Counting Grief, Or It Takes a Sabbatical to Write a Eulogy
Amy Vidali
Keywords: parent death; grief
Categories: As If the Pandemic Wasn’t Enough: Tales of Loss and Grief; (De)Constructing Writing; Academic Pressures (or Critiques of Neoliberal Horseshit Productivity Expectations, as suggested by Amy Vidali)
Content warning: parent death; grief
When I was a kid, my dad, my sister, and I took to the highway for the whole month of July each year—to the Florida Keys, to Prince Edward Island, almost to Alaska. His left arm was always tanner than his right, because weather be damned, you drive with the window down. Years later, when we took presale photos of the ‘56 Chevy Nomad in which we made most of these trips, I took a picture of him at the wheel from the backseat, because watching him bearing down the road is the happiest I remember him. It’s the way I miss him most.
My father’s eulogy has four parts, and so, too, did my sabbatical plan: conference paper on directed self-placement (get my second COVID shot); finish my infertility article (send my anxious eight-year-old back to in-person classes at a new school); attend the Watson conference (plan my father’s memorial eight hours away); then write my father’s eulogy. But I became too anxious and started the eulogy right after the conference paper.
I began by considering genre expectations, noting online advice that suggests eulogies be no more than ten minutes. I wrote a first draft, and it was 17 minutes long, like a conference paper, so I reduced the length like I was the late addition to a four-person panel. I wrote it like I write most things, refusing to let anyone see in-progress versions, and I added a part at the end where I could wave my hand slowly through the air. I read it aloud again and again, so I could get through it in person, but I just cried at different parts. My therapist said I shouldn’t call the eulogy a “talk,” and I kept referring to the memorial as “the funeral.” My sister called the memorial a “celebration of life” and I almost threw up, and she sobbed as I gave the eulogy in front of a COVID-dispersed crowd.
My dad was not made for positivity and gratitude; he was the self-appointed “King of Downside Analysis.” He did not trust easily, and given his upbringing he had no reason to; he was a self-built boy and later man who applied to college without even telling his parents. He believed in me and also passed along some of his mistrust; as a teenager, he told me not to do anything I wouldn’t want to see on the front page of The New York Times, laying a thoughtful if daunting foundation for an ethical life. Though far from sunny, his lessons have served me well, because sometimes it really is true, as my dad was prone to say, that “life is a shit sandwich, and every day you take a bigger bite.” But it didn’t take much to scratch the surface, to find a vulnerable and emotional man who longed for connection beneath the confidence and the accomplishments. I know some of you knew this man—a guy who liked to sing the verses of songs to narrate his life and made you feel like the luckiest person alive when he looked you dead in the eyes to compliment you or thank you. The man who cried when I got dressed up for my first formal dance.
Writing and grieving both require vulnerability. As Nicole Sieben and Stephanie Anne Shelton note in their introduction to Humanizing Grief in Higher Education, “[B]oth are recursive processes that ebb and flow depending on specific circumstances of the moment and situation” (2021, p. 3). Or, as Laura Davies claims in her piece on grief and WPA work: “Like writing, grief is ongoing and recursive” (2017, p. 44). I had to write the eulogy to do something with the grief, as Terah Stewart explains in her piece about losing her mother during her doctoral studies: “Grief feels like a volcano that slowly builds pressure in your entire being. Grief weighs you down. It makes you tight. In grieving, I’ve found that the only way I can relieve the pressure is to do something with it. To create. To write. It is through the process of creating that I feel like I can alleviate some of the pressure and breathe” (2020, p. 31). But in pouring all my grief into the eulogy, I made little headway on my promised sabbatical work.
My dad was a college professor, a performer, a salesman, and every space was a classroom, every moment an opportunity to get a laugh, every interaction a chance to persuade and to sell. When I was in elementary school, I did this long-distance run on May day. As the race drug on, I was last, running slowly while sobbing and claiming I couldn’t go on. Suddenly my dad was slowly running alongside me, and I’ve always remembered what he said: that it was better to be “the best of the worst than the worst of the best.” Think about that for a second—he was saying that by being dead last I was somehow nailing being the worst, which was better than being second to last (which I wasn’t even close to). This makes no sense, and I bought it completely, because my dad could sell you anything. I felt better. I’ve tried to use his phrase on others facing epic failures, and unlike my dad, I can never sell it.
Would anyone buy that writing my father’s eulogy is academic work? My eulogy uses many of the creative nonfiction strategies I teach in class but rarely get to practice, as I don’t have time to write creative nonfiction. I turned myself into a character (Lopate, 2013); I conflated some experiences in articulating the “truth” of my life with my father (Miller and Paola, 2004); I even considered my students’ beloved idea of writerly voice (Lamott, 1994), which I don’t really believe in. I radically rearranged the ordering, just as my students do with the first chapter of Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (picture groups of students with scissors and tape, or both Didion’s husband and my father dying of heart attacks in their homes). In writing this braided piece, I again found myself shuffling scraps of paper on my coffee table, trying to get the meaning right.
There’s room for multiple interpretations and meanings in tallying the impact of a life. My dad loved me; he always had time for me, always wanted to hear from me, and believed in me without question. He was the only one who thought I could and should travel alone in Europe for seven weeks as a young woman, who supported my move to Seattle sight unseen for graduate school, who shouted for joy when I got my first professor position. So could he be difficult, short-sighted, unrelenting. Do we, as my dad so often did, make a list of pros and cons—my mom remembered his tendency to make these Ben Franklin lists—and between the two columns, come up with a total, a decision? In deciding whether to buy an old car, maybe. But in life, no. We’re left with contradictions, places where the best things about us are also the worst things in ways that blur the columns. Long ago, I set aside the comfort of black-and-white thinking to love a complex man in his true colors. A man who wrote to me as I left home for the first time, “Be careful, be prudent, and don’t ever forget what’s important.”
When my father died, I canceled a week of class, then taught on Zoom from a messy bed in the basement of my father’s home, my childhood home. The month before he died, I wrote a story about what ended up being our last conversation. As I wrote it, I realized it was a great model for the creative nonfiction assignment my COVID-stressed students would soon be writing, and I hesitantly decided I would share it. The day I scheduled to read it aloud in class (I wasn’t ready to put it out there in print) ended up being the day I taught from the messy bed. My camera was off. I think I cried as I read it. I don’t remember.
Willer et al. articulate a vision for “critical grief pedagogy,” noting that “openly grieving can be a terrifying proposition for both instructors and students,” but that “such pedagogical vulnerability can be the stitch that weaves us Madly together” (2021, p. 29). My students made room for my grief, even thanked me for it. I’m moved to think about how we can ride together in grief, given the rates of bereavement among college students (see Ridgway, 2021).
One night, as a young girl, I was sitting up front with my dad and it was late. We were pounding down that open road with my sister asleep in the back, dead bugs on the windshield, radio lightly glowing, and I was doing that thing kids do out the window with their arms. As I looked out past the headlights to the horizon, I caught that feeling my dad was always chasing: maybe we could drive forever and stay just like this, connected but not talking, listening to Neil Young or the Cars or the Four Tops, pulsing with the sound of old tires on still-hot-but-cooling pavement. On that night, wherever we were, in a 1975 Chevy four-door truck of all things, something clicked, and that feeling for the road that was part of him became part of me, for good.
Grief and death mark my academic journey, as I’ve experienced four unexpected, traumatic deaths while working in higher education, including three people who were far younger than my dad. Academia is not what what Breen et al. call “grief literate,” which is a society where “people would understand and accept the uniqueness and variability of grief, rather than stigmatizing the grief of others via their own assumptions, experiences, beliefs, and expectations” (2022, p. 428). Their definition of grief literacy doesn’t actually take on literacy as a rhetorical practice, but I want that for academia, too. As Alexandra Ridgway notes, “dialoguing with the dead” can be used to transform grief into an “energetic force,” which propelled Ridgway forward in her dissertation after her father’s death (2021, p. 3).
To my surprise, writing my father’s eulogy reignited my writing career. In total hours spent, the eulogy occupied a sizable part of my sabbatical, but it may have also made up for itself in motivation for new projects. But I want to step out of the productivity trap. The truth is that if I didn’t have the privilege of being on sabbatical, I would not have had the time or ability to write the eulogy I did. Because there is no time or rhetorical room for grief and death (writing) in academia.
The eulogy was what my dad would call “a hit”; my accomplished childhood friend congratulated me with a tear in her eye, and an old man I didn’t know came up to me with a smile, asking if I would write his eulogy. It’s the best feedback I’ve ever received on my writing, and alongside the eulogy, helps me chart the road ahead through writing and grief.
My dad always wanted to hear about my classes. There’s a quote I often share in class that encourages students to keep going into the unknown, a quote by E.L. Doctorow that says, “It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Without my dad, the road beyond the headlights’ beams feels dangerously dark, hard to imagine and live within. I guess that’s where I’m left, we’re left, wondering how to move forward without the man who was always at the wheel, without the man who always knew the way. I love you Dad.
Works Cited
Breen, L. J., et al. (2022). Grief literacy: A call to action for compassionate communities. Death studies, 46(2), 425-433.
Davies, L. J. (2017). Grief and the new WPA. Writing Program Administration, 40(2), 40–52.
Lamott, A. (1994). Bird by bird: Some instructions on writing and life. Doubleday.
Lopate, P. (2013). On the necessity of turning oneself into a character. To show and to tell: The craft of literary nonfiction. Free Press.
Miller, B., & Paola, S. (2004).Tell it slant: Writing and shaping creative nonfiction. McGraw Hill.
Ridgway, A. (2021). Love, loss and a doctorate: An autoethnolography of grieving while writing a PhD. Higher Education Research and Development, DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2021.2019202
Sieben, N., & Shelton, S. A. (Eds.). (2021). Humanizing grief in higher education: Narratives of allyship and hope. Routledge.
Stewart, T. J. (2020). Hard grief for hard love: Writing through doctoral studies and the loss of my mother. In S. A. Shelton & N. Sieben (Eds.), Narratives of Hope and Grief in Higher Education (pp. 27–37). Springer International Publishing.
Willer E. K., et al. (2021). Mad to the bone: Learning outcomes of Critical Grief Pedagogy. Communication Education, 70(1), 27-48.
Bio
Amy Vidali is an Associate Teaching Professor and Chair of the Writing Program at UC Santa Cruz. She teaches required undergraduate writing courses and graduate seminars in teaching writing, and her research and activism is in rhetoric, writing, and disability studies.