On December 1, 2022, toward the end of my first semester teaching on the tenure track, my husband Andrew died of brain cancer at the age of 31. His 15-month illness began suddenly with a seizure, followed by an excruciatingly long brain surgery, with vague and concerning updates that ended in a cancer diagnosis. Then came daily radiation, toxic chemo, ER visits, scans, restless waits for scan results, and eventually, cognitive changes that meant that the husband I knew was both gone and leaning on me to walk across the room.
Andrew and I met as graduate students at the University of Michigan — he was in biomedical sciences, and I was in public health. Our offices on the medical campus and our apartments in Kerrytown were both a block apart, so in the very early days of dating we started coordinating our commutes. We had real best-friend energy, the kind that keeps you up talking until 3 a.m. at a sleepover even though you keep saying “goodnight.” In 2020, we downsized our wedding plans from 175 guests to 10, because we hated the idea of postponing it, and moved to the Boston area to start postdoctoral fellowships and married life.
A year later, at the onset of Andrew’s illness, I was a fellow at Harvard University studying trends in mortality and life expectancy, and the challenges of working longer for the aging population. I was on the academic job market, suddenly limiting my search to the Boston area so that his treatment would not be interrupted.
When I told a friend about one of my job interviews, she asked me what they thought about the fact that my husband was going through cancer treatment. They didn’t know, I replied, and couldn’t legally ask if I was married. She worked at a religious school where job interviews usually involved candidates recounting their life stories. Something as life-altering as a partner’s cancer diagnosis, she said, would have come up. By contrast, I spent my interview talking about my research and trying to tune out the voice in my head that kept screaming, “Andrew has brain cancer!” until I could go home and cry.
Over the next few years, I perfected that performance art. In higher education, we do not ask about the personal lives of job candidates, department colleagues, peer reviewers, or conference panelists. Professional boundaries show respect for colleagues’ privacy and protect employees from discrimination. They also make the work of grief invisible. Perhaps it shouldn’t be.
The past two years have taught me that enduring a loss can feel like having the earth split open beneath you. I know I am not alone in that experience.
Grief is a nearly universal part of the human experience, a by-product of the attachment that enables our species to survive. The past two years have taught me that enduring a loss can feel like having the earth split open beneath you. I know I am not alone in that experience. There is mass grief in the world right now. In the United States, mortality rates in recent years have been high and rising, not only from Covid-19 but also worsening trends in suicides, drug overdoses, cardiovascular disease, and yes, young adult cancers — the earth splitting over and over with each loss.
Since Andrew’s death, I’ve lived a double life — one part of me trying to survive a traumatic loss and the other part trying to be a good worker. That compartmentalization is a lot to ask of someone rebuilding from the ground up. Here, I let the two stories collide.
Life goes on, until it doesn’t. In the spring of 2022, I was offered and accepted a tenure-track job, and Andrew was promoted from a postdoc to a principal scientist. Our new roles were key to feeling like our life was still moving forward. That’s what Andrew wanted. He had received a diagnosis too devastating to process or accept. He looked around at the little life we were building together and said — let’s just keep going.
He didn’t want to travel the world. He wanted to cook dinner with me in our carriage house in North Cambridge and do good science. He woke me every morning just after pouring my coffee, put a hat over his craniotomy scar, and took the Red Line to work. I taught “Social Epidemiology,” a course that explored the social patterning of diseases across populations, and then went home to an individual case.
Andrew’s decline that fall was swift. The first hint came when I realized that I needed to check on him while he showered, or else he’d stand there forever, forgetting to wash his hair. Not long after, I started staying in the bathroom the whole time to keep him moving along. Then I started holding his arm out of fear he’d fall and hit any one of the surrounding hard surfaces. Then I decided giving him a bath would be safer, but I had a very difficult time helping up a wet, hot, tired Andrew. It almost took us both out and did take out my back. So I ordered a bath bench and a new shower head with a hose. When getting him onto that bench quickly became too difficult, I Googled, “how to give a sponge bath.” Soon after, he was admitted to hospice where the aides helped with his care. He died in my arms in our living room eight days (and a few baths) later.
At the start of Andrew’s decline, I asked for a meeting with my department chair and told him that my husband had cancer, that I was the primary caregiver, and that caring for him might start conflicting with my classroom responsibilities. A few weeks later, I emailed to say I couldn’t leave my husband’s side. Living in Massachusetts, I was able to take a paid, part-time leave for caregiving.
My colleagues signed up to substitute teach the last few sessions of my course. Friends and family flew in from across the country to help with Andrew’s care and to say goodbye. I learned that he and I could communicate even if he lost all ability to speak and that I could change the sheets with him still in bed. He faded, and I moved his wedding band from his swelling hand to a chain around my neck.
When Andrew died, the caregiving leave abruptly ended, and I started bereavement leave — three days total, standard for colleges and universities and more than many workers are afforded in the United States. “Social Epidemiology” was added to the spring course catalog, and I told myself that going right back to work might be good for me.
There were moments when I considered quitting. I thought about it as soon as Andrew’s tumor stopped responding to treatment. I’d spent a decade working toward the job I now had, but did anything really matter besides his care? At the time, I thought: If he dies and my world turns upside down, maybe I should blow it all up, move home to live with my parents, take some time off, and then start a new career completely. After his death, Andrew’s best friend told me that Andrew was proud to see me start this job, and that it was better for him to have left the world with my career launched than with the feeling that he was holding me back.
I didn’t quit. I spent winter break surrounded by loved ones, recovering from the exhaustion of caregiving, and staring at Andrew’s shoes by the door wondering when I should move them. I upped Zoom therapy to twice a week and scheduled different visitors every weekend for the next several months as I adjusted to living alone. I taught my course one day a week and grieved for the other six.
I lost weight from crying. I wrote to my friend like she was a diary. I made a list of “Widow To-Do’s” to track my progress closing credit cards, rolling over retirement accounts, and changing utilities to my name. I mailed special items of Andrew’s to specific friends and family members. I had a quilt made of his graphic T-shirts, flannel button-downs, and sweat-wicking polos. I started searching for a new house. I consulted a fertility clinic about freezing my eggs. I planned a celebration of life for Andrew’s birthday, which happens to also be my birthday, continuing our tradition of joint celebrations. I didn’t think of any new research ideas.
I have now completed two and a half years on the tenure track, four semesters of teaching. I have added a second course, a seminar on “Aging in America.” Twice now, I’ve taught sessions on caregiving and on end-of-life issues without disclosing my personal experiences to my students — performance art. I publish papers, present at conferences, and secure funding, in large part thanks to my supportive co-authors, collaborators who knew me before Andrew got sick and channeled their helplessness into drafting our grant proposal.
As my therapist said I would, I look back at the first academic year marveling at how I did it. I miss Andrew, and I’m glad that I stayed.
Still, I wonder: Should I have advocated for more accommodations? Could I have dropped the performance and kept my job? I don’t know. I was new to my university and to being a professor. I was new to cancer, to caregiving, to grieving, and to widowhood. My life was a boulder rolling down a hill faster than I could run. I was doing the best I could. I am doing the best I can.
This year, I am on “junior leave,” and the break from teaching has allowed me to shift from surviving my loss to integrating it. I am settling into the ways that losing Andrew has changed me and considering how it should change my work as a population-health researcher. I want to push my work and the field of public health past mortality trends to consider their rippling effects on individuals, families, and communities.
And I want to bring my grief into the light. I want us all to do so. In living a double life, I have been on both sides of the divide that stigmatizes individual deaths even as we quantify them. In performing, I have shared in the discomfort with and unpreparedness for grief. I can see clearly now the disservice that habit is doing to all of us, the present and the future bereaved.
