Day 116: Law School as Community

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Yesterday, I talked to a student who is facing the loss of a loved one. Today, a client told me he just lost a parent. Both the student and the client struggled with grief.

There isn’t much you can say at times like these. You can’t take away the pain. You share in it.

Yet I treasure these conversations. When we share in the sorrow of those around us, we become more deeply human. Perhaps that moment of sharing our humanity — our mortality and fragility — shines a faint ray of light into a grieving soul, too.

I have a friend who works as a hospice chaplain. She said people often ask her, “How can you do that job? Isn’t it so depressing?” She tells them, “No — it’s the opposite. Today I heard a father tell his son he loved him, for the first time in years. At the end of life, we are at our most real.”

We don’t often talk about a law school — or a law clinic — as a community. But that aspect of this work may be the part I’ve come to value most. As we engage in important work together, we form bonds. Those bonds weave themselves together into a net beneath us that we don’t discover until we fall.

My own parents are both gone, but this weekend I get to celebrate my mother-in-law’s 92nd birthday. I am reminded to be especially grateful for her and her love for us all.