Benjamin Aiken, Ph.D., still remembers crossing paths with a 23-year-old fellow college student at his school’s campus library in Winter Park, Florida.

It was 1997, and Dr. Aiken was a 21-year-old undergraduate majoring in Political Science.

After 20 minutes of awkward back-and-forth glances, Dr. Aiken said the “handsomely tall and dark-haired guy” studying history finally introduced himself: “Hey, I’m Dennis. So…do you go to school here?”

For Dr. Aiken, that remains the most pivotal and influential moment of his adult life, leading to love, loss, and ultimately, his career today. This meeting leads off Dr. Aiken’s story, which he shares in a book chapter, “On Tragedy and Transformation: A Logotherapeutic Autoethnography,” published in April in “Logotherapy and Existential Analysis: Proceedings of the Viktor Frankl Institute Vienna.”

The two college students grew in friendship, in love and ultimately figured out how and when to come out to their families and friends. After graduation in 1999, and in part because of California’s same-sex domestic partnership law, they moved to the Golden State and married. For 13 years, they lived a loving companionship founded in trust and mutual respect as they traveled around the world, bought a home, enjoyed Southern California’s culinary experiences, and raised several beloved pets.

Ten years later, Dr. Aiken was recruited by a real estate investment trust based in Denver, Colorado, and the couple sold their home and relocated. However, only a few months after their move, Dennis fell ill and unexpectedly died.

“His death completely knocked my world upside down, and the sting of that loss was a catalyst for me to do something very different with my life,” said Dr. Aiken, who is an assistant professor in Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology program on the Vancouver Campus.

In the autoethnography chapter, Dr. Aiken shares how the loss of his partner led him to spend years seeking an answer to the “why” and “how” of suffering. For four years, he saw an existentially oriented psychotherapist, his first time working with a therapist.

Dr. Benjamin Aiken and his husband, Dennis, during a 2003 trip in Honolulu.

Developed by neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, logotherapy is based on the premise that an individual’s primary motivation is to find meaning in life. Like Alfred Adler and Sigmund Freud, Frankl grew up in Vienna, Austria, pre-World War. Dr. Aiken said there are more similarities than differences between Frankl’s and Adler’s concepts in psychotherapy.

“Logotherapy is an action-oriented approach to change,” Dr. Aiken said. “It’s about doing something about a given situation. You can reframe that as, ‘How do we say yes to life when life wants to get in the way?’”

Dr. Aiken was vice president of a real estate investment company when he began taking a course on grief and loss at the University of Colorado, per the advice of his therapist, to grow beyond his trauma.

This class led to another class and then another.

“Soon, the registrar sent me a letter saying that I could only take nine credit hours as a non-classified student,” he said. “So, I applied and got accepted.”

Dr. Aiken said he had no intention of becoming a therapist. But when his company asked him to relocate to Chicago to open a new office, he decided to continue his studies at the University of Colorado. He said he was finding meaning in what he was learning in his courses.

After earning his master’s degree in counseling psychology and counselor education, he continued by pursuing a doctorate in counselor education and supervision at the University of Wyoming.

It was in 2017, while taking an autoethnographic course in his Ph.D. program that he began putting together the journal entries he had written after Dennis’ death. Seven years later, members of the Viktor Frankl Institute encouraged Dr. Aiken to submit his autoethnography to the Institute’s journal, and it was ultimately chosen to be included in the second volume of “Logotherapy and Existential Analysis: Proceedings of the Viktor Frankl Institute Vienna.”

“I wanted to convey in my chapter that none of us will live a life without tremendous hardship. We are going to lose someone we love,” Dr. Aiken said. “However, we have opportunities to find meaning even in the worst circumstances. It doesn’t lessen the sting of loss. Finding meaning in loss, however, does make unavoidable pain more bearable.”

And as for what Dennis would think about his journey in becoming a therapist, joining Adler University in 2020 as a professor of counselling psychology, moving to Canada, and now sharing their story in a published chapter about unavoidable suffering — Dr. Aiken said he hopes Dennis would be proud.

“I would like to think he would have said, ‘I knew you would figure it out.’ I do want to be careful to say that I don’t think grief is something you completely put in a box and put away. It’s a journey, and I’m still on that journey.”