When Educators Leave Us: The Quiet Weight of Grief
A few days ago, I stood in the cafeteria when a student I’d seen around campus many times approached me. Her eyes didn’t blink as she asked, “Is it true? Is he really gone?” I froze, her gaze piercing, searching my face for an answer I didn’t want to give. Her teacher was gone. We, the leadership team, had learned the night before, and though we braced ourselves to support the community, I still wasn’t ready.
Loss is hard, and I rarely hear public discourse around the loss of those who educate us—the family that isn’t quite family, the love expressed not through blood but through knowledge, discourse, and the act of caring enough to help us grow, intellectually and perhaps even personally.
“Grief is nebulous. It doesn’t have edges; it ebbs and flows, fading into moments that seem to get better before crashing back into sadness. ”
I remember losing one of my favorite professors, Dr. Tran. I heard about his passing via text message, and I didn’t want to believe it. I resented that I learned such a monumental thing through the coldness of a screen. Grappling alone with his death felt isolating, the loss not just of a life but of ideas, of unfinished conversations. I mourned for his family—his young children, his wife, the dreams they had yet to fulfill. And I held my grief as a student, standing outside the circle of those who could lay a more defined claim to it.
That loss still revisits me, especially when I’m engaging in academic work, which so often aligns with the mentorship he provided and the scholarship he shared. Grief, like a fine mist, returns in waves, delicate and intangible. So when that student looked at me, brimming with the same pain I had felt, I couldn’t shield her from it. Though I wanted to. I told her the truth, that yes, he was gone. And then I reached out to hug her because, while grief may be hard to hold, people aren’t.
“There is power in community, in creating spaces to come together, to mourn, to remember. ”
The lessons we learn don’t end with loss. In continuing to share and grow, the educators we lose find a way to live beyond their physical selves. Their teachings, their care—they linger, carried forward in every moment we honor them by applying what they left behind.
Grief is nebulous, yes, but it is also a thread that ties us to the teachers who shaped us, even after they are gone.
More on Dr. Hoang Vu Tran’s work:
