dying and death and grief, because we wish it didn’t occur.
Another reason is that academia is such a weird space in that we are mostly judged on our individual outputs that are enabled by a background system.
So the university as a whole gets to take credit for the grants I bring in, the papers I write. And they provide an infrastructure for helping me submit those grants and for, sometimes for getting papers published.
But if I don’t do those things, it’s not like they take organizational blame for me not being able to do those things. They simply don’t count it.
So given that odd, individualistic model of what professionalism looks like, it makes sense that in combination with a death-denying culture, we would end up in a situation where there aren’t a lot of supports. I think I’ve seen a lot of change since the pandemic, but that’s slower to come into academia, as you might imagine.
But even at our university, there have been efforts among people who are doing a lot of elder care or who are grieving to think about, how do we create more humane supports?
So it takes people being vulnerable enough to talk to one another to see that there’s need to have people who are high enough up in the university to convene these groups, to bring people together to make an effort. But a lot of that effort is free labor in the meantime, so it needs a long, sustained effort from a group of people who are willing to put in that sacrifice before those changes end up being made.
Adam Levy 16:31
Now you’ve spoken about, well, how hard it was to speak about this. But you’re speaking to me now. You also authored a piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association. What does it mean to you to talk so candidly about what you’ve been through and what you wish had been done differently?
Krista Harrison 16:51
Part of the verb of grieving, for me, was stitching together the narrative of what happened, because particularly when you get a trauma, a traumatic loss, your memory fractures, you don’t even create memories in the quote, unquote, normal way.
And so I felt compelled to go back and create timelines of what happened to just try to put these pieces together for myself. And so a couple essays came out of this, and I’ve continued to write. I think it helps that it took me a long time to find the narratives that resonated, and that too helped me motivate to talk about it, because I felt like I was probably not the only one who wasn’t finding what I needed and what already existed.
Adam Levy 17:47
And did you get that feedback from people outside of your academic circle as well, but your your experience resonated?
Krista Harrison 17:57
Yeah, when the original article was published, I got a flood of feedback, and it totally took me by surprise, but was so generous of people.
And I continue to actually hear from people who find it years later. So that continues to encourage me, and continues to make me willing to talk about it.
Adam Levy 18:21
That article is called Making Space For Grief in Academia.
And I suppose that response indicates that to some extent, you did make some space for grief in academia, for other academics.
Krista Harrison 18:33
Well, it was good timing too. I think since the pandemic, a lot of people have been trying to figure out how to manage a multiplicity of loss.
There has been a lot of collective grieving needed from a lot of different circumstances. But as we’ve said, it’s also such a universal experience to experience grief and loss.
Adam Levy 18:56
And what would you want to see from academic institutions so that individuals can navigate these times of grief with more support?
Krista Harrison 19:06
I would encourage academia and other employers to continue creating those supports, because requiring individuals to make the supports on their own is a good way to lose those individuals from your professions, from your departments, from your workplaces.
It’s much more efficient to create the supports and keep your great employees.
Adam Levy 19:36
That was Krista Harrison. Krista’s losses were profoundly personal, although, of course, they had an impact on her professional world as well.
And when we lose someone close to us, those impacts on our professional lives can be especially severe when that someone was also a colleague or a collaborator.
Early in the series we heard from Shannon Bros, professor emerita from San Jose State University Department of Biological Sciences.
She shared how her transition to living her life as a woman opened her eyes to other forms of discrimination that her peers and students might face. And similarly, the loss of a friend and colleague made her keenly aware of the pain that so many of us keep hidden.
Shannon Bros 20:25
My best friend passed. She was the chair of our department. My dearest friend, she passed away from cancer. And I was walking across campus a day or two later, and I saw these people laughing and having a good time. And in any other time I would have been kind of mad that they were enjoying life when I was feeling so miserable.
But it didn’t happen. I ended up having a completely different epiphany. I looked around and went, “How many times have I walked anywhere and not seen people in pain?”
And it changed me, you know? So now I pay attention and I try to talk to people. If someone’s having an issue, I’ll try and talk to them. And I wouldn’t have done that before.
Adam Levy 21:06
Was there any official response in that time to try and support colleagues who were going through that period of grief?
Shannon Bros 21:14
None, none at all. You’d have to deal with it on your own. We had, you know, a service for my friend Sally. But you know, there was no grief support.
Adam Levy 21:25
What do you think would have been helpful for you and for your colleagues?
Shannon Bros 21:30
I think it would have been really good to have someone from counselling come over and talk to the departments and just say, “You know, hey, I know you’ve had a loss. We’re here. This is the things we can offer you, and these are some of the things you might be feeling.”
You know, they could just kind of walk you through what to expect and how you might navigate it, but it was pretty much every person for themselves.
Adam Levy 21:53
Shannon Bros there.
As we’ve heard, discussing grief and loss in academia can be deeply challenging, but there are times when losing a collaborator has direct impact on our abilities to work. And often the systems simply aren’t in place to deal with these roadblocks clearly and compassionately, which is precisely the issue that Katy Derington faced.
Katy is a clinical pharmacist at the University of Colorado in the United States, researching how we choose what we prescribe to patients.
She penned an article titled, When the death of a colleague meets academic publishing: a call for compassion.
I gave her a ring to discuss the events that led to this piece.
Katie Derington 22:37
So before I joined this position, I was at the University of Utah, and on one of the teams we had a statistician. She was a brilliant biostatistician. She was Masters-level trained, but gosh, if she didn’t have an honorary PhD, I don’t know who does, and I worked with her, gosh, from think 2017 up until her death in 2023.
She had over, I think, 120 publications when she died. So she clearly was a very sought-after collaborator.
So as, just like a nature of our working relationship, she was on this team that I was also a part of, and would obviously be a co-author on all these papers. And so when she died, she was a co-author on several papers that we had ongoing.
Adam Levy 23:26
Now you mentioned the death of this co-worker.
Could you explain a little bit more how you learned of her death and how that knowledge impacted you?
Katie Derington 23:36
When she died, she had been hospitalized for about a month or so, and she had a chronic illness that she was kind of always in and out of the hospital.
And so this time, though, was different.
She had been in a coma. I had found out from my boss that, you know, things were really tenuous, and she was going to need some rather intensive treatments.
There was someone on our team, actually, who was also a care provider on her care team in the hospital.
So it was kind of heavy for all of us for about a month there, while she was hospitalized. And then I distinctly remember I was taking my infant daughter to target, and I got back in the car, and I looked at my phone.
It was a Sunday afternoon, and I got an email from one of our close collaborators who had worked with her for decades.
And he had said, “You know, to let you all know she did die this afternoon, and we’ll be in touch soon with information about her obituary, and, you know, any memorial we plan to hold.”
And honestly, I just burst into tears because she was such a wonderful person to work with.
She was just an absolute light, so reliable on our team, so funny, so unique, that when someone takes up that space in your life, it’s hard to imagine your life without them, I guess.
In many ways, like we work with our co-workers and see them nearly every single day, more often. And some of our family members right as adults, so it leaves a hole.
Adam Levy 25:03
Is that something that you felt able to speak about with, with other collaborators, with other co-workers?
Katie Derington 25:09
Yeah, we have a very open team. The Tuesday after this Sunday that she had died, we had a team meeting, and we just dedicated the whole hour to remembering Jen and talking about her.
And you know, my boss opened the floor for people to just express how they felt. They could share a memory, they could share how they were personally feeling in that moment.
And a lot of us cried truly on this Zoom call with one another, just remembering different things about her, and, you know, saying what we’ll miss.
And so there was a good space to do that.
And you know, anytime I spoke with some other collaborators who had worked with her, it was just an opportunity to also, like, say, “Yeah, this happened,” and kind of talk about how we feel about it, yeah.
Adam Levy 25:52
Now, of course, with such a valuable member of the team, there’s a practical impact on the team’s ability to work, and I’d like to come to that in just a second, but, but just the emotional impact, did it affect the team’s ability to, you know, get on with the day to day ground of academia?
Catherine Derington 26:11
Yeah, for those projects that she was really key on, or we had, you know, some tasks that were waiting on her, those essentially ground to a halt, right?
And we had to figure out how to shift that work and that burden to other people on our team who are also either being mentored by her or obviously worked with her closely and were also grieving her.
So I remember asking one of our PhD students if he could go into her folders on the computer and look at her code for an analysis project.
And if you kind of think about that on the analyst side, it’s a very personal thing, your own code, and how you decide to code things, the comments that you make.
And so I can imagine him going through that. He said it was rather eerie, like it was almost like she was talking to him right through the code.
Adam Levy 26:58
And you actually penned a piece describing, I suppose, some of the more administrative challenges, or one particular administrative challenge that you faced, yes, in the wake of this collaborator’s death, could you explain what you were confronted with?
Katie Derrington 27:14
So at the stage where this manuscript that she was a co author on was with a journal, this manuscript was almost accepted. Essentially, the journal was going to send us an accept-in-principle decision.
And at that stage, you essentially have to have every co-author sign a copyright release form which says, “Yes, we own this work and it’s being published in your journal.”
The second form is a disclosure form where you say, “here are my conflicts of interest.“ And that gets published in the manuscript as well.
And you can imagine, these are legal forms, and so they can’t bypass this stage. This has to happen. These forms have to be signed in order for a paper to be published.
So in the case of my co-author’s death, who signs those you know, so I’m not sure. For example, my husband today could even tell you what conflicts of interest I have at work, because it’s not relevant in our day-to-day life, right?
But what this journal had told us is you must have her executor sign both forms. This is one manuscript, but we had several other manuscripts that were also at this journal, or in some stage of being submitted to this journal. And so this was going to be a problem, not just for this paper, but several papers after.
But they ssentially said to me, “Sorry, here’s our policy, go ask him to sign these documents.”
And this man had just lost his wife the week before, right? So it felt icky in some way. There’s really no more scientific way to say it.
This is just the personal way to say it just felt icky to approach someone who I didn’t know and say, “Hi, I know you’re grieving. Please sign these documents for me so my life can move on,” you know.
Adam Levy 29:00
How did you navigate that ickiness then?
Katie Derington 29:07
Yeah, it’s a good question. There were a lot of conversations about whether we just pull the manuscript from the journal and just go somewhere else to see if other journals would have the same policy. But ultimately, we just decided we will send her partner an email.
We know we’ll give him his time to respond. And unfortunately, the journal is going to be on our timetable with this. Like, if this is what they’re waiting on, then they’re going to have to wait for him and all the different things he’s going through to sign this document.
He was responsive for a couple times via email. But ultimately he stopped being responsive, and I had to have a collaborator who knows him personally reach out to him and ask if I could stop by his house to have them sign them.
These forms are not very intuitive for people who don’t see them all the time. It’s kind of complicated, which checkboxes you need to actually check, and where to sign and all these things.
So you can imagine, like if someone handed you a form from a completely different scientific field and said, “Fill this out for your dead partner.” You’re like, “But how do I do that?”
And that’s perhaps a task that you put off while you’re acutely grieving, right? There’s so many other things that need to be handled. So it was challenging. It took several months, rightly so, to get these forms populated.
The journal worked with us a little bit in moving things forward to production while we were waiting on these forms. But it almost felt very transactional, like going back to the emotional piece of this. It felt very transactional.
I just need a signature on a paper, but really, what that signature is representing is her value and her work on just this one manuscript of several in her armamentarium of different manuscripts she’s contributed to.
Adam Levy 30:56
Now, as I mentioned, you actually wrote a piece about this. I suppose, this icky experience, yeah. What motivated you to share what you know in lots of ways you’ve described this very personal journey.
Katie Derington 31:11
When I was trying to figure out how to handle this situation in a very academic format, I looked online to see what other people do and if someone else has published on this topic before, or if there’s a best practice in the field as scientists, that’s something we like to lean on, right?
And I didn’t find anything. But even still, as I was thinking about what would a document telling me what to do be helpful? Sure from the administrative piece, but there is like you’re saying this emotional experience attached to it, and it’s impossible to disentangle the two, really.
And so that’s why I wrote this piece, is to kind of talk about the administrative, what we need from the field, the standards we need, the policies and procedures we need, in context of all that grief that’s happening in the background.
It was more cathartic for me personally just to put my experience out there.
But I do hope that others who go through the experience at least see it and feel empathy, compassion, sympathy, rather figuring out this very complex situation, you know.
Adam Levy 32:13
Now, in some ways, what you’re describing is quite specific, specific to your group, to the papers, to the collaboration. But in other senses, it’s, it’s quite a universal experience, the experience of grief.
And are there any lessons, I suppose, that you’ve taken from this that you would want to see implemented, changes you would want to see.
So that that balance between the personal and the professional dealing with grief is better balanced out?
Katie Derington 32:43
Oh, absolutely, for sure. I think that every publisher needs to have a policy for how they handle deceased authors and how these forms are handled specifically.
And for a publisher not to have those policies really puts all the onus on us as academicians or as writers of the paper to figure it out.
And that’s not fair to us while we’re acutely going through all this grief for ourselves when the publishing piece is their burden to bear, right?
So I think that there needs to be policies at the publisher level that balance the legal aspects, but also are rather rational, right?
As I said earlier, there are pieces of this form that are appropriate for a deceased co-author’s trust to sign. And then there are other pieces of these forms that are not appropriate for them. These disclosures, conflicts of interest, types of forms. I think those types of forms would be best handled by a supervisor for that deceased co-author.
You know, as academicians, we have to fill out COI forms for our institution on an annual basis, at least. So there’s a whole office who would be able to attest to a deceased co-author’s conflicts of interest.
Or perhaps there needs to be a conversation that happens within scientific groups or teams or labs about how this would be handled in the worst-case scenario.
So I think there’s a lot of unique solutions that we can think about, but ultimately, the status quo of just saying, “Yeah, approach the deceased family to sign these forms” is not appropriate. It’s not compassionate, and it’s not really grounded in rationale, or, you know, logic.
Adam Levy 34:25
And what about advice for the individuals who lose colleagues? Do you have any recommendations for how to how to navigate this time, when there are so many emotional and so many professional questions that are coming up?
Katie Derington 34:39
I mean, if others are going through this experience, the last thing I would say is giving yourself grace with trying to compartmentalize.
How do you move on with the tasks versus how do you move on emotionally?
It’s hard to, as I said, disentangle those two things. I don’t think that they should be disentangled. They are very much connected.
And sometimes having to put off an administrative task is okay while you grieve.
You can put it down and pick it back up. There’s very, very few things in academia that are truly the fire is on the house. “We have to put it out now kind of thing.”
You can put down a task, typically, and pick it up in a couple months, when you feel more mentally healthy to do so. And I would encourage others who are in this experience to consider that as they grieve.
Adam Levy 35:27
Is that what you tried to do for yourself?
Katie Derington 35:32
I did.
I tried that for some projects that we had her a part of the team, others like this manuscript in particular, that we were trying to publish was important to publish for a grant I was putting in that I had to submit, but trying to minimize that burden on yourself so that you can have the space to grieve, I think is very important.
Adam Levy 35:52
That was Katie Derington describing her journey with grief, as our interviewees have shown, Grief can take many forms and have many causes.
And in next week’s episode, we’ll be speaking about the struggles, including the feelings of grief that can surround battling for an academic career, while also battling fertility issues.
Speaker 5 36:15
I think I suffered a bit from the assumption that I must be a child-free career woman, when in truth, I was a broken hearted, childless woman. I was kind of hanging on in academia by my fingernails at that point.
Adam Levy 36:34
Until then, this has been Off Limits: Academia’s Taboos, a podcast from Nature Careers.
Thanks for listening. I’m Adam Levy.
