Lessons on Grief from a College Intern
By Rachel Markowitz
If you’ve been reading these newsletters the past few weeks, you might recognize my name. I’m Rachel, Inner Harbor’s summer intern, and I am a junior in college majoring in English and Public Health. As I am starting to stuff my clothes into those blue Ikea bags and getting ready to move back to school, I wanted to reflect on what I have learned from immersing myself in this type of work.
Questions I received from well-meaning friends and family members when I started writing these blogs were often along the lines of, “Why are you writing about death? You’re young. Isn’t that kind of depressing?” I find this question kind of funny. It implies that grief is too depressing for a 20 year old to intelligently write about, even though loss is something that impacts young people every day. I found it empowering and interesting, not sad, to research things that affect myself and my peers.
For several of these pieces, I interviewed my friends and was shocked by how open they were to talking about some of their own experiences involving grief and loss. Among people my age, I think that conversations surrounding mental health are becoming a lot less taboo. While I initially thought it would uncomfortable to ask my friends things that seemed “invasive” (such as interviewing my friends about their experiences coming out as LGBTQ+, or discussing a shooting in my friend’s hometown), we ended up having some good conversations, and I realized how important it is to talk openly with people without shying away from discomfort.
A big lesson I stumbled across was how politics and intersectionality intertwine with grief. I was not expecting to write anything controversial for this blog. After focusing my first blog on the experiences of LGBTQ+ students, a topic that is not nearly as divisive as it was in years past, I thought that was the full extent of controversy I was willing to take on. The next week, Roe v Wade was overturned. It felt wrong to ignore the news, but I could not think of a way to write about it that was entirely politically neutral. This forced me to reconcile with the fact that politics interact with the types of loss people experience, and I became more comfortable with writing about how things like race and socioeconomic status can affect someone’s experience with mental health. After writing a piece titled “Grief is Political,” it became apparent to me how true this statement is.
Another lesson I took away is that grief goes beyond death. A lot of the research I ended up doing was about types of loss other than a family member’s death: loss of acceptance from friends and family, loss of certain freedoms, and other major life changes. I never realized how many different things counted as “loss” and how even positive experiences, such as moving away from home, can cause a person to grieve certain things that were once a part of their lives.
Of course, I was left with some questions that do not have simple answers, or at least not solutions that can be found with one summer’s worth of blog writing. We established that grief is political, and different people have different access to support, but how can inequalities be solved? For example, the barriers that prevent college students of color from seeking out professional mental health support go far beyond what any school’s counseling department can fix. These issues are societal and I feel as though I have barely scratched the surface of why and how these barriers exist.
While I am not entirely sure what my plans are post college, I know that the lessons I learned here will translate into my public health studies. Mental health is a big part of community health and I know that these new perspectives will be incredibly important with anything I take on next.