Stephanie Gilbert on Loss, Grief, and Academia

In this special episode of the agile academic, Dr. Stephanie Gilbert and I discuss our grief experiences and her research on bereavement in the workplace. 

Transcript

Rebecca Pope-Ruark: On this special episode of the Agile Academic, Season 4, I sit down with Dr. Stephanie Gilbert, associate professor of organizational management at Cape Breton University in Canada to discuss our experiences with grief as higher education professionals. This is an episode about bereavement experiences and research, and I do want to offer a content warning that we discuss the loss of a parent and the loss of a child. We also discuss ways to understand grief in general and in the workplace, and how to support colleagues having grief experiences. 

Welcome to the Agile Academic, a podcast for women in and around higher education. In each episode, we tackle topics from career vitality to burnout, and everything in between. Join me as I chat with inspiring women about their experiences pursuing purpose, making change, and driving culture in the academy and beyond. I'm your host, Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark. 

Hi Stephanie. Thanks so much for being on the show today and talking about this special topic with me. 

Stephanie Gilbert: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Rebecca. 

RPR: So why don't you just introduce yourself and tell the audience a little bit about the work that you do. 

SG: Sure. So my name is Stephanie Gilbert and I'm an associate professor of organizational management at a university here in Nova Scotia, Canada called Cape Breton University. So I live on an island right in the Atlantic Ocean. It's a beautiful place to live, and most of my work in my research has been focused on employee wellbeing and the predictors of that in some capacity. So I've done a lot of work on leadership and the role that good leadership or bad leadership can play on employee wellbeing. And more recently, my work has shifted into looking at bereavement in the workplace and what that looks like, so what the bereaved employees experience is, and how bereaved employees can be supported. So that's kind of moving into policy work. In some areas it's moving into the leadership domain. So how can managers support bereaved employees? Certainly talking to bereaved employees also and getting their experience. And I've done some work on broadly bereavement, but I've also done some specific work on pregnancy loss in the workplace too. So that's how my work has evolved over recent years. And kind of what I'm up to.

RPR: One of the reasons that, well, the, the main reason that we connected is because I read an, an article in Nature that you were quoted in regarding faculty or the researcher experience of folks in higher ed, um, experiencing some sort of grief or bereavement experience. And as my listeners may know, I experienced the loss of my mom in early February very unexpectedly. And you've experienced your own loss as well. So thank you for being here to, to have this conversation. I don't think it's something that we talk enough about in higher ed. Um, as we said before we got on, it's really kind of a club that we'll all be in eventually or in some way, unfortunately. So how do we have these conversations with each other and understand what that experience is more like? So before we jump into that, I always like to ask folks thinking about higher education and what's, what do you think your purpose is in higher education and, and where does that come from? 

SG: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. So most of the work that I'm interested in doing is, like, my background is called industrial organizational psychology. And most of the work that I am doing is looking at really the idea that if we work full-time, even part-time, a lot of our work experience has the potential to affect our overall quality of life. And so the quality of your work experience really matters for just your life satisfaction and your wellbeing. And so that's been the focus of a lot of my work. And then recently with this grief work, I'm starting to really recognize the idea that there are times in our life that having a positive work experience and having support at work might matter just so much more times when we're vulnerable or going through a loss or some other significant or stressful life event. So in higher education, I think my mission is to do work that tries to improve the work life experience of employees and in my teaching to teach the next generation of business leaders and the next generation of employees about how how much that does matter, that they have a positive work experience, that they can seek that for themselves, um, and that that's gonna have an important implication for their overall life quality, but that also they can be part of shaping those more positive and healthy work environments. 

SG: You shared some of your grief experience in that recent Nature article, which I'll link to in the show notes. So can you tell us a little bit about why you think this work is important to be doing right now and what it means to you? 

SG: Yeah. So you, you shared that you've lost your mom. I'm so sorry that, that that happened. And I, I did have a loss myself that kind of guided the work that I'm doing. And it was actually a pregnancy loss. I had a stillbirth at full term in 2017, so it was my second child, and it was very unexpected and certainly presented a great deal of grief and also physical challenge and need for physical recovery. I guess I was very fortunate in that like living in Canada here, we have access to maternity leave still. So we have paid maternity leave of 15 weeks and you can still access that benefit if your loss is a stillbirth. So I did have a great deal of time off and wondered a lot about when people go back to work after three days after a loss, right? And so I'm thinking about how fortunate I've been in having had the support, even being aware that that benefit was there for me, which in Canada, although we have this benefit, doesn't mean that people are using it, that everybody is aware that it is available. 

Um, and I know that now after the research that we've done in pregnancy loss. So I felt very fortunate in many ways to have been supported in the ways that I was with the information that I needed with that leave time itself and then being supported going back to work. But I know that many people don't have that. And like the average bereavement leave is three days and maybe give or take a day for travel if it's needed. So people are finding themselves in many cases, going back to work before they're really ready or not taking any time off at all. And so I think those kinds of questions about, and observing myself through my own grief experience in going back to work really led me into this line of research, I think. But I was really interested in trying to play a role in making change with it, whether it is policy or management practice or even individual's decisions <laugh> about how much time do I take off? 

Or social norms around how much time can we take off? Can I be part of, of shaping some changes in a positive direction? So that's kind of where I was going with this work and why I decided to get into that. And it's interesting also, I would've started with a pregnancy loss study initially, and I thought, uh, maybe that's too niche <laugh>. I think it was the stigma around pregnancy loss really in the back of my mind that led me to first start with a study on just bereaved employees, uh, bereaved from all types of losses. And we had two participants in that sample who had had pregnancy losses. And it was very apparent that there were some unique challenges. So certainly we can't create a hierarchy of grief. We don't wanna be comparing different bereavements to one another. But I did see that there were some unique challenges with pregnancy loss, mainly physical challenges that we might not see in other types of losses and, and maybe the stigmatized elements. So then I did later on do a study of the pregnancy loss experience for employees. So that's been really meaningful, really motivating. I've received a lot of positive feedback about this work, which has been amazing. But I'm just so much more motivated and energy energized to do this kind of work than anything I'd previously done. So it means a lot to me. It's really important. It really gives me like renewed engagement in my work, I think. 

RPR: But how do we use our experiences to, to shape the work that we do and make it really meaningful to us as well? And I, I had not, I had not had a traumatic loss experience in my life. So the loss that my mom was was really shocking. And it was interesting to see then how, how people treat you. And to think about the leave that is, I ended up taking I think about a week and a half, but I dipped into bereavement and to sick days and to vacation days to be able to do that. And I know that even just coming back after that, my executive functioning was so low for months that it was really just almost impossible to, to get any real work done. I, I really, I got to the point where I was having my amazing supervisor sit down with me every morning and look at a to-do list and say, what are we gonna focus on today? So that I could have some kind of just structure to, to help me get through the days. So I think, and I'm saying this because I'm thinking about the grief experience at large, and you know, what can, what can we expect when we're grieving based on the research, knowing that that old concept of the the stages of grief really hasn't been validated by research at all? 

SG: Hmm. Yeah. Those stages of grief are so prevalent. Like <laugh>, everybody seems sticky. Yes, there's something about them. They're memorable, I guess, or, and they've been applied in so many even grief studies I think out there, right? But many people are surprised to know that those stages of grief, they were developed by Elizabeth Kubler Ross. She was an amazing researcher, and she was actually studying patients in palliative care that were anticipating their own deaths. And that's how those stages were developed. And then later on became applied to bereavement grief. Um, so yeah, we know now that those stages may not always represent bereavement grief, and we certainly don't progress through these stages in a linear way. So what we know instead is everybody seems to have quite a unique and individual trajectory of their grief, and that we might grieve in very different ways, <laugh> and for different types of losses also, right? 

So, so many factors are gonna influence your experience of grief for a particular loss. And I think we kind of know in most cases, there's likely to be an acute period of grief, probably in that first six months after your loss, where you're daily activities are likely to be in some way impaired by your grief. So common grief symptoms are things like the ones you mentioned, like the brain fog, just really having difficulty with cognitive function or like making decisions, taking in and processing new information. All these things that we do in academia are more tricky, and maybe we're impaired in our ability to do those things when we're grieving. But we might also have like physical expressions of grief. We know that our immune systems are compromised when we're grieving and more likely to get sick. And some of us might be more likely to express grief that way than others. 

There's some evidence that men tend to somaticize their grief a little bit more than women, for example. So there might be some gendered effects. Some of us are kind of more doers in our grief and others are much more emotional in our grief. I was much more emotional person <laugh>. So during my time off, I was doing a lot of prying, a lot of journaling, just emotionally processing what had happened. But others might be doers. They wanna be, you know, I had a friend who jumped right into going through her mother's clothes after she died, you know, within days was going through her closet and getting rid of things. And that felt good to her to be doing. What can we expect when grieving? I think we can expect that first six months to be especially hard. And then what we know is the majority of people tend to return to a more normal level of functioning after the six months. 

Not to say you will not continue grieving because you will continue grieving forever, and that's always now going to be a part of your life. But most people will kind of, after that six months, be able to return to a somewhat so-called normal level of functioning. But again, everybody's so different and everybody's going to have different needs, and those needs are going to change throughout time. So what to expect, I think is to expect change. And, you know, constantly changing needs, changing emotions, those waves of grief to come over you at sometimes un unexpected times. And to be really gentle with yourself when you're going through all of that, I think is important. 

RPR: Yeah, I think that's really crucial to the experience, just knowing you feel, I, in my experience, I felt like there's, there were certain ways that I should be feeling or certain, certain ways that I should be behaving, certain levels of crying I should be doing that. There was some kind of mark that said, I love my mom this much if I cry this much, or something like that. And, and if I didn't, what was wrong with me? Was I not that I not love her enough? And, you know, those were things that, that I was mentally processing while I'm trying to sit and work <laugh> the whole time. Right? Yeah. How do I, how do I focus on the work that I'm supposed to be doing while 90% of my brain is on this loss, while my neurons are literally knitting themselves to understand a world that she's not present in anymore? And thinking about that it's okay that we, that we deal with things in different ways and that is going to change and going to, going to evolve. And I think that leads into my next question really well is, you know, if, if a colleague is grieving, what are some of the best ways that we can support them? 

SG: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>? Yeah, that's a really good question. And it's tricky, but I think because like I said, everybody's going to have different needs. But one of the overwhelming themes of our work, and there was a, a study actually on faculty, bereaved faculty. It is 2007 paper by Fitzpatrick. One of the overwhelming findings there is that, especially in academia, often we work kind of in silos and we're not always aware of what our colleagues are doing or what they're going through. And especially that's the case, I think with personal stuff. We might not even be on campus anymore. Many of us are working from home. But it's really important that people's losses are knowledge and recognized. Uh, and that may seem really obvious <laugh>, but it's not always so easy to find a time when it feels comfortable to say to a person, I'm really sorry that you lost your mother. You know, um, I'm here for you. I'm here to listen. You, I know you're going through a lot of pain right now. I just wanted to sup to let you know that you're supported or whatever it is that you decide to say to acknowledge that person's loss. Some it's often flowers or sending cards or food. Sometimes colleagues are attending the funeral, if that's comfortable. They're, you know, or dropping by with coffee to a colleague's house if that's comfortable. But, or just mentioning and acknowledging the loss in the hallway, <laugh>, there are various ways to go about doing it. And the way that you do it is probably going to depend on your relationship with that colleague. But we found overwhelmingly that people remember who recognized and acknowledged that they've had a loss and who didn't. And especially when somebody doesn't recognize or acknowledge what they've been through, that can feel more harm, like that could cause more harm to that person because they're feeling invalidated in their pain, dismissed. 

And they also might feel like they're a little bit crazy. Like, I had a colleague when I went back to work, I had, I had been hugely pregnant, right? Took 15 weeks off. Everybody knew what had happened, that I had lost my baby, came back to work, now I'm not pregnant. And a colleague just kind of said, you know, hey, and starts making small talk, no acknowledgement at all about why I was gone, how long I was gone. This is a colleague whose office was like right near mine. And I felt a little bit crazy, like, has something not significant not happened to me in this time since I've seen you last? And you can't even acknowledge it, even the littlest bit in conversation. And many of our participants said the same thing. You know, people passing them in the hallways that they were quite close colleagues with who were, avoided them completely, didn't wanna talk to them at all, or started to make small talk without mentioning the loss at all. 

You know, that can feel quite harmful to grieving people. So I'd say recognition is really important. And in one of our papers, we developed a model of bereavement support. It spells CARE. that r is for recognition of the loss, which I think is the most prevalent theme. The C though, is for communication. And that's two-way communication where you're giving the person information they might need. Um, maybe it's around their leave options, maybe it's around, you know, maybe you should talk to this person, or maybe, you know, you should consider this form of accommodation. But communication is also about getting the information from the briefed person about what their needs are and acknowledging that their needs might change over time. So that two-way communication is really critical to informing what the a and the care model is accommodation. And that's kind of doing what you can to help that person. 

So if it's a colleague, can you take over a class you know of, of theirs? Can you, you know, what could you help them with in terms of their service load? Or maybe it's something, I don't know, helping with a student that they're advising at the time, if they need to step away from that. Or maybe something less onerous, you know, something more simple like, like food, a coffee break when they might need it, lending an a listening ear, right? So a, is it just about accommodation recognition I've already talked about? And then the e in Kara's emotional support. And that is kind of that ongoing support that people really need after their loss. They're gonna continue grieving, like I said, quite intensely for probably six months, maybe longer, and then ongoing for the rest of their life. So that emotional support might look like checking in on their wellbeing over time. 

Maybe it's remembering those important milestones after their loss, like their first major holiday without their loved one, the death anniversary of their loved one. Uh, maybe it's sharing bereavement experiences, or maybe it's just listening about their loss asking, you know, what was your loved one's favorite meal? Or asking something about them so that they have an opportunity to share and it can open up a conversation. So there are a lot of ways that that could look too, but this care model that we developed, we think could be applied by coworkers and managers, <laugh> and, um, maybe HR professionals also. But, so it's kind of flexible in that sense, but I think it provides some guidance as to how you could support your colleagues. And in academia, things are quite complex, <laugh>, so it might not always be straightforward. So I think that's where that communication is really even that much more important to understand, how can I help you? And compassion really underlies that whole process, right? It's seeing suffering and then doing what you can to try to alleviate that. 

RPR: Yeah, and I think, I think there's such a, a fear of saying the wrong thing or of being, not wanting to be insensitive, and then maybe unintentionally being insensitive by trying not to bring it up or by trying not to, you know, upset someone by bringing it up. Because we don't talk about this, this as a life experience in higher education. We're not using those opportunities to be human with each other, to, to have that connection and that compassion with each other, and like, it is an experience that we're all gonna have at some point in some way or or another. And how do we, how do we show up for our colleagues? And I and you, we talked, you said a little bit earlier about faculty members being kind of isolated in the, in their, in their little spires. And how, how do we, how do we connect to each other when we're distanced that way? Is it, is it possible to take over someone's class? Is it possible, you know, to, to take over a research load for, for a colleague? You know, there's, there's so many variables in what faculty members do in their roles to, to think about the complexity of that in addition to the pain is, is it's a lot to think about. 

SG: Yeah, it's it, and it can be very difficult to step away from all of that if you've had a loss. We have all these balls in the air as academics, and maybe there is a case where your members of your department could take on a class for you, or you could bring in, say, the writing center to do a workshop or the librarian, or consider those resources. But right after a loss, we are often not very creative <laugh>, like I said, we are really, our cognitive capacity is really reduced to think about those kinds of options. So yeah, it can be really difficult to know too, how to support your colleague because you might not have anything to do with their research or with their teaching. So then you might need to consider, are there other ways to support them? Yeah. And with, with respect to insensitive comments, that's something that is a really difficult part of bereavement. people wanna say something, but they don't know what to say. And in general, we're really grief illiterate in our society. We don't talk about grief. So you'll get a lot of, I'm sorry for your loss, I'm sorry for your loss. And you'll probably get some comments that feel insensitive in insensitive, whether they're like platitudes, at least this or that, or everything happens for a reason, or, you know, those kinds of comments that might not feel great to some people <laugh> to hear that can be very, very difficult. So I'd say across most of our participants, that they, although they might be harmed by those insensitive comments, they also in some way recognize that the other person is trying, that they don't know what to say and that they're trying, so saying something is probably better than not saying anything at all. I don't have a lot of advice around what to say, but I guess if you were to say, I'm sorry for your loss, what would you say next? 

Maybe just say that, you know, I'm sorry for your loss. Losing your mother is an incredibly difficult thing. You must miss her so much. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you know, or ask, how are you gonna remember your mom? Hmm. You know, what can you say after the, I'm, I'm sorry for your loss, <laugh> mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So that's the part that's probably going to really acknowledge their pain and maybe offer support in some way to them. It's also difficult for somebody to say, let me know if you need anything to a bereaved person. And for them to feel like they can really take them up on that, because they might not know what they need and they might not feel comfortable reaching out or, or later on saying, Hey, you told me, let me know if I need anything. Well, guess what? I've got a class you could teach, or I've got a student you could meet with. Or, you know. So it can be very difficult for bereaved people to feel comfortable taking other people up on those very vague offers of support. Many people would say it's not even really a form of support. It's kind of a, just a saying that people offer some so that they have something to say. 

RPR: It does beco, I, I do feel like over the course of the pandemic, we got a little more comfortable with our each other's humanity. And I wanna make sure that we don't really lose that as we go back, as we are back and as we are building whatever higher ed looks like in the next era. So, and this is one of those things that we're all gonna experience. So how do we have those conversations? How do we connect with students who are going through this experience, that grief experience? How do we, how do we as faculty members take the time that we need to experience that? And I think one of the things for with me was, was that brain fog and that, that my brain wa my brain wasn't working kind of quote unquote experience and thinking about, I don't teach, I'm not, I'm not teaching faculty anymore. 

And just imagining what that would've been like to have to go back into the classroom immediately, or to, you know, go back into the research lab immediately. It's just kind of, it's mind boggling to me that, that we go through these experiences and that we don't really talk a lot about what that experience is like, because it might make someone else uncomfortable to have to think about it. I wanna go back to what you said about compassion and, and I'm curious what you think compassion means in this context, especially in higher education. And, and we talked a little bit about how you can act more, more compassionately, but what can we even do to go kind of beyond just how we communicate with people 

SG: Yeah. So I think the CARE model that I described before, the more I thought about it, the more I was like, this is just compassion, which the compassion process is really about. Like, you notice that somebody is suffering and you acknowledge that, and then you try to do something to alleviate that suffering. And I think that any, all of us in higher ed and any employee is going to have relatively, uh, reasonable expectations about what their workplace can do to help them with their grief, right? Who can really help us with our grief. But I think the, the main thing is not to cause undue stress on the grieving person because their capacity is so reduced at that time, and their ability to cope with stressors is just, you know, tanked. So I think the compassion process in higher education might look like the continuing to check in with your colleagues, finding out like how their needs might be changing. 

And especially if you're a close colleague to that person, can you kind of check in on them? Can you find out from them what they, what they might need, what they could benefit from, even if it's just meals, so that when they get home, at the end of the day, they don't have to cook <laugh> something, and then that mental load of what's for dinner is taken off their plate. Those kinds of gestures can be, it's, I think, really meaningful to people. They will remember for the rest of their career, which of their colleagues sent home a meal in that difficult time. Even better, if somebody's able to take a full week off of work rather than just three days because a colleague jumps in and combines two classes together, like their class and, or takes over their class, they will remember that <laugh> 

RPR: And really thinking about what we can do, feeling like maybe there's an action we can take, I think can be, can really help be helpful. And like I've said a million times already, knowing that it may happen to you in the future, and that you may need that support as well. So how do we, how do we kind of build that community that way? 

SG: Yeah. There was something else that you said about having a really hard time imagining going back to work. I went into this work really thinking that anybody that's grieving is gonna have a difficult time going back to work. But there are people that I now know from doing all these interviews that for whom work was an, a massive benefit to them in their grief, that I think these are people who like their jobs and generally have a supportive and healthy work environment. But going back to work for them felt like a great healthy way to detach from their grief for a period of time, and then at the end of the day, go home to their, maybe their grieving family and deal with that grief again. And during the day, have an opportunity to derive support from colleagues to focus their energy on a productive goal. 

And again, just have like a little bit of recovery. So for some people, I think if our workplaces are healthy and we like our jobs, or we find them to be fulfilling and meaningful work can be really beneficial. Um, but again, everybody's gonna be different in that capacity. Like some people are gonna wanna go back to the classroom, and if you do, that's okay. Like, we know about grief that we kind of tend to oscillate between this grief orientation where we're really like actively grieving and this recovery orientation where our, like, our brain just can't be grieving a hundred percent of the time. Right. And you mentioned earlier about like feeling like you're not crying enough because it might mean you don't love your, love your mother enough. I remember having a moment where I was like, after our loss, having like a dance party with my daughter in the living room and smiling and laughing and then immediately thinking, I can't be doing this. I'm supposed to be sad, but our brain needs breaks from grief. So sometimes for people work, is that break? Or sometimes we need to introduce moments of joy so that we can move into that recovery orientation. And then slowly over time we spend a little bit more and more time in that recovery zone, moving towards more kind of more normal, so-called normal. If you know you can ever really return to that after a significant loss in your life, 

RPR: I think that's really helpful for even just thinking about, you know, I'm, what's five months into the experience, you know what, feeling kind of a little bit better. Like, it's not 90% of my brain that's on my mom most of the time, not on that experience. Right? It's, it's evening out so that I can have those experiences and I think that I can do a better job reaching out to people for support when needed and thinking about how I can be, how I can use connection with others as well to, to be supportive, who I've been lucky that the people in my, in my office have been very, very supportive and very, very helpful since that experience. But that's not this, that's not the case in, in every situation. And we, you know, we've, we've talked about policies being sometimes you have three days worth of bereavement ex experience, you know, if you've had a loss, then three days is getting you to the funeral back, like you said. So, you know, how do you higher ed policies for bereavement maybe compare to what you've seen in industry? And is there what's kind 

SG: Of holding back from, from better policies? Yeah, so I think in many cases I can't, I haven't done like a review of higher ed policies than bereavement. But like of the, the institutions I'm familiar with, the bereavement policies align more or less with what's average, which is like three days. So sometimes give or take time for travel. So I'd say they're kind of on par as far as I'm aware. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, of course there's gonna be variation, I'm sure. But I think it's important to know just because a policy's there doesn't mean it's being used, right? And it, just because there's a policy doesn't mean that there's a culture or a norm in that organization for adva taking advantage of the policy. So none of my work was really specific to faculty, but I did, in one study, I talked to I think four or five faculty members, some of which I knew, some of, some I didn't. 

Uh, and in our pregnancy loss study, uh, we had a faculty member I think as well, so they kind of, yeah, they shared their experiences and they may have been aware of a bereavement policy and their faculty association collective agreement, or maybe it's an in institutional policy, but the policy didn't really factor into their decisions about how much leave time to take <laugh>. They, I think this is maybe the double-edged sword of having the autonomy that we tend to have as faculty, and it's probably gonna depend on the time of year when your loss takes place too. We have so much autonomy though that we could decide, I guess to cancel a class and just, and then return the next class. But many people didn't. Many people that we talked to took no time off and certainly no formal time off was taken by any of these faculty members that we talked to. 

I talked to one person who had a full term stillbirth and took no time off from teaching or research or service, was at a conference in Ireland two weeks later in fact. And she chose to do that and, and, and really pushed through, but later on, you know, said, I wish I'd known that I actually could have taken maternity leave. That that was still a possibility for me. And we had other faculty members who maybe one person had a lost right before our spring break, we call it reading week here, and just kind of took a bereavement leave informally during that reading week and slowed down, but didn't completely stop their activities. I had, I've talked to a couple of people who had their loss in the summer, so they kind of informally assigned themselves some time off. One, one person, it was four days only, and then back to work after their father died. 

One person, their mother was in hospice and they were with her in the hospice throughout the summer that year and, and their mother died. And then there was a celebration of life and all that followed where he was really responsible for helping with plan most of that, right? So that person later on when going through the promotion and tenure process, their performance expectations were not adjusted for that full summer of having been with their mother and dealing with all that that entailed. So I guess I'm trying to say that like policy is one thing, but we do not have a culture of taking the time off that you need in higher education. And just because there's a policy there doesn't mean that people feel free able to take advantage of that policy again. Like we have a loss and we go into survival mode and we say, okay, what, what needs to get done? 

Well, none of my colleagues can take over my class. Nobody can take over my research. You know, I've got these service commitments. I don't know, maybe somebody could help me with that, I don't know. But it's very difficult to even determine, okay, of all of these balls I've got in the air, which ones could drop right now? Which could I pass on to somebody else? Yeah. So I think what's holding us back are these norms. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> and yeah. Um, autonomy is wonderful. I love the freedom that we have in our jobs, but I think in this case, sometimes that can be, it can be detrimental. 

RPR: I I always end on one question and we can, we can think about, uh, this from the perspective of grieving and bereavement too, but what's one thing you wish all women associated with higher ed? Maybe especially those who are grieving new or practiced? 

SG: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. I guess what I wish all women knew is that almost everybody that I've talked to in my research looks back and wishes they'd taken more time off. There is a cost associated with pushing through, I think, and while it might feel easier at the time because it's so difficult to think of supports or leave options or how could I get away from my work? And it's very common, like everybody in our studies did that. They pushed through, they got it done. Very few people took extended leave. We did have people though who took no time off and then needed to later take time off because they hadn't coped and they hadn't been able to process their grief. So I wish all women knew, especially women who are grieving, knew that this advice from Grievers that I've heard is take a little bit more time off, maybe more than you think you need initially. 

Know your leave options if you can. Options could include beyond the bereavement policy, like you did many people cobble together different types of leave vacation or if you have that or, um, sick leave, there's family and medical leave. There might be disability, short-term disability leave. In the case of a pregnancy loss, you can take F M L A here in Canada. You can take sickness, leave benefits or maternity leave benefits if it's a stillbirth. So your HR person might know some of those options, or your dean, I guess, could know. But it's really difficult to advocate your, for yourself when you're grieving. And I recognize that it's very difficult, but I think that leave time for many people is a really important resource for helping you begin the grief process rather than to have the funeral go back to work. And you're still in like shock perhaps and a great deal of distress over what's happened to you. 

And now at such a reduced capacity to function, you are still handling what is a very stressful job anyways under normal circumstances. So I really hope somehow that women who are grieving can take the time off that they need and to do it, i, if possible, as formal leave, so that when they go through the tenure and review process or promotion, or if they're applying for grants, that on their CV is listed, this career interruption where their performance expectations are adjusted accordingly, and so that their grief is not held against them like it has been for some of the people that I've spoken to. 

RPR: Thank you for that advice. Thank you for the work that you do and for, for sharing your experiences with us as well. 

SG: Thank you so much for having me. I, I really enjoyed this discussion. 

RPR: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Agile Academic Podcast for women in higher ed. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. To make sure you don't miss an episode, follow the show on Apple, Google, or Spotify podcasting apps and bookmark the show. You'll find each episode a transcript and show notes theagileacademic.buzzsprout.com. Take care and stay well.