The copy room smelled faintly of toner and burnt coffee when a colleague walked in and asked, “How was your break?” Without thinking, I said, “It was good,” and turned back to unjamming the printer tray. The moment passed, and so did he, but I stood there afterwards unsettled by the answer I had just given.

The truth was that it had not been a good break. My dad had died unexpectedly, though peacefully, the Friday before Thanksgiving. There had been no warning, but simply a phone call from my brother and a rupture that split my world into before and after. And still, when asked, I said it was “good.”

This is part of the quiet choreography of grief in professional spaces where it feels like we are handed two scripts and expected to quickly choose one. We can either say we are fine and keep things moving, or we can name the loss and risk a pause that feels too intimate for a hallway conversation or too heavy for a chat in the copy room on a Monday morning.

What made that moment especially hard was that the truth did not fit neatly into either option. Some parts of the break were genuinely good. I was with my family, doing the familiar things people do after a loss, like trying to hold one another together even as we each struggled to stay upright. There were moments of beautiful tenderness in that space. It was also profoundly hard and heartbreaking. But standing next to the hole puncher, I was not about to say that my dad had died or admit I was still trying to find my balance in this new reality.

After I left the copy room, I returned to my office and answered emails, showed up to meetings, and gave feedback on students’ papers. All the while, I carried the surreal knowledge that someone who had always been part of my life was suddenly gone. I even noticed a quiet........

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