ABSTRACT
Autoethnography “shows people in the process of using communication to achieve an understanding of their lives and circumstances”. Although our relationships with Kathy may have begun at work, this autoethnographic inquiry has revealed the messy but beautiful boundaries of our organizational relationships that sustain us, even as they rip us apart from the inside, only to heal us all over again. This autoethnographic performance has helped us make our organizational work space more sustainable. K. I. Miller embraces a dialectic approach to understanding issues of grief in the workplace—she (rightly) reframes the rational/emotional dichotomy as dialectic. L. A. Baxter and B. M. Montgoery present strategies of integration, recalibration, and reaffirmation to address the poles of the dialectic and the spaces in between to transform how people experience opposing tensions. The authors enact compassion out of shared grief that has the potential to transform our own sustainability in this organization.
