On Loss, Resilience and Compassion: A Pandemic Memoir

Rifat Salam, Social Science

In the spring semester of 2020, I embarked on long deferred sabbatical, feeling excited, hopeful and full of plans. I had been putting sabbatical off, but finally everything was in place, and all the information my colleagues would need was organized and shared. I walked out of my office and brought my office plants home. While things started to feel ominous in February, we could not have imagined the catastrophic events that followed and the ways in which every aspect of our lives would be affected. I started the pandemic feeling removed from my colleagues’ plight, focusing on the needs of my family and my emotional well-being and hoping things would be back to normal by the fall semester but preparing for remote teaching in the likelihood that it didn’t. I felt a combination of guilt and relief, knowing that I was having a much easier time of it than most people I knew.  And in this first phase of the pandemic, I did what I always do and made the best of things. I checked in on friends, worked on projects and even started a local gardening group. During that summer, I practiced Zoom, revamped my Blackboard and teaching materials and read articles and watched tutorials, all of which did help me prepare for remote teaching.  What I did not anticipate was the exponential increase in my workload, the emails, the problems to solve, and the administrative tasks, which took so much longer to do remotely.

The world seemed to be falling apart, but at least I could focus on my students and my work. I approached pandemic teaching and work as I did everything else—with enthusiasm. I attended workshops, I facilitated workshops, I worked on projects, scheduled Zoom chats and checked in with my colleagues.  I did even more service and reversed my decision to take a break from faculty governance when I was elected to serve as department representative. But it was okay. In that service, along with administrative duties in my department, my work as a WAC co-coordinator and as a teacher and mentor to my students, I was at least making a difference in my corner of the world. My problem-solving skills were in high gear, but with every Zoom session with colleagues, students and staff, I took time to ask how they were doing, and I listened. It was okay, because I was used to going above and beyond, to doing “all of the things.” Until I could not do it anymore. When my body became an unfortunate metaphor for the unending toll and uncertainty of pandemic life, when doing it all became unsustainable. Like many academics, and especially those of us at institutions serving students with challenging lives, I embraced the culture of “heroic stamina,” giving until it hurts, sometimes literally.

Heroic Stamina, Pandemic Teaching and Compassion

My teaching has always been informed by the sociological perspective.  The classroom does not exist in a vacuum, and I approach teaching, including the readings I assign, and the activities I design, to be always subject to adjustment.  This way I can shift in rhythm with what is happening in the world and meet my students where they are.  At an institution like BMCC, this is just what we do, but all of the usual challenges were magnified during the pandemic, calling on all our reserves of teaching skill, compassion, and emotional energy to help our students get through it.

In an article on hidden disability in academic careers, Elaine Beretz (2003) refers to heroic stamina as the norm of being expected to go above and beyond to meet multiple and often conflicting demands around teaching, service, and research requirements. While we have more flexibility than those in “9-5” jobs, that flexibility means that we can work all the time and feel pressure to sacrifice our family and personal time, as well as our health and well-being to do so. We academics are even guiltier than most with our humble bragging around overwork, which is sometimes more performance than actual productivity. At BMCC, being heroic is part of the job since we serve students who are dealing with so many personal and financial pressures that it would be selfish not to go above and beyond for them. Consider the workshops that are offered to faculty—most of them require us to spend even more time and effort on our work lives, learning and applying new pedagogical approaches, technology, and then also being more productive with research, writing, and applying for grants. We know that this level of commitment is unusual for community college faculty, and it is fair to say that we are asked to be even more heroic than typical academics. If you choose a career at a community college, dedication to students and helping them succeed should be the most important aspect of the job, but it must be said, the additional pressures and emotional labor involved in that work need to be addressed.  Unlike other caring professions, ours lacks the structure in our institutions to address the latent effects of the work we do.

The pandemic sent the expectations of heroic stamina into hyperdrive.  We were asked, appropriately, to offer students as much flexibility as possible, to understand their trauma and build that understanding into our pedagogy.  I witnessed faculty and staff, themselves not immune to the effects of the pandemic, walk around in a haze of exhaustion but also guilt because their problems are not so bad as the students’. A colleague in Teacher Education noted that what is often missing from conversations about trauma-informed pedagogy is the teacher themselves and their own experiences of trauma. Others will write about the emotional tolls of pandemic teaching, the guilt, the feelings of helplessness, isolation, but there are also the practical effects—allowing flexibility means that you are always grading and having to keep track of extensions and late work, and remote work resulted in countless additional hours spent on email and Blackboard. Add to that, when everyone was working from home, it meant we were always available for Zoom meetings and always connected, no off-campus days for grading and writing, not even the reprieve of commuting when you could read or take a nap. The pandemic meant a loss of the best part of our jobs, connecting with students, the spontaneous hallway chats, and the flexibility of carving out time to do actual academic work. Even with the campus being open, most say it is not the same, and fear that it never will be.

What seemed to be lacking was compassion for ourselves.  While we were told to offer (and genuinely felt) compassion for our students, we gave, and were given, very little to ourselves. If you have ever had a conversation with me about compassion in the workplace, you have probably heard me expound on the necessity for “360 degrees of compassion.”  For me this means that compassion should not be limited to those we feel are deserving of it, which in the college’s context means students, but rather to also create a culture of compassion where we acknowledge the humanity in others and how they might be affected. The need for this was even greater during the pandemic when faculty and staff were feeling overwhelmed. Even small gestures of appreciation, acknowledgement and understanding became more important than ever.

Collectively, we did not have enough compassion for ourselves because we felt that faculty were better off, that our problems and our losses were not as great as those of our students.  It doesn’t mean that we should minimize the experiences of our students — but we collectively minimized our own. We said things like, at least we have a job, no one close to me died, I have a home, etc. Our losses seemed insignificant in comparison.

Disenfranchised Grief, Ambiguous Loss, and My Own Personal Loss

In her article, “It’s Okay to Grieve the Small Losses of a Lost Year,” Tara Parker Pope describes the idea of disenfranchised grief, conceptualized by bereavement researcher, Kenneth J. Doka, who described it as grief that is not acknowledged or supported by social ritual. The article goes on to describe the many kinds of loss people experienced during the pandemic—college students missing opportunities and lost goals, canceled trips and being unable to see grandchildren and even getting a cancer diagnosis during lockdown when you were isolated from your usual supports.  As I said earlier, as faculty, we lost much of what we considered to be the best parts of our work lives. But because we were luckier than most, we felt an odd sort of survivors’ guilt and undeserving of sympathy. I was not able to do the field research and travel I had planned for my sabbatical, but it felt selfish to want sympathy for that.

It has been a year since that article was written but I think many of us are still dealing with the disenfranchised grief of the last two years. It has been made worse by the financial pressures brought on by sharply declining enrollments at BMCC, which we share with community colleges throughout the country.  Our professional lives are under threat and anxiety has increased, especially for adjunct and untenured faculty and those in many liberal arts disciplines. Adding to our accumulated losses is heightened insecurity, the loss of sheer numbers of students, as well as declining resources.  Administrators tell us to be prepared for austerity, our union tells us we need to fight, but either way, we are faced with perpetual uncertainty under a sword of Damocles of more loss to come.

How do we deal with a loss that is not quite a loss? I came across an NPR piece on a new book by bereavement researcher Pauline Boss, who describes the concept of ambiguous loss as “a situation that’s beyond human expectation. We know about death: it hurts, but we are accustomed to loved ones dying and having a funeral and the rituals. With ambiguous loss, there are no rituals; there are no customs. Society does not even acknowledge it. So, the people who experience it are very isolated and alone, which makes it worse.” Like disenfranchised grief, the lack of acknowledgement means that we have no rituals to process it nor is there likely to be any closure which we expect to happen with more defined experiences of grief.  The pandemic itself is a source of ambiguous loss because while we seem to be getting back to normal, the virus is still around and affecting our daily lives and choices. While we may continue to talk about the pandemic and the virus, we are increasingly being told to move on. But as it relates to our institutional uncertainties, we are unable to move on.  Lacking the ability to process the uncertainty of it all, we might feel we are left to choose between becoming cynical, angry, demoralized, or some combination.  Even I, a constant seeker of solutions to problems, have yet to tackle this dilemma, but my own personal experience of disenfranchised grief and ambiguous loss has given me new insights on what we were all feeling.

As bad as the pandemic has been, last year I faced a personal health crisis that challenged every aspect of both my professional and personal lives.  As I alluded to earlier, my body decided that it could no longer sustain the heroic stamina that was so central to my professional identity.  Yes, I was getting older, but my health was always robust and my energy pretty much boundless. I even shrugged off years of chronic migraine as an inconvenience. But in early 2021, things started going wrong—my vaunted energy was gone, I had mysterious skin issues that my dermatologist could not explain, inexplicable bouts of pain. I had to cancel class one day because I just could not manage a 75-minute Zoom session. Given that in over 15 years, I’ve only cancelled class a handful of times, this was more of a disappointment to me than for my students. My body was like a reflection of the endless malaise, uncertainty, and dashed hope that characterized the second year of the pandemic.

By the end of spring semester, I had lost most of my hair on top of everything else and doctors had not connected all my ailments. I began to do it for myself, and based on family history, I asked for specific tests that I had hoped would not confirm my suspicions. By the end of June, I was bedridden, and I had to reach out to my department chair and other colleagues to let them know what was going on and to ask for help with work I was unable to do.  They were unquestionably supportive, as I had expected, but it was a huge blow to my professional identity and sense of myself—after all, I was the one who helped colleagues who were ill or had difficult situations or were just overwhelmed with other responsibilities. I had lost my vaunted heroic stamina and that was as painful to me as the physical ones.

Eventually my initial hunch became a reality: I was officially diagnosed with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE), but commonly referred to as just lupus.  You might know someone who has it or maybe you heard about it from TV shows like Seinfeld or multiple episodes of House M.D. When Dr. House’s junior colleagues could not explain a mysterious illness, and concluded it must be lupus, he would famously say, “it’s not lupus, it’s never lupus.” It is a systemic autoimmune disorder that is tricky to diagnose. Except in my case, it was lupus and I kind of unofficially diagnosed myself.  My sister was diagnosed with SLE over 20 years ago and it devastated her young life and continues to have its effects, though there are better treatments now.

Fortunately for me, there are much better diagnostic tools and treatments now, and I am lucky to have access to experts who specialize in and study the disorder. In the middle of the summer, I thought I would have to take a medical leave as I had difficulty walking more than a few steps at a time. Ironically, the remote work environment of the pandemic made it possible for me to continue working and it was ultimately the right decision.  My work, along with the support I received from my colleagues, helped me get through those tough early months when treatments needed time to kick in. Though fatigue and chronic pain is part of my new normal, my doctors tell me that right now, I am a best-case scenario.  It is, however, a disease that needs to be carefully monitored and I have to accept and plan for times when it will become more active and require additional treatment. Still, the lupus diagnosis had parallels to the ambiguous losses of the pandemic. I felt guilty and that I had no right to complain because it is not cancer and I am not in mortal danger, and other people have it much worse than I do.

It is difficult for me to disclose this in such a public way, and the issue of chronic illness and hidden disability in an academic career is an important but separate conversation.  I share this because it would have been disingenuous to write about grief and loss without revealing this huge part of my pandemic experience.  More importantly, it has created an opportunity for me to talk about the pitfalls of heroic stamina and unacknowledged loss. Learning about disenfranchised grief and ambiguous loss finally gave me a framework for understanding the experience of my illness, but also the sense of loss and pandemic gloom that continues to hang over us. The Times article I referenced earlier had suggestions for dealing with the feelings of ambiguous grief and loss, but I do not have a simple answer for us, as members of the college community dealing with our feelings of loss.  We’ve lost the robust presence of students, the spontaneous connections with colleagues and, with the enrollment crisis, we fear for the loss of our ability to do the work that we love to do.  It is tempting to resort to heroic stamina, either as a way to expend nervous energy, or more cynically, to demonstrate our worth in an uncertain environment where even tenured faculty are anxious. Genuine dedication for helping students and our institution through this difficult time, getting involved in ways that make sense for you, whether it is meaningful service or union activism is healthy, but working yourself into exhaustion to prove your worth is not.

People often come to me for advice, but it is not in my nature to be proscriptive.  Even with my students, I explain a few different strategies for dealing with an issue or challenge and ask them to choose what is right for them.  What has gotten me through these two years, including the health crisis, was to strengthen, maintain and create connections with the extraordinary people who work at the college.  The colleagues who are much more than work friends and the relationships to staff members in various offices whom I call on to help me with problems big and small, helped me get through the personal, professional, and bureaucratic challenges of the last years. And yes, to avoid potentially toxic heroic stamina, you should say no more often, but not to the detriment of your colleagues or worse, your students. In other words, try not to be that colleague who always says they are too busy, knowing that the work will fall to others who are likely just as busy, and may have their own issues. Preserving our own well-being need not be accomplished by compromising the well-being of others, however unintentional and inadvertent.

My goal in writing this is not so much about my own experiences but the hope that what I have raised here will spark meaningful discussions about what we have gone through and what we can do to get through these difficult times. I want to end by talking about compassion and ask that you try to infuse it into your everyday interactions at the college, in your teaching, in your interactions and indeed, in how you express yourself in email—any gesture that recognizes the humanity in others, and this goes double for the people and situations you find especially difficult.  I am no saint and you will hear me complain about all the people and things that frustrate me, but I find it’s better for me to eventually turn to humor and compassion to avoid internalizing those negative feelings. Most of all, if you are like me, really think about why you take on extra tasks and realize the pitfalls of heroic stamina and give yourself compassion.  Helpers rarely like to ask for help but I had to get past it, and was overwhelmed by the support and generosity of colleagues whose deeds ranged from simple words of acknowledgement and support, to practical advice gleaned from their own experiences of chronic illness. As I felt better, I especially appreciated the colleagues who recognized that I was still me and still happy to contribute my skills and experience. Ultimately, recognizing and acknowledging the grief that resulted from the loss of my old me has helped me to accept and do the best that I can for who I am now. We as a college community need to talk about and acknowledge what we have lost and support each other as we face the uncertainty ahead.

References

1 Response

  1. Hollis F. Glaser says:
    November 4, 2022 at 7:38 am

    Powerful Rifat. This is a real gift to the community. Thank you for your honesty and generosity.

    -Hollis

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