Navigating Grief: A Call for Loving, Nurturing, and Wholly Generative Academic Friendships

This essay is a vulnerable sharing of personal stories, lessons learned, but most of all, a call for action for management researchers and educators to engage in the development of loving, nurturing, and wholly generative academic friendships. The experiences we share with you here are grounded in an academic friendship which has flourished during a time of immense loss and grief. The brutal reality is that one of us is dying of cancer, one of us recently lived through 11 years of cancer treatment, and one of us wears the invisible scars of watching her brother and stepbrother die of the same disease. As we write
this, two of us are living through the journey of watching a close and dear co-author, research partner, and friend battle an inoperable brain tumour; the other is devastated beyond words but is trying to live every day as fully as she can. Together, we are navigating this challenging time – one in which we have bridged our personal and professional lives. Here, we have built an academic friendship which is supporting us in complex and myriad ways to navigate one of life’s most difficult yet inescapable challenges – one that remains taboo within and outside of our organizations – death.