It’s an unfortunate reality that the ages during which most people attend college are often also when our loved ones begin to leave us. Nearly 60% of college students report losing a friend or family member by the end of their collegiate career, according to a 2015 Florida State University study.
For such a ubiquitous experience, navigating the loss of a loved one while in college never seems to be a topic during orientation. In fact, it’s rarely discussed at all, leaving students to grapple with their grades and grief in silence.
Frankie Kerwood, a junior at MCLA, lost her grandmother to end-stage Parkinson’s disease earlier this spring. She said the loss itself, although extremely emotional, wasn’t the hardest part.
“My grandma had been dealing with Parkinson’s for nearly 20 years when she passed and had taken a turn for the worse in December, we knew we didn’t have long left with her,” Kerwood recalled, in an interview with the Beacon. “I was prepared to lose her. I wasn’t prepared to deal with everything that came next, while being a student.”
For many students, though they may have lost loved ones earlier in life, the losses they experience in college are the first they must navigate as adults, managing their own mourning. The responsibility is on them to inform professors, staff, friends, employers, and anyone else who needs to know. But even deciding who needs to know, and how much to tell them, is a challenge.
“No-one teaches you how to tell your boss or your professors that you’ll be absent that day because you’re two states away watching your dad cry for the first time ever, over the first dead person you’ve ever seen,” said Kerwood. “There’s no handbook they give you that teaches you how to translate one of the most intense experiences of your life into a ‘corporate-ese’ email asking for a few days off or an extension on an essay.”
Not only are students navigating the emotional turmoil of grief, often for the first time, they’re learning on the fly to communicate their needs and ask for accommodations.
Toni Basil is a rising senior at MCLA. Though she hasn’t lost a loved one during her collegiate years yet, the thought is never far from her mind.
“My grandma is 94, and it kind of feels like I’m preparing for her to die. It sounds crazy and it sounds kind of mean, like I’m waiting for her to die, but she has Alzheimer’s now, and her health has been deteriorating for the past two or three years,” Basil said. She, like many of her peers, can’t help but worry about the grim logistics of grieving while in school.
“How am I going to explain to my professors that my best friend in the whole wide world is my grandmother, and now she’s gone, and now I’m falling apart? I need this course to graduate, but I can’t handle any of my work,” Basil said. “I don’t actually know how to explain that to them, and I feel like you shouldn’t really have to, but at the same time, I don’t know. I’m here to get my education, and I know if I fall apart like that, [my grandma] would be really pissed.”
Basil and Kerwood are among the latest generation of college students facing loss, but they’re not the first—and they certainly won’t be the last.
A Death Doula Weighs In
Cynthia August, of Ipswich, MA, is a certified death doula: a person who assists families and individuals as they move through the dying process, much like a midwife aids childbirth. Their work usually supplements and/or goes beyond hospice, helping families with the rituals and realities of dying, recognizing it as a natural and important part of life.
She became a death doula to be the support for others she needed when she lost her mother to ovarian cancer in college.
“It was really hard, at 21, to grasp what was happening…without someone like a doula,” August said. “My dad didn’t explain it to me, the doctors didn’t explain it to me, and my mother had a stroke after the surgery; she wasn’t really able to talk. I really had no idea what was going on.”
Now older than her own mother was when she passed, and a mom to a college-aged daughter herself, she reflects on her loss through a different lens.
“I think it’s hard for college students, who have so much pressure around them to achieve, and they’re so scheduled and so much in a bubble…because it can be this very homogenous experience where you’re only with your peers, which isn’t necessarily an ideal place for mourning and grief.”
Dylan Schenck lost his uncle unexpectedly between his freshman and sophomore years at MCLA. While home for summer break, Schenck found solace in his family.
“All that fell apart the second I moved back to college,” he said. “Losing my support system felt like having a rug pulled out from under me. I fell into a deep depression, battling with sleep deprivation due to frequent nightmares about his passing.”
Like, Schenck, Kerwood found the return to campus life extremely difficult.
“Everyone was understanding when I had to drop everything overnight and go be at her bedside,” Kerwood reflected. “It was having to pick back up were I left off; my friends were too cheerful, my assignments were too shallow or needlessly complex, my room was too dark. I just hated everyone and everything here, but I knew not sticking it out would only make things worse.”
August, the doula, remembers a similar experience trying to finish her senior year of college. She was preparing to graduate in May when she received the news about her mother’s cancer diagnosis on February 14.
“It was like I had hit a brick wall. It reached in and plucked me out of the nose-to-the-grindstone, in-the-game place that I was in,” she said. “Just pulled me right out of it and pulled me right back into my family dynamic. So, I was carrying that knowledge, trying to move through my days normally…. Really, from the beginning of finding out that she was ill to her dying was this cruel experience for all of us.”
August’s mother, affectionally known as Ginny, passed away on May 7th of that same year: the day before graduation. While some students are lucky enough to be surrounded by understanding faculty and institutions, August is among those who were not given the same grace.
“My experience of support was pretty flawed. There were a couple people that attempted to help, but there should have been some accommodations made that were not,” she remembered, with an icy edge in her voice. “The school refused to graduate me because I had done poorly on an exam, because I knew she was in her final hours. That professor failed me because I didn’t have an obituary yet. That was pretty traumatic— I actually ended up not graduating until the end of August.”
Researchers Heather L. Servaty-Seib and Lou Ann Hamilton showed in a 2006 study that bereaved students had a significantly lower GPA, completed fewer credits, experienced more instances of probation, and were at a higher risk of taking an incomplete grade, withdrawing from classes, or completely dropping out than their peers.
August’s experience is an extreme case study in college being a difficult place to grieve. Even when students receive accommodations, however, deadline-driven college life creates inescapable pressure: get back to the grind or get out.
For students who manage to stay in school, withstanding that pressure isn’t an easy task.
“Even though everyone said ‘oh, take all the time you need’, I still felt like I couldn’t really let myself step away for long. I came back to campus after only a day,” said Kerwood, of the time following her grandmother’s funeral. “There were smaller things I could afford to let go or push off, but I had so many big projects due soon. I could have got an extension, but the end of the semester is an immoveable deadline. All it would have done is pile all that work into a shorter time frame, which I know I can’t handle.”
Despite getting back to classes and turning in work, Kerwood says she’s still not sure the choice was the right one.
“It’s so hard to get myself to focus enough to finish assignments. I’m half-assing all my work but feeling guilty about it. I don’t even know how much of the stuff I’m learning I’ll remember in a year. Every assignment takes three times the effort for a third of my usual quality.”
Anticipatory Grief
It’s not just navigating life after the death of a loved one that proves challenging for students. Often, carrying the weight of an impending passing is just as derailing.
“I feel like every year; I’m just waiting for her to go which takes a toll on me being a full-time student and going to school three hours away from her,” Basil said. “It’s really hard with the fact that I’m not there for a lot of these ‘last moments.’ I never know if it’s going to be a last moment and that feels a lot worse right now than if I just had to attend her funeral.”
There’s a name for the feeling: anticipatory grief. It’s a common emotion for people to experience when they know a loved one is reaching the end of their life, as they begin grieving before the person has actually passed.
For students, it often includes the added stress of not knowing what their workload and schedule might look like when they do pass. Exams, projects, extracurriculars, and sports make for an ever-changing schedule that’s nearly impossible to plan in advance around.
“I’ll see if I can make it to the funeral and wake, when they happen, but I don’t know. I don’t really know yet,” said Basil, when asked if she had a plan for handling school when her grandmother passes away. “I feel like I’m going to try and be prepared like this and then the time is going to come, and I’m going to be freaking out and devastated, and I’m not going to know what to do with myself.”
With two on-campus jobs, in addition to her roles as an RA, general manager of MCLA’s public radio station, and assistant producer of the college’s web news, as well as a full-time course load, Basil, like many of her peers, has a full plate on a normal day. She often finds herself distracted by anxiety around trying to get home to be with family when it’s time.
“We’ll see when that happens, but hopefully it’s easy— like just emailing them and I hop in my car and go, but again that seems like the time [my car] would have engine issues or something, so who knows.”
Anticipatory grief is one of the places where August says she has seen her work as a death doula have the greatest impact.
“It allows me to take an active role in healing for myself, and helping other people say goodbye well and end things in gratitude, rather than in fear. If you’re busy being frightened of the loss, you actually aren’t able to stop and do the good rituals around loss that comfort and soothe you and allow the good stuff to stay,” she said. “What I think it does is it takes away some of that fear of the unknown. There’s always going to be grief around loss, right? But, if you can remove the anxiety of not knowing what’s going to happen, you can make room for preparation.”
Community Care
Not everyone has access to a death doula, but she says there are ways for the rest of us to help when someone in our community is grieving. She encourages turning to online resources, like the Dougy Center: The National Grief Center for Children & Families, which have toolkits designed for everyone from kids, teens, and young adults to friends and school personnel.
August also suggests students who experience loss while in college should reach out to the school’s counseling services and academic support immediately, who can liaison with faculty and staff on their behalf.
Staying connected to their campus community can make all the difference for students who face loss during college, but first the community must make itself a safe and welcoming for those experiencing grief to be.
“My professors were kind and gentle with me, being very accommodating and giving me extensive time to make up my assignments, but my friends helped me the most,” said Schenck. “Having a shoulder to cry on—and sometimes just yell my emotions at—was the reason I pulled through.”
“I think experiencing loss needs to be a part of the conversations we have when we’re acclimating students to being in college,” said Basil. “It affects so many people while they’re in school; if you don’t lose someone, your friend does, or your teammate, or your roommate. If we started educating incoming students about handling grief during orientation, or giving them resources at events throughout the year, we could make college a much kinder place to be grieving.”
“I know professors must hear ‘oh, my grandma died’ so often, it’s sort of become the dog-ate-my-homework of college and sure, maybe some of those instances aren’t totally truthful, but I was so nervous to talk to my professors about what was going on because I’ve heard so many be dismissive of their grieving students in the past,” Kerwood added: “They might hear it all the time, but behind each of those emails or conversations is a student, trying their best to cope.”
To faculty, staff, and administrators, August makes a request: consider the way you talk about loss and grief with students.
“I get so pissed off when older people say ‘Well, you’re young, blah, blah, blah.’ It’s like, no, you don’t understand. I had a catastrophic loss at 21 years old. Catastrophic. I never looked at the world the same way again.”
Most importantly, August asks us all to remain open and to listen. “Grief can be so isolating,” she said. “Leaning in and not being afraid of grief is as helpful for the person grieving as it is for the person trying to help.”
