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Feb. 3, 2022

There is nothing quite like being told you have a couple of minutes to gather up what you can of your life. In fact, it can’t be done. But my wife Stacy and I tried to do just that as the Marshall Fire approached our home on Dec. 30. And along with about 70 ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½Æƽâ°æÏÂÔØ faculty, staff, students, and their families and loved ones, we were not successful and suffered the loss of our home in Louisville.

There is also nothing like the feeling of gratitude you experience when you’re wearing someone else’s clothes; they fit surprisingly well, and you feel lucky to have them. Or the feeling of warmth and connection when people reach out with food, gift cards, or the gift of their time—just listening as you tell them how you are putting things back together. Stacy and I, and hundreds of other households that had their lives upended by the fire, have also experienced this from friends, neighbors, CU colleagues, and perfect strangers.

To say we are grateful for this doesn’t quite get there—doesn’t quite express what we have felt and are feeling. We have gained a true understanding of what community and family really mean. We are beyond grateful; we are moved and transformed.

And, too, we are wiser. The losses of the fire are a kind of horrific defining moment on top of two years of loss of life, loss of normality, and loss of expectations. I’ve seen that loss in the faces of our students and our faculty and staff during the last two years. I’ve heard it in their questions—about learning modalities, course offerings, teaching, and workloads. It’s a yearning to connect with one another in common purpose and to do the work we do in a spirit of hope for the future. I understand all of this more clearly now.

Those connections are being made. Perhaps not at the rate we would have hoped for and not always in the immediate and available way we would like. But I want to thank our faculty and the tireless and dedicated staff who support them for continuing to make these connections happen during the last two years and doing so against obstacles that keep arising.

I understand your loss of familiarity—how hard it is to find the joys and rewards of teaching and learning while doing so remotely. I empathize with your exhaustion as staff in accommodating new obstacles and logistical challenges all the time. I never realized what magic it takes to keep moving forward—to get up each day and face all of this squarely. I thought I knew, but I didn’t.

But I do now.

We’ve just completed our first week back together in person, and I know people are already uneasy, tired, and spent. Yet, I am finding that there is hope in gratitude—an energy in building back from tragedy and a perspective that comes from loss. I urge all of us to be true to these new groundings in how we carry out our work together.

I want us to be kind to one another in the classroom, the laboratory, and the community. To be flexible with our students who have struggled amid this environment to learn, to achieve, and to believe in the future. To be patient with our faculty colleagues and staff team members who are working long and hard solving new problems every day, doing so while dealing with personal losses and challenges we may not know anything about.

Finally, I want us not only to show gratitude to one another, but also to try to live that gratitude. And not just temporarily, but as a permanent way of life at ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½Æƽâ°æÏÂÔØ—as a testimony to all that we have lost during the last two years and as a tribute to why we, and the university, are here in the first place.

Thank you all for your kindness and generosity to me, my immediate family, and to our extended CU family and local communities. If this experience has taught me anything, it's that generosity paid forward will get us through this and whatever else awaits––together.

Warmly,
Russ