By last September, we all suspected that my mother's cancer had returned. It wasn't completely unexpected news, then, when I received the phone call in my office on a Wednesday afternoon in early October, just as my office hours were about to start.
"Three to six months," said my oldest brother.
Suspecting the news was coming didn't make it any easier to hear. When I hung up the phone, I saw that a student was waiting in the hall, anxious to get my feedback on a rough draft of the paper he had due in a couple of days. In that moment I faced the first of many similar decisions that would confront me over the next three months -- be responsible and hold my office hours as scheduled (meet class, grade papers, attend a committee meeting, etc.), or cancel them and go home and cry.
It hardly felt like a decision at all.
"Office hours are cancelled, Mike," I called to the student from my office as I packed up my school bag. "Classes are cancelled tomorrow as well. Check your e-mail; I'll send around an explanation over the weekend."
For the next two days I walked around my house in a daze, and spent a lot of time on the telephone with my siblings. I did no work; I mostly hung around the edges of my children's general play area, wherever that happened to be, and watched vacantly. I didn't send that e-mail to my classes until late Sunday evening.
When I returned to school on Monday, I had a message in my voice mail from the dean asking me to attend a conference on assessment with her and two other administrators at a nearby college.
Second decision, same result.
I e-mailed her about the news I had received, and explained that I would not be taking on any new commitments for the next three to six months.
Later that week I got a third request, via voice mail, this one from the chairman of another department, asking me if I would be willing to serve as the outside member on a search committee for his department. I thought about that one for a moment. I love serving on search committees and having the chance to shape the future of the college.
I ran into that chairman as I walked to lunch an hour later, still thinking about how to respond. I started to tell him the news about my mother, preparing to explain again that I felt reluctant to take on new commitments. He held up his hand and stopped me midsentence.
"Say no more," he said. "You're off the hook. Sometimes you've got to stop and take care of your life."
I tried to do that during the last fall semester, as I shuttled back and forth from Massachusetts to my parents' home in Cleveland every chance I got. I didn't think too much about class when I wasn't in it, and I wasn't the most attentive participant in committee meetings. I cancelled classes and office hours regularly to facilitate traveling.
The gaps and spaces in a typical academic schedule suddenly became visible to me, the shortcuts that I had never had any reason to take. I pulled out old lesson plans and carried them into the classroom with me unchanged. For the first time since I started on the tenure track more than three years ago, it took me longer than a week to turn around some student papers.
At first, I will confess, I felt guilty about all of this. But then I began to remember what I had learned a few years back, when a bout with an extended flare of a chronic illness had landed me in the hospital for a week during my second semester on the tenure track.
When I checked into my hospital room that February afternoon three years ago, I brought with me my laptop, all of my school books and notebooks, and a stack of papers to grade. The first thing I did was to type up a long and extremely apologetic e-mail message to my colleagues in the department, begging them for help in covering my classes, and offering them detailed lesson plans they could follow.
Once I had sent that message, I settled back to rest in my hospital bed, intending to begin tackling the schoolwork I had brought with me after a nap.
I never went back and did any of that work. Instead, I did what any sane person in a hospital bed does. I rested. I watched television. I read a popular novel, and enjoyed it immensely. And, as the week passed by, and my body began to heal, I slowly felt less and less guilty about the pile of work I was leaving untouched in the corner of the room.
In the meantime -- imagine the shock to my ego -- life at the college went on without me. Some of my classes were taught by my colleagues; some were cancelled. Committees met, students trudged around campus in the snow, and the dining hall served chicken patties once a week as usual.
Looking back on both my illness and the death of my mother, I can see two principles that helped me survive. Those principles became clear to me only as I lived through the experiences; understanding and accepting them from the outset would have significantly reduced the stress I felt in handling them at the time.
I offer the two principles, then, to other faculty members who find themselves knocked back by life during their early years on the tenure track -- whether their experiences are negative ones, like illness or the death of a loved one, or positive ones, like a marriage or the birth of a child.
First, do not hesitate to ask for help from your colleagues.
I was mortified at the thought of having to ask colleagues to cover classes for me during my first-year illness, because I knew what a burden such a request would have been to me. What I didn't understand then was that life on the tenure track gets (slightly) less hectic during the years following your first one, and that you find ways to manage your time more effectively. Hence my request for help was not quite the burden to my senior colleagues that it would have been to me in my first year or two.
My four years on the tenure track have also taught me that no one survives a 30- or 40-year career in this business, or any business, without confronting personal tragedy, and that we all need help from our colleagues occasionally. In my four years here I have watched colleagues suffer heart attacks, battle cancer, mourn the death of a spouse, get divorces, and more. And I have seen other colleagues step in repeatedly, and graciously, to help their friends and co-workers in any way they can.
So ask for that help when you need it. Someday soon you will have the opportunity to give it back.
The second principle echoes the statement of my senior colleague who let me off the hook for that search committee: When times of crisis spring up, don't hesitate to stop and take care of your life. And, I would add, as a corollary to principle two, don't feel guilty about it.
I did feel guilty initially about my own stint in the hospital, an attitude that strikes me as ludicrous in retrospect. While my illness was not a terminal one, complications that might have resulted from ignoring or downplaying my illness could have been fatal. If I had not stopped to let my body heal, I could have left my children fatherless. That realization puts a few missed classes into perspective.
This past fall, on the next-to-last day of classes of the semester, my father called me and told me it was time to come home. I sent an e-mail to all of my students explaining the situation. I pushed back the due dates on their final papers until the last possible final exam day (I had assigned only final papers, and had no exams to proctor).
I asked some colleagues to hold office hours for any students who wanted to receive feedback on drafts of their final papers. I was scheduled the next evening to emcee an open-microphone poetry reading sponsored by the student literary magazine I advise. Three friends in the department assured me they would take care of it.
I flew out that evening with my wife and children, and spent the last few days of my mother's life in my parents' home, sitting at her bedside as often as I could. She died on the Sunday before final-exam week began.
I was in the room with her when her breathing became labored, her face lost all its color, and her eyelids suddenly rolled open. I called in my father and my siblings from the next room, and her husband and children were standing around her holding hands and praying as she took her final breath.
Back on campus after the wake and funeral, at the end of finals week, still dazed and depressed from the experience, I had to slog through 70 final papers in three days.
In the midst of that haze of student writing and grade calculations I didn't have much time or mental energy to reflect on the experience -- to wonder whether I had visited her enough while she still was healthy, to regret not calling her on the telephone more, to reflect on whether I had been as good a son as I might have been.
I could see only one thing that I knew for certain I had done right in the three months I had spent sleepwalking through my responsibilities in the fall semester: I had found the empty spaces in my schedule, curled up inside them with my family and my mother, and taken care of my life.
