By Amy L. Kenworthy, Fiona Hurd, and Suzette Dyer
In this essay – that speaks with rare honesty about dying, grief, love, and friendship in academic life – the authors reflect on an academic friendship forged and sustained through profound loss, serious illness, and anticipatory grief. Writing from lived experience, they call on management researchers, educators, and leaders to act differently: to look toward colleagues who are suffering rather than away, to create spaces of kindness and relational care, and to challenge the professional silences that surround grief, loss, and death in our organizations. This essay invites us to reimagine academic friendship as tender, nurturing, and generative – friendship that honours humanity alongside scholarship. It is a call grounded in love, vulnerability, and care.
