Instead of a story of failure, today’s episode is a story of grief. It is a literal story, a work of fiction, based on an actual event.

I’m in conversation with English professor Andrea West because when I was asking anyone who came within ear shot of me about whether there was a place for loss and grief in higher education, she said something unusual. She said, well, I think there’s a story we could ask about that.

Andrea and I talk about a very short story by the Indian American novelist Bharahti Mukherjee called, The Management of Grief. It begins in the aftermath of the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985. The flight was traveling from Montreal to Delhi and Bombay by way of London. It exploded off of the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 people on board. This podcast will not go into the further details of the incident but there are some resources on the web page that you can explore if you’d like to know more. 

This story is many things but relevant to our concerns, it asks questions that we ask at the college: if we have official processes to follow, what happens when a person’s emotions and life circumstances don’t fit inside of what we expect? 

This episode was tricky to make and perhaps it fails to convey what we hoped. Your host meditates on the constant risk of failure and the worth of completing a project even if it is an imperfect thing. 

Stream the episode here or listen through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.