She was a really nice professor and she wrote me a good recommendation letter that resulted in a lot of good results with applications. Recently, this professor died from brain cancer, which was a fast and shocking death for me.
Tomorrow is the deadline for a grant. What should I do? Is it professional to use letters from the deceased?
If I cared enough about a person to write a letter of recommendation, I would be pleased to think that one day after I am gone that the person could use my letter for their benefit.
You will possibly benefit from this recommendation and possibly someone else will suffer if you are selected based upon the recommendation; however, competition is not generally considered unethical.
There are no legal questions raised that I can imagine.
It seems unconventional, but not extreme.
My feelings are that it would be ethical to use the letter.
I attach letters of recommendation from Dr W and the late Professor X.
Perfectly reasonable.
The point is, it's courteous to refer to the deceased as the late Professor X to prevent confusion or embarrassment and to avoid unnecessary pain to the bereaved.
If you don't do this, and the widower receives a letter addressed to his wife that assumes she's alive, then has to write back to someone he doesn't know explaining to save your skin, shame on you.
I am in, more or less, your exact situation. My PhD supervisor died of a brain tumor in 2011. However, he did not leave behind a letter for me, nor am I on the market. I think you should be careful of the culture that you are applying in. If the culture demands, usually, that the letter be blind to the applicant, then you should probably not use it unless you state in your cover letter the reason why you have included it. If it's an open system, then you will probably benefit from it unless it's been 5 or 10 years since your recommender's passing. Either way, as the comments say, you should disclose what's going on.
One option would be to have the letter sent to a colleague who knows your work and was close to your late professor. That person could then write you a letter which could incorporate some of the information from your late professor's letter. For example, they could include an excerpt from that letter put into context. This both gets around some of the ethical issues (since the new letter writer can explain that the old letter writer passed away) and also avoids some of the issues with the letter being out of date (since the new letter writer will be able to include comments on recent developments).
I have no ethical qualms about using a letter from a deceased professor. I would however also seek out at least one letter from a colleague of the professor, not because it's unethical but because only having a letter from a deceased professor will at least raise eyebrows.
I have letters of recommendation, which I have publicly published (online).
I don't bother to keep track of whether each of the authors behind these letters continues to breathe.
If I found out that somebody has passed away, do you think I ought to go into my collection of published material and delete the content? The person's life has been snubbed away from the planet. You think I should go remove a positive thing that provides some ongoing evidence of this person's activity?
The point of these rhetorical questions is point out some of the reasoning to my opinion, which is obviously that it's fine to use the letter. If I were on my death bed with a week to live, but I knew I could help someone by writing a letter of recommendation, and if I bothered to write that letter, I wouldn't want them to tear up the letter into pieces in a couple of weeks just because I will have left my death bed by that point.
