In July 2025 I was bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to start my brand new term as wellbeing officer at the University of Sussex SU.
I’d admittedly got off to a bit of a rocky start, with NUS offering us some choice words over an open letter we’d signed, and my first officer conference derailed when the building was occupied – you’ve got to love the student movement.
None of that deterred me, and I was full of hopes and dreams of a year spent fighting the good fight and getting things done.
But things didn’t quite work out that way, because immediately after I got back from Lead and Change I was told about the passing of a close friend and SU colleague, months before he was due to begin his master’s degree and one week after he graduated.
It sent my friend group and me into a whirlwind, working out the very grown-up dynamics of death and coming to terms with the fact that this just…happens.
I found myself calling my parents, my brother, and my friends, and every one of them gave advice I could tell came from experience.
It turns out I wasn’t as unusual as I felt. Studies put the share of university students who’ve been bereaved in the previous two years somewhere between 35 and 48 per cent – which means on any given course, in any given flat, someone else is quietly carrying the same thing.
A hundred cups of tea
This wasn’t my first run-in with grief – I’d lost a family member I loved dearly earlier that year – but the difference was culture.
In Ireland we celebrate life as much as we mark death, so immediately after someone dies you meet every single person they have ever known, drink a hundred cups of tea, eat delicious sandwiches, laugh, and cry, and the whole rambunctious affair is underscored by the body of the deceased being in the room with you the entire time.
I’d never realised how healing that ritual was until I was sat in the middle of Brighton with a hole in my heart, devastated friends, absolutely nowhere to go, and nothing to do.
That’s when I discovered the downside of English politeness – because the almost primal desire not to make your conversation partner uncomfortable leads people here to avoid the topic and the concept of grief entirely.
That really isn’t my style.
Seven people in a room
Feeling fairly hopeless and unsupported, I went along to the Southern SUs conference in Essex and sat in on a session by the incredible and inspiring Anna May of the Student Grief Network called “Bereavement frameworks in HE” – and it changed the entire direction and purpose of my officer year.
Sitting in that room with about seven people who had clearly chosen the session because of some connection to grief, I felt a little bit lighter for the first time in months.
Anna May opened up a conversation about grief that I’d never experienced in England, talking about her own loss, how it affected her degree, and how she’d started a peer-to-peer grief support group at her university to help herself and students like her cope.
I arrived back at Sussex knowing I had to do the same, so I recruited my fellow officer Elena Southard – an all round gorgeous and kind human being – to co-facilitate with me, threw together a dodgy Canva poster, and set the whole thing up.
I didn’t expect a soul to turn up, I felt completely out of my depth, and I’ll admit to a small freak out beforehand. But students came, sometimes pushed through the door by friends who were feeling exactly the anxiety I was.
Islands of our own
What I discovered first is that being an “expert” in grief is really weird.
Beyond that, grief has touched so many of us in every part of our lives, and yet the taboo keeps us all on islands of our own, never knowing that the person sitting beside you in your tort law class is feeling exactly the same pain that you are.
There’s a name for this, as it turns out.
Grief researchers call it disenfranchised grief – grief that never gets openly acknowledged or socially validated, usually because the relationship, the loss, or your right to be upset about it isn’t recognised by the people around you.
Once I had the term I saw it everywhere. A review of the bereavement literature in higher education found that only around one in ten bereaved students ever access institutional support at all, and the ones who do often say the response they get from staff or peers feels like an unhelpful extra burden on top of the loss itself.
I don’t think that’s because universities, SUs or other students don’t care. I think it’s because grief gets quietly disenfranchised at an institutional level too, filed under “not really our department.”
One phrase came up every single week without fail, and I still can’t explain how many times I heard those exact words.
I want to speak to my friends about it, but I don’t want to make them uncomfortable.
Our people pleasing tendencies have stunted our ability to reach out and seek solace in one another.
Off-brand lemonade
The prompts that uncovered the most beautiful responses weren’t overtly about grief at all, and asking a student to share a memory of the person they’d lost, one not centred on their passing, was like a door opening.
For some it was one of the few times they’d been able to speak about them without the elephant of their death in the room, lingering behind every word.
Being able to share a funny story about your grandmother’s obsession with off-brand lemonade, or about how my granda used to secretly smoke in the living room and think we hadn’t noticed, and to be met with a laugh rather than a sigh and an apology, made me feel okay again.
I later found out I’d stumbled onto something with actual names attached to it. Continuing bonds theory, first set out by grief researchers Klass, Silverman and Nickman back in 1996, argues that healthy grieving was never about “letting go” of the person you lost, but about carrying an evolving relationship with them forward.
And the dual process model of coping with bereavement, from Stroebe and Schut, says the healthiest way through grief is to oscillate between confronting the loss head on and taking a break to just live your life.
Turns out that’s exactly what a lemonade story does. It’s not a distraction from grief. It’s half of it. After all, what is more human than death?
Force the conversation
That’s why we need to get talking, forcing these conversations and powering through the awkwardness, because the connections I found in that small room helped me more than I could ever have imagined.
It takes very little to build one – two officers, an hour a week, and a poster you’re slightly embarrassed by – so start one. And if you want advice, or just to talk it through, come and find me, because I will always talk about grief.
Oh – and most of the students who come to the group are international students. English students, I will crack you one day.
