Losing Jay: A Meditation on Teaching while Grieving

I.

My partner Jay died on May 23, 2006. It was sudden and unexpected—he was thirty-one, I was thirty. No one expects to be widowed at thirty. I don't speak very often of my grief, in part because there are no words that seem satisfactory to express such pain and in part because I recognize how uncomfortable it makes others. But my grief is always with me. It is part of who I am, as much as my flesh or limbs or organs. And it has influenced every facet of my personal and professional life since.

My grief was prolonged and agonizing, and I have since learned that doctors refer to my condition as "complicated grief." Truly, I am not sure how I survived the first year after Jay's death. I certainly wasn't convinced I wanted to do so. But I did. I have. This essay, then, marks my first attempt to reflect on the process of grieving and particularly on teaching through grief. In the process, I want to argue that teaching while grieving became a radical lesson in feminist pedagogy for me, particularly around such issues as embodiment, authority, discomfort, and love. In many respects, I came to the moment of grieving with an already clearly defined feminist pedagogy. However, in mourning the loss of my partner, in continuing to teach students while moving through that grief, and in now reflecting upon the experience of my first two semesters of teaching after Jay's death, I have learned a great deal about myself and my teaching. I do not know whether I can offer a succinct conclusion about this, but I want to use my experience to raise questions and offer suggestions for other educators to consider. Although I cannot claim to be grateful for my experience of such raw grief, I hope that I can at least say something meaningful, perhaps even useful, about it.

II.

When Jay died, I was between spring and summer sessions at my university. I was scheduled to teach new courses in the coming summer and fall. The summer course, which I was developing for graduate and advanced undergraduate women's studies students, was to begin in about two weeks, and the topic was to be "Reading Judith Butler." The class would last for just over a month and would meet almost three hours a day, five days a week.

I considered canceling it, but as an administrator, I still would have been in the office all summer. When I thought about the long, empty days ahead of me, I was actually grateful to have something to do. And so the class proceeded as scheduled, and I let the students know on the first day about my situation. It never occurred to me not to share my experience of grief with my students that first semester. One feminist principle I firmly believe in is taking risks and allowing myself to be vulnerable in the classroom. Although I recognize that this is not the only way to perform feminist pedagogy in the classroom, it is one of the methods that I find most useful for relating to my students. As bell hooks writes in Teaching to Transgress, "In my classrooms, I do not expect students to take any risks that I would not take, to share in any way that I would not share. When professors bring narratives of their experiences into classroom discussions it eliminates the possibility that we can function as all-knowing, silent interrogators" (Teaching to Transgress 21). Anyway, my grief was so new and close to the surface that I couldn't have hidden it even if I'd wanted to do so. Even now, a simple question such as, "How are you?" can elicit tears with no warning, so there was no way to avoid the immediacy of my pain then.

What I did not know to say at the time was that I was experiencing my grief, as most people do, in an embodied way. My understanding of embodiment has been influenced by feminist body studies, a...