I made a strange discovery this spring/summer. I started working seriously on writing a big grant, an R01 (~$500k/year for 5 years to conduct research). One of the ways we refine the aims page (essentially a 1-page summary of what we plan to do and why its important) is presenting them at Works-in-Progress (WIPs) sessions. I do interdisciplinary research, so I presented at multiple WIPs associate with multiple groups.

I noticed I kept having overly strong reactions to presenting and receiving feedback (overwhelm, despair, self-doubt). One time this reaction bubbled over into tears. After changing my afternoon schedule to go for a peer-mentoring hike with a friend-colleague (thus giving the backburner of my brain time to work), I made a realization. This was grief.

As I started trying to make sense of why grief was showing up, I remembered that I was revising my K01 career development award application when I heard of my dad’s accident in October 2018, and spent much of the 2 weeks after his death finalizing it for submission (which was possible only due to the substantial help of colleagues). In the months after, I was revising an R01-equivalent as part our resubmission of a large program project grant (P01 - 5 R01s and 2 resource cores aimed on a single theme). I found emails to my co-PI saying things like, “sorry I can’t send that on time, I’m enroute to my stepfather’s funeral”. That was April 2019; the grant was due in May. In January 2020, I attempted starting two different grants, and kept emotionally melting down so only pursued one - in retrospect, this was both an unacknowledged grief reaction and, frankly, I was probably still in acute grief. Then the pandemic started.

I finally have enough time and healing to begin cognitively recognizing these connections and to begin recognizing and unraveling them - another way to actively heal. To those on the outside, perhaps this timeline seems too long, raising concerns about “abnormal” grieving processes. Ok, another way to say that is part of my brain wonders what’s wrong with me. Yet I’ve done a decent amount of work to catch up on the modern neurological and sociological understanding of grief. Given the cumulative grief and multiplicity of losses I experienced, the stress of grieving and parenting and academia, the compounding nature of the pandemic, I think the extended timeline makes sense. I also think people rarely talk openly about the long tail of the impact of grief if everything else in their lives is going well. To be clear…I am not depressed, I don’t think this is complicated grief, lots of other things are going well. It’s just that we keep re-processing grief in different circumstances and situations as time passes.