President Manya Whitaker

Photography by Jamie Cotten

If you’re reading this, it’s okay to feel like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders.

I lost my brother in 2010. My best friend in 2012. A friend I’d just met 4 months before their passing in 2015. I watched my parents grieve for their only son. I watched friends grieve through nostalgic social media posts. I held hands with someone’s mother as their child, whom I barely knew, took their last breath. I’ve spoken with parents who’ve lost their children and tried to remain professional because, after all, they are speaking to me as a College official, not as a member of their grief support group.

I don’t stop for gas or go to the store at night. I try to be home before nightfall because it’s in the dark when bad things happen, right? But it was morning, afternoon, and sometimes night when my brother attempted suicide. I know because his calls immediately before the attempt would require me to leave the gym, class, or bed. I know because it was 1:13pm when my friend took their last breath in the ICU while holding my hand.

When I visit my parents in my hometown, I don’t try to get in touch with high school friends because, frankly, I don’t want to feel what I felt as I watched my best friend slowly die from HIV. Every visit, he was sicker and sicker, and when the end finally came, I was living on the other side of the country and unable to attend his funeral.

I felt guilty because he had always been there for me, and I wasn’t there for him in the years preceding his death and not even at his funeral. I felt guilty that someone I’d just met died on my “watch” while visiting me. I felt guilty that, eventually, my words were not enough to stop my brother from doing what he’d been trying to do for years.

I am a psychologist. I know I have survivor’s guilt. But naming it doesn’t change the fact that at least once a week, I think to myself, “my parents can’t lose another child”. So, I take a deep breath and keep going. For them. And sometimes for myself.

If you’re reading this, it’s okay to have the weight of the world on your shoulders. Because the world needs you. And me.  

Interim President Manya Whitaker, Colorado College

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