As the associate dean at my former campus, Phil was the one who hired me and who worked with me as I navigated my professional life as someone who'd left a tenured position and become and adjunct faculty member. He was the least boss-like yet most effective boss I've ever had. He always made me feel like the campus was lucky to have me, although the reverse was more true.
My last real conversation with Phil was the day I told him I'd accepted a job offer at another school. It was the only time in ten years I saw him speechless. His response was kind, supportive, and encouraging--exactly what I needed as I plunged headfirst into a new professional life.
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At work, we live in our professional worlds. Sure, there is some blurring of boundaries as we discuss our personal lives, schedule meetings around the fact that we have to relieve a spouse in graduate school of parenting duties or get a cavity filled, and see the wear and tear of life on our colleagues' faces.
In academia, the professional is personal for many of us. Scholarship and teaching are extensions of our earlier selves when we were students. Our research and writing focus our academic interests and come home with us. We engage in our intellectual work in our jammies and in the shower, not just at work. The point, I guess, is that for academics, the boundaries between personal and professional are already a bit fuzzy, just because of the nature of our work.
When a colleague dies, though, the remaining barriers are shattered for a brief time. Phil died recently; yesterday I attended his funeral service on campus. He'd been sick for a couple months, and his death sent the campus (and my friends and former colleagues) reeling.
Because I now work somewhere else, I won't experience the loss of Phil on a daily basis as so many of my friends will. I feel a bit outside the community of mourners. For several days after his death, I was incredibly sad and I cried a great deal--but I am not the one who will have to live with the loss when the spring semester begins and Phil is not there. My friends will. By the time the funeral arrived, my sadness over his death was overshadowed by my sadness for my friends who will need to live and work without him. My tears, by now, are for them.
At the funeral service, I saw grief in my friends' eyes. Man and woman alike, they cried. They shared stories--not about Phil's professionalism, but about his humanity and the way he touched their lives.
In the end, it is not the work we do but the way in which live our lives that leaves a legacy. It is right that those we spend time with cry over their loss. It means we lived well. We made a difference. And when the people we leave behind mourn and grieve together, the circle that has been left empty is at least, somehow, complete.
