The philosophy of grief

KALAMAZOO, Mich.—Ashley Atkins can’t point to a specific moment when she realized she was destined to be a philosopher; it always just seemed to be a part of her. Her mother recalls her asking “are there still philosophers?” at an age so young Atkins does not even remember it herself. What she does recall, however, is always having an internal preoccupation with philosophical topics—not a flashy or bold passion, but a quiet, dwelling curiosity.  

So perhaps those questions found their first real outlet in Atkins’ high school philosophy class, where both her teacher and the subject began to stir the ideas which she carried with her for years.  

“I think when you’re a teenager, you’re sort of waking up to the world in a way,” she says. “And I think that philosophy can really speak to someone who's questioning a lot at that time.” 

Atkins continued with philosophy throughout her academic career, all the way to Princeton University where she received her doctorate. Now as an associate professor of philosophy at Western Michigan University, she’s applying her expertise in social and political philosophy, race and gender to the object of her current work: grief.  

Her innovative approach to understanding grief earned her a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for the 2024-2025 academic year which will help to support her work on a career-defining scholarly monograph: an exploration of the intricate, isolating and entirely human experience of grief through the contemporary memoir. 

WHERE PHILOSOPHY MEETS GRIEF 

Although she was awarded the NEH fellowship in early 2024, her introduction to grief began a decade earlier—during her first semester teaching at WMU. That semester, she taught a race and gender class, just as the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri ignited the Black Lives Matter movement.  

As she covered these events in class, she came across Claudia Rankine’s opinion essay in the New York Times, “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning.”  The poignant piece explores the idea that systemic racism and violence in America forces Black people to live in a perpetual state of grief. Rankine’s piece delineates a state beyond the individual experience of losing a loved one, but rather an atmosphere of continuous mourning.   

“I was interested in these social and political contexts [of grief], like Black Lives Matter, but thinking I should understand something about the grief that many people experience in their personal life,” she says.  

Just as she began to dip into an intellectual study of grief, she unexpectedly lost her dissertation advisor.  

“An accident of life”, she jokes tenderly.  

Yet now grappling with her own personal encounter with grief, her desire to understand these experiences only deepened. However, Atkins quickly ran into challenges in addressing the topic within her field of philosophy.  

“I found that there weren’t really accounts or theories of grief that were close to the experience,” she says. “They seemed to be intellectualized substitutes, quite removed from what people are grappling with when they lose someone they love.”   

As her desire to understand what was happening at the nationwide level merged with her own foggy, understood experience of grief, she was drawn to the medium that first inspired her: literature.   

While suffering from illness during a trip to Iceland, Atkins read C.S. Lewis’ “A Grief Observed:” a raw, introspective account following the death of Lewis’s wife. Atkins described this moving insight into his bereavement as the most illuminating source for her understanding of grief.  

Realizing that first-hand accounts of grief like Lewis’s might be the best path to philosophically explore grief, she began to pursue more in-depth study into what would eventually become a monograph. 

“The book project is a way of engaging with books like Lewis’s. These are eyewitness accounts that are really, really close to the experience,” she says. 

Her monograph will include ten chapters, each exploring two or more literary pieces that shed light on a specific aspect of grief. These aspects may be “philosophically interesting, extremely difficult to understand, or troubling or challenging in some way,” she says.  

 In addition to "A Grief Observed”, other books Atkins also examines include Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking”, John Bayley’s “Widower’s House” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Widow’s Story.”  

In fall 2025, Atkins will continue work on her book project as the awardee of a prestigious Bellagio residency in Lake Como, Italy. Bringing together the world’s top artists, scholars and practitioners, this fellowship provides scholars with space to advance groundbreaking work. Notable alumni of the program include Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Maya Angelou, among many others, situating Atkins among the ranks of legends.  

BRIDGING TO THE PUBLIC  

Atkins is also exploring avenues to disseminate her work to the public. Although her monograph is being written for a scholarly audience, she hopes its impact will spread beyond the philosophical community. To help achieve this, Atkins applied for and received the Marc Sanders Philosophy in Media Fellowship in Summer 2024.  

The fellowship bridges the gap between academic philosophers and the mainstream media, offering guidance on writing for general audiences. It brings together editors, staff and writers from some of the most esteemed outlets in the nation, including the New Yorker and the New York Times to instruct top academic philosophers. 

With her NEH Fellowship completed in December 2024, Atkins continues to hone her writing skills for a general audience by crafting longform essays for publications. In these pieces, she plans to explore cultural attitudes and emerging trends towards grief, including prohibition against speaking ill of the dead and grief festivals—gatherings that provide a space for individuals and communities to process and express their grief through various ways including workshops, art, shared support.  

She is also sharing her findings via symposium contributions and pieces for academic journals, which also offer a slightly quicker turnaround than drafting a book. 

NAVIGATING THE NEXT CHAPTER 

While she’s spent the past year reading, studying and writing about grief memoirs, Atkins has also been increasingly drawn to interdisciplinary study and application of her findings. Taking what she’s learned from the literature, she hopes to connect her expertise in grief to policy and public health fields.  

 “How could I work with people in these helping professions — doctors and nurses — to better assist people who are in the early stages of grief, where they're not always getting the kind of support that they deserve in medical other bureaucratic settings?” she says. 

As she achieves her professional goals and completes her current projects, Atkins is thinking carefully about how she wants to approach the next phase of her career.  

 “I feel pulled in different directions and I have to figure out what my career will look like,” she says. “I want to be a good teacher and a good institutional citizen, but I also want to write books which require me to go into a cave.” 

Yet no matter what the future holds, she knows this path is for her, as her temperament and attitudes toward death, aging and grief make her well-suited for this study.  

 “I think that there are people who find it anxiety producing to talk about certain kinds of topics, like death, grief, aging,” Atkins said.   

She continued: “I am the exact opposite—I almost feel relief when I am able to talk about these things. I feel anxious when I am not able to talk openly and freely about grief, death, aging.”  

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