One of Us is Dying: Musings on Love, Loss, and the Beauty of a Möbius Strip Metaphor
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Authors
Kenworthy, Amy L
Hurd, Fiona
Dyer, Suzette
Supervisor
Item type
Journal Article
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Publisher
SAGE Publications
Abstract
In this essay, we vulnerably reflect upon an exploration of love and loss in academic life grounded in nine months of shared reflective musings following one of us receiving a terminal brain cancer diagnosis. Together, we harness the powerful metaphor of the Möbius strip to conceptualize love and loss as inseparable, co—constitutive forces shaping identity, relationality, and meaning—making. We offer four interwoven themes and the tensions we felt within them—emotional (grief/gratitude), social (isolation/connection), ethical (extraction/generativity), and temporal (very little time/lots of time)—as an invitation to reflect upon how we each engage within our roles, with our ‘academic work’, and with those around us. We view these tensions as both an illustration of the profound intertwining between personal and professional and love and loss and an affirmation that being an academic is not merely a cognitive pursuit, but a deeply human one.Description
Keywords
3507 Strategy, Management and Organisational Behaviour, Brain Disorders, Cancer, Mental Health, 1503 Business and Management, love, loss, autoethnography, work-life balance, tensions, poetry, humanity, relationships
Source
Journal of Management Inquiry, ISSN: 1056-4926 (Print); 1552-6542 (Online), SAGE Publications. doi: 10.1177/10564926261445343
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© The Author(s) 2026. Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC 4.0). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).