Under Pressure: The College Stress Test

Processing loss when classes, work, and bills don’t stop.

Grief rarely arrives at a convenient time. It does not wait for your semester to end or for bills to not be due or for you to have a couple days off of work. It comes in the middle of a work shift, like when my mother died at the young age of 47. It comes in the middle of your class at college, like when I got the call that my ex-fiancé had passed away at the young age of 49. It comes in the middle of you doing your metrics for the next “wave” of work for your team, like when my dear friend/co-worker had a heart attack and passed away five minutes after we shared a meal together in the breakroom. When grief decides to grace you with its presence, the world does not slow down for you to catch your breath.

For college students, this collision between loss and responsibility is not particularly rare. According to a 2023 study from Eastern Washington University, approximately 37% to 44% of college students experience a significant loss within their first two years, and 60% report experiencing a loss by the end of their academic career. In short, grief is not an exception—it is part of the student experience. Sadly, many people (and places like work and college) are often conditioned to treat grief and mourning as if it is some kind of inconvenience, rather than a life-altering psychological event.

When my mom died, I was back to work two days later; I still had bills to pay, after all. People who knew that I had a tough upbringing where I had to raise myself still to this day ask questions about why I may or may not be affected by my mother’s death if we “weren’t that close.” The thing is, when you grieve someone—in particular a parent—that you never got to really experience good moments with, you don’t grieve those good memories, like most people do. Instead, you have to accept the reality that now you will never get a chance to see that person beat addiction, remember you (their child) exists, and make changes for the betterment of everyone. In the case of my past partner, it was as if I wasn’t expected to grieve over his loss primarily because we were no longer together when he passed away. Regardless of that little detail, this is someone that I spent a portion of my life with, that, at the time, was my family. We were raising teenagers together. We had good memories together as a family—something I had never had before in the first place.

Nonetheless, I still had adult responsibilities; I still had schoolwork due, I still had work the next day, etc.. I was grieving someone who had once been deeply important to me, regardless of it being someone I had left behind in the past chapters of my life. The grief I encountered was layered with sadness, with unanswered questions, with feelings of unfairness, and laced with memories I had tried to hide away under my bed. To add to it, there is some sense of guilt that comes along with that kind of grief, like there’s something I could have done to help them or heal them: this is, of course, unfair to myself… but these are real feelings.

Here’s the thing about grief: it does not ask how long it has been or whether the relationship between you and the deceased was simple or pleasant. The only real consideration? Whether the person ever mattered to you, in any sense of the word. And of course they did.

Life goes on, right? I carried along a functional sorrow. I grieved between my never-ending responsibilities. I cried on my way to work; I cried in my bed alone at night while wondering why life unfolds the ways that it does sometimes. Sometimes I took a break from schoolwork just to give myself a good ol’ cry to clear my mind. My life, while encountering the waves and woes of grief, gets divided into two halves: the internal weight of loss, and the external expectation of continuance and productivity. After all, work doesn’t exactly give you bereavement days for a past partner who wasn’t your legal spouse. The power company doesn’t give you an extension on your bill because you’re sad. There is no necessity or requirement for a formal accommodation process where you just get to put a pause on your day, week, month so you can grieve and heal. In the last five years, I have buried my mother, both of my in-laws, two of my dearest friends, my ex-fiancé, and, most recently, my stepfather—notably, over half of those deaths were due to addiction… and I just kept going. What else was I supposed to do? Ask for help? From who?

The EWU’s data makes one thing painfully clear: most students will experience loss during their college careers, yet there are no rest-areas for life designed around that reality. Extensions on college coursework are favors, grace, kindness—not policy. Compassion is optional rather than systemic. Students (and adults overall) learn very quickly how to compress their grief so that they can pull off the endless deadlines consistent with adulthood—assignments, bills, all the things. When we are in the throes of grief, some days feel unbearably long, while others pass by as a blur. Deadlines, on the contrary, remain rigid. They come on time like the 5 pm train, like the rent that is due on the first of each month, like the shift that starts at the same time every morning for you. The clock-tower of life does not register mourning; it just keeps ticking along.

There has been many a night where I stared at a blank Word document, willing my brain to participate and write something worthwhile. Meanwhile, my brain replayed fragmented memories, and questioned all the what-ifs that I couldn’t answer for myself in a lifetime. There were mornings where I drug myself out of bed (I hate to admit just how many) while my darkened soul lay hidden under the blankets in my curtain-drawn room. Sometimes I feel grateful for the moments of numbness; sometimes the thought of feeling everything all at once feels wholly unbearable.

Grief is not something that just affects your emotions. It ruins your concentration, memory, energy, sleep, and your motivation, like a dog running through a flock of sitting birds in the park. College, however, is structured around having a constant focus and a seemingly never-ending prioritization of submitting the next assignment. There is very little room for a bout of cognitive impairment caused by heart-breaking loss. As adults, we have long been conditioned one thing, if nothing else: Perform anyway.

There is a certain air of isolation that surrounds grief. There is no flashing sign on your forehead that says “Handle with care;” no tell-tale sign that you are carrying death in the depths of your soul while sitting down at your desk before math class starts. People readily assume that, because you showed up, that means you are capable. If you show up, that means you are okay. The caveat, is that if you don’t show up, it suddenly means you don’t care about the task at hand. A cruel game, eh? But presence does not equal wellness. I can certainly attest to that.

While I was handling death, while I was handling grief, I remained a high-performing student. I maintained my high GPA. I endured three grueling surgeries and two years of sickness thereafter. In the same light, I received multiple scholarships, with one being extremely prestigious. I uprooted my life twice, moving completely across the country once, and a few states away the next. I lost friends due to not having the capacity to give them the attention they craved from me. I studied abroad, traveled a lot, flew 40,000 miles in 3 years, visited seven countries. In the meantime, I handled funerals and cremations. I loved and I lost. I gave my all to people who couldn’t do even a fraction of the same for me. All of these hard things caused me grief in between moments of success and love and joy. There is a strange guilt that accompanies functional grief.” Am I broken? Am I heartless? Did I really care? Am I doing this grief thing wrong?

Loss does not always arrive with ceremony, okay? Sometimes it arrives in the middle of survival mode. When you are already exhausted, grief becomes just another weight added to an overburdened system. One of the hardest aspects of grief to process is how casual it is in the world. Routines still endure. The sun still rises. Meetings are still scheduled, and assignments still have impending deadlines. The reality of all that is that the world holds absolutely no accountability for the internal devastation you are suffering from. Yet, you endure.

I am not the only college student navigating grief while still trying my best. Students like me exist across campuses—grieving quietly in classrooms, taking hard tests while feeling numb and hollow, clocking into work after crying the whole way there, submitting essays (or webpages) after overthinking all night long. Many of us never say anything because we don’t know if our loss counts enough to justify any kind of interruption. Life goes on, right? When we cannot pause life because of grief, we simply learn how to hide it. Survival without spectacle: the most honest shape of grief we can ever take.