'Mourning Academic Mentors and Mentees'

Abstract

My approach is both autobiographically reflective and collegial, seeking to share experiences that others may also have felt over the years, but which seldom find either public expression or disciplinary recognition. As for the “method” informing this exploration, I adopt an informal “conversation” between personal experience and longstanding anthropological and theological research on mortality in general, complemented by some limited comment from other academic colleagues. As for “reflection,” it is something that, for the moment, I distinguish from the more developed social-scientific fashion of “reflexivity” for reasons that will become apparent. Similarly, despite the fact that this chapter is not a formal essay on grief theory, I will introduce three theoretical topics to provide some direction for the flow of argument, namely Disenfranchised Grief, Uncommon Losses, and Continuing Bonds. Finally, since my focus concerns a type of mourning engendered by a mutual participation in “knowledge,” I will invoke a brief formulaic approach to ideas, emotions, and identity as interlinked facets of the distinctive academic way of life. My hope is that these interplaying considerations may allow colleagues at large, as well as some Death Studies specialists in particular, to gain their distinctive purchase on this otherwise meditative consideration of shared knowing.