When a colleague dies, faculty members in his or her department cope by ensuring that the professor's work is continued, according to a recent article on Career Network.
But colleagues also die after they secure positions at other institutions or after we leave to take jobs elsewhere. In those circumstances, we aren't around to counsel their students, teach their classes, or carry on their committee work.
Until recently, we would learn of a colleague's death months, sometimes years, later. We might find out about it at a conference, or read about it in a newsletter or journal. If we have moved to other campuses, we might contact our former departments for references or tenure-related materials, only to learn of the colleague's death.
The Internet has changed all that. Now we learn news in a timely manner via e-mail messages so that we, too, might attend memorials or send eulogies, adding our voices when family and friends most need to hear them.
My former colleague -- the eminent poet Tom Andrews -- had relocated to Athens, Greece, intending to marry last summer, but contracted a rare blood disease and lapsed into a coma from which he did not wake. Tom had taught creative writing at Ohio University, where we met and became friends, and then took a professorship at Purdue University. Soon after, he was awarded the Rome Fellowship in Literature, intending to complete a long poem about St. Augustine at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where he met his fiancée, Alice Boccia Paterakis, another fellow, whose field is preservation of archaeological artifacts. I never met Alice because I had lost touch with Tom soon after he left Purdue for the American Academy.
I learned about Tom's death in an e-mail message from a former journalism student, Tara Reeser, now director of the publications unit at Illinois State University's English department. In the early 1990's Tara took a media-ethics class from me and, during an advising session, expressed a desire to compose poetry instead of obituaries. In the past, the cemetery was the traditional training ground for would-be journalists -- literally. Cub reporters began careers writing obits because the dead, alas, cannot be libeled. Tara preferred the eloquence of eulogy to the deadline of obituary. Back then Tom was teaching poetry at Ohio University. I sent Tara to Tom, and he became her trusted mentor.
I had lost touch with both. So I was pleased and surprised one morning to see the e-mail message from Tara with a seemingly innocuous heading, "hello!" I have long since come to terms with e-mail, a dubious invention that intrudes on family life and keeps us working all hours and on weekends. But we rely on it and on the Internet when we are changing careers or seeking jobs, as I had been this past year, networking with colleagues and visiting Web sites, in search of opportunities. So I have learned to open e-mail with anticipation and apprehension because electronic communication is as apt to bring good as bad. Tara wrote:
I hate to send this news, but I received an e-mail about two weeks ago regarding Tom. The copied e-mail below gives all the details. I have since heard that he squeezed his fiancée's hand, but has not come out of the coma. I'll send word as I receive it. If you hear anything, will you please send the news my way?
I read the copied text, which sounded too impersonal for the occasion, as e-mail is wont to do, stating that Tom was in a Greek hospital. He had complained of an earache but symptoms worsened until doctors diagnosed a blood disease called thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura. The message continued: "Tom's been in critical condition for about two weeks now and has slipped into a coma. He cannot communicate." The message also noted that Tom, a hemophiliac, had no insurance.
That was not surprising, given how many other risks he took in life. Despite his disease, Tom had always had a passion for motorcycles. He wrote The Hemophiliac's Motorcycle, (University of Iowa Press) a collection of poetry that won the Iowa Poetry Prize in 1993. I was a great admirer of Tom's poetry -- so much so that I had written about it in my text, The Art & Craft of Poetry (Writer's Digest Books, 1994). His love of motorcycles, seemingly at odds with his disease, also had inspired his verse through what he called "the great imponderables": "How does your life fit within the larger circle of meaning?" "What is your role in the social contract?" "How does the fact that death is absurdly present alter your life?"
I meditated on those imponderables while Tom lay in a coma and also checked e-mail every day for any update on his condition. A few days before my family was to go on vacation, Tara sent another message, which had the look of an obituary; "Tom Andrews" was all the message field said:
Tom Andrews died on Wednesday, 10:45 p.m. London time. His parents and partner, Alice, were with him.
As it turned out, I would be traveling with my family to Nova Scotia and could not attend either the memorial or the burial. Technology, of course, resolves such conflicts. I could compose a eulogy for Tom's parents and partner and send it via an e-mail message. First, though, I would message my colleagues at Ohio University about Tom's death so that they, too, could send tributes. Today in academe, when a former colleague dies, quick multi-address communication ensures that lives and legacies are celebrated. I did that in my eulogy:
Tom, when I knew him, believed in an ultimately good but dangerous world in which we all had to make a choice -- to narrow our vision and limit our activities out of fear, or to embrace life and condone passion, no matter what the risk, because every day on earth is a blessing.
Many people share that Weltanschauung, of course. They throw caution to the proverbial wind and indulge in their passions without a thought of anyone else but themselves. What made Tom's faith so special was that he managed to embrace life passionately out of gratitude -- without causing harm to others.
Upon returning from my vacation, I opened the requisite avalanche of e-mail messages, several of which bore the heading "Tom Andrews." One message was from Dean Roush, an associate professor of musicology composition at Wichita State University and a cousin of Tom Andrews, who wrote, "Your memoir was read as the last part of the last eulogy, and was for me the most inspiring part of the entire service."
In turn, his message inspired me to write this essay on how we get word about the deaths of former colleagues. E-mail plays a role in that social contract. Not only as a vehicle to learn about colleagues who have passed on, but as a tool to express loss or remember a scholar's contributions, precisely at the moment when loved ones need that the most.
Judy Sheppard, an associate professor of journalism at Auburn University, says e-mail is helping society adjust to what she calls "the death of the free obit." Newspapers now routinely charge to publish obituaries, she says, so that e-mail and the Internet mark "a new sort of smoke signal, or drum beat, of someone's passing."
Although Tom Andrews has died, his legacy is alive on the Web. The eulogy I wrote about him is available online. Each day more and more admirers on the Web are writing about him as a poet, professor, and hemophiliac biker. In reading online obituaries, I also learned something new about Tom. He was founder of beginnerbikes.com, a Web site about the joys of biking. His literary legacy continues as well. Critics are explicating and venerating his verse, and those essays inevitably will appear online. Tom's books will be available through Web-based vendors. Moreover, his book-length poem, "St. Augustine's Gospel," completed at the academy in Rome, will be available one day, too, according to his fiancée, who has assembled a team of distinguished poets to try to publish that work. In the future, those of us who knew Tom will be able to summon him electronically.
Friends and colleagues who attended Tom's memorial or burial will have memories of that experience. I don't. The Internet is a poor substitute for the sensations of time and place. For that we rely on secondhand accounts. In a message about the memorial, Dean Roush related how on that sweltering day, loud sirens outside the church interrupted the playing of "Satie's Gymnopedie," a very quiet, lyrical piece that was a favorite of Tom's. "Rather than seeing this as marring the service," he wrote, "several people pointed out later in the service that Tom relished randomness, and that such a confluence was perfect to the occasion."
I can imagine the sweltering heat punctuated by a fleeting breeze in an open church window, and the Doppler effect of siren on "Satie." E-mail can inspire that, I suppose. More importantly, it can set up meetings, as it did with Dean Roush, who visited me in Athens, Ohio, last fall. We reminisced about Tom over dinner and shared the great imponderables of our lives.
