The death of a parent can strike at our very core, rattling our sense of self and raising questions of how we could possibly continue beyond their departure. For the PhD student, parental loss can act as a significant disruption, saddling them with a heavy emotional toll to carry alongside the typical challenges of completing a thesis. Yet, parental death can also be transformative, providing the doctoral student with a powerful reason to persevere. Through an autoethnographic account of losing my father during my PhD, I reveal how parental death, and the desolation it engenders, can be transformed into a productive influence for the doctoral journey. This work contributes to international literature on parental loss, grief and graduate school experiences, while revealing how dialoguing with the dead can act as an effective learning tool. Methodologically, it demonstrates the usefulness of autoethnography for higher education scholars transnationally.