One of us is Dying: Musings on Love, Loss, and the Beauty of a Möbius Strip Metaphor
一位学者在确诊脑癌后，与同事通过九个月的共同反思，用莫比乌斯带隐喻探讨爱与失去如何交织塑造学术身份、人际关系和意义建构，邀请读者反思自身角色与工作。
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.