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Submission Type

General Submission

Abstract

This paper is a three-way conversation about grief that follows a graduate program. We explore our experiences with post-graduate grief in community, attending to each other’s sense of loss following separation from supervisors, theses, and graduate programs. In committing to slow scholarship, processes—such as navigating feelings and living—have been valued over producing a manuscript quickly. Slowness, including long gaps between meetings, enabled us to follow the diverse contours of quiet alchemical processes such as grieving, opening up to emptiness, self-acceptance, being enough, and letting go. After years of compression and dialogic friction with her mentor, Tanya confronts feelings akin to postpartum depression, an anticlimactic melancholy accompanying the completion of her doctorate. Chris is haunted by his inability to recognize the authenticity of repeated invitations from his committee to engage following his Master’s degree, finally breaking his 16-year silence through narrative inquiry into losing what he never knew he had. Anna admits to filling emotional and intellectual gaps following her Master’s degree by pursuing her doctorate. She honors wholeness of herself that encompasses ruptures of grief, confusion, and her journey towards self-acceptance. Emerging from our collaboration is something entirely unexpected: healing. We share our private experiences of post-graduate mourning and re-emergence as an invitation to students to honor what comes unbidden following a graduate journey and an opportunity for relational scholarship.

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