When a colleague dies: exploring academia's "death-denying culture"

In the sixth episode of Off Limits, a podcast series exploring topics that are often perceived as taboo in the academic workplace, three researchers describe their personal experiences of loss and how their respective institutions handled it, both practically and emotionally.

Krista Harrison, a geriatrics researcher at University of California, San Francisco, recalls colleagues being very supportive when she suffered a spate of deaths in her family. But overall she needed advice, direction and resources and, ideally, a year off from having to think about writing grants. She set up a grief group and wrote articles calling for academia to shift norms and expectations around loss and bereavement leave.

In 2023 a colleague of Katie Derington, a cardiovascular researcher at University of Colorado Anschutz in Aurora, died of a chronic illness after being hospitalized for around a month. At the time of her death she was co-author on a series of papers with Derington and other colleagues.

Derington describes having to contact her colleague’s grieving widower to complete documentation related to the team’s soon-to-be-published article. This icky” experience also prompted her to write an article ​​​​​​​calling for academic publishers to show more compassion to bereaved authors.

But how do you juggle mourning a colleague with a lengthy to-do list at work? Putting off an administrative task for a couple of months is okay, Derington says. There’s very, very few things in academia that are truly the fire is on the house.”

Shannon Bros, an emeritus ecologist at San Jose State University in California, says support from counselling team colleagues would have helped when her department chair died of cancer. But seeing people having a good time on campus provided an epiphany. I looked around and went, ‘How many times have I walked anywhere and not seen people in pain? It changed me.​​​​​​​’”

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