Grief and Work

*This post was originally shared on Medium on 2/14/2020

I?had barely walked into one of our brightest conference rooms with beautiful windows and brick building views — one of those classic sceneries that made me fall in love with The Big Apple — when I noticed a missed call from Jeremy. Jeremy’s my younger brother and he had been by dad’s side since he went into the ICU just a few days ago. It was October 24th, 2019, and in less than 12 hours, I was about to get on a flight to Taiwan.

My day started like any other Thursday; from the frantic subway to the barely-moving elevator, I feed off of the adrenaline that gets me into “fixer” mode. I had met with my leadership coach in the morning. My teammate and I were about to review the learning and development plan as we pushed to finish Q4 strong. A draft of my “out of the office” was ready to go. Unlike the weeks before where I felt powerless as my mom pinged updates about my dad on WeChat, I was finally going to do something about it. It was October 24th, 2019, and in less than 36 hours, I was going to be by my dad’s side.

I excused myself, called Jeremy back, and in the faintest voice, he said, “dad died.” Or, did he say dad passed? Dad’s gone? Dad something. Did he say it in English? Mandarin? I don’t recall. My legs went on autopilot and they took me straight to the bathroom on the other side of the floor. The single-use bathrooms at work I once advocated so fiercely for because of gender inclusivity now existed to benefit me. “He was supposed to wait for me” I said half speaking half crying as I shut the door. It was October 24th, 2019, and in less than 72 hours, I was to see my dad in a way that I’d hoped to never see him.

My dad, Joe Lee, or Mr. Lee as I fondly called him in front of friends and coworkers, had been battling with heart complications since I was born. In one family VHS tape, I was four years old. I wore the whitest, softest looking fur jacket that had ears on its hood. The outfit was most likely a splurge that ended in an argument between my parents. I hopped on the gray cement blocks like the prettiest snow creature, self-entertaining on a hazy day. I’d learn as an adult that the footage was filmed in front of the hospital where my dad had yet another open-heart surgery and we were waiting for good news. It would be the second out of four.

In 2016, a few years after he recovered from his fourth open-heart surgery where he received a heart transplant from a young man roughly my age, my dad shared that in his latest check up, the doctor saw two tumors growing on his liver. I vacillated between sadness and anger — more anger because I hated that the most dignified man couldn’t catch a break. Like so many people in this world who believed in The American Dream, he wouldn’t miraculously get better if he just worked hard enough. The cards were stacked against a boy born into extreme poverty, whose mother gambled as an escape and passed due to cancer when he was barely in high school.

Work started to take a different shape for me as his health rapidly declined. In 2017, I took a leave of absence from working full time at Pandora to help care for him. The three months that Pandora gave me were everything and nothing at the same time. In 2019, ten months before he passed, I accepted the biggest job of my career to lead Culture, Belonging, and People Growth at DoorDash. Life became a constant pull between excitement and fear. Excitement, because I was building a vision that I knew would make him proud. Fear, because I knew that he may not be around to see it.

As the eldest daughter of a Chinese immigrant family, the daily guilt of living my life manifested in me struggling with how to be happy when I was not with him. It was only right to put my life on hold since his time with us is limited. But it also felt completely at odds with the life he wanted for me. I will always remember talking to him on the phone a week before he passed, asking (telling) him if he wanted me to come home. I heard my mom in the background urging him to tell the truth. In his silence, I felt the eternity of his hope that I wouldn’t feel strained by cultural expectations even though he wanted nothing more than to be surrounded by his family. Still, it broke my heart that after a long, quiet pause, he said “yes.” He must’ve been so scared.

I’m on my way, I told?myself.

Grieving while working is something that all of us will likely experience in our lifetime. Living through the global pandemic of Covid-19 and experiencing half a million deaths have also fueled the feelings of grief and loss in an unprecedented and collective way. We are grieving, even when we no longer feel it, because there has been so much irresponsible and unnecessary pain.

Yet, grief is not something that we’ve made room for with most companies offering three to seven days of bereavement leave, limited paid time off, and less than intuitive counseling benefits. We barely are comfortable talking about death. It’s like a shameful secret. I recall precisely two resources that appeared in my echo chamber of social media without me actively searching about this topic — this?piece?by Teresa Brewer from 2017 and Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg’s?Option B, both of which I read a few years before my dad passed and were helpful.

Perhaps we don’t talk about grief and work in the same sentence for the right reasons — who cares about work when you’ve just experienced trauma? However, as essential workers work around the clock and white collar workers are working two to three hours longer each day, how we cope in a space where so much of our identity is defined is both daunting and isolating if we fail to make meaning of it.

I have always known that logically, work is just one dimension of my identity. However, for better or worse, it’s a dominant identity because the language and culture barriers that existed between me and my parents have made it so that my professional success became a hack for a love language never defined. Like the cat that once brought a dead bird to my doorstep, I excelled within work because it was my gift to my dad that he did good.

You did good, dad. Look at?us.

In my poor attempts at preparing for his departure — something that I’ve rehearsed countless times — I always imagined time suspended with me observing his resting body from across the room. Sometimes, I’d see myself crawling up in bed next to him. It was my denial that prevented my imagination from exploring what life would be like after. The suddenness to confront this became new territory for me.

It wasn’t until Brandi Nicole Johnson, Director of People Growth at DoorDash, kindly shared McKinsey’s “The Hidden Perils of Unresolved Grief” with me, that I so succinctly understood why I have struggled at work since he passed. It’s because in a sudden turn of events, I have lost everything. To put it bluntly, he’s dead. None of?this?matters. What am I doing all of this for?

If the sun were no longer burning, where does the earth?go?

More than a year has gone by, and I’ve barely processed the reality of my new life with plenty of help from family, friends, and a really good therapist. On this Valentine’s Day, I hope my reflections can be a love letter for others as I continue to find meaning again.

Grief is ever so personal, and I am nowhere near figuring it out. If you’re grieving at work, please know that you’re not alone, and that you have the permission to:

Talk about?it.

Coming back to work, I noticed that talking to and being around colleagues who have met Mr. Lee or are at least familiar with my family made me feel less lonely. I’m sure it’s because their simple presence in my life confirmed that he was real — it was a temporary med to the shock of having him there one day and not the next. I knew that as hard as it would be to talk about him,?“giving in” to my thoughts by addressing them in a managed way?actually helped me to get through each day.

Plan ahead and take time?off.

Many friends have reached out to share that the year of “first” can be the hardest (and year two, three, four…). As my dad’s birthday approached back in September, which fell on a Sunday this year, I mentally prepared myself by proactively taking the week after off.

Originally, our family had planned to be together just like we did every year to celebrate my dad’s life during our annual family reunion. Ryan Sokol, VP of Engineering at DoorDash, shared with me that having one big family hurrah for his dad helped him mourn the beautiful life his dad led. However, due to Covid, not only did my family have to cancel our plans but we were also situated in different parts of the world so we each quietly dealt with the void.

With my planned days off, I thought I was being smart. What hijacked me completely though, was on the Monday leading up to my dad’s birthday, I felt the magnitude of my loss in a way so strong that I was unable to function. I couldn’t stop crying as I did my best to reshuffle that week’s meetings through snots and tears.

As the anniversary of his passing crept up, I put on my out of the office for both a few days before?and?after. I couldn’t make my grief go away, but I learned that I could hold space for it.

Be honest about what you’re going?through.

There were days that I couldn’t get out of bed, and I imagine those days are far from over. I needed to have my video off during a few meetings because my eyes were so swollen that the last thing I wanted was to explain the night/morning I had.

Now, I am living in a zoom world when I expect myself to be “on”, both physically and metaphorically. During days that are so much longer — without the travel time between conference rooms and real lunch breaks to decompress — I did my best to be honest about what was going on for me. I found it helpful to say, “At the risk of being vulnerable, I’m having a tough day today and hence I won’t be turning my video on. Thank you for understanding. Now onto today’s agenda…”

During a standing meeting with Sarah Wagener, Chief People Officer of DoorDash, I shared the McKinsey table and said, “This might help to explain what I am going through. As my manager, I just wanted you to know because you must be sensing something different from me.” Not only did Sarah take this opportunity to reaffirm her commitment as my manager through the good and bad, she also reminded me that I have experienced tremendous loss and that I needed to be kind to myself. Did it change much the way we worked? Not really. But I am so glad we had the conversation because it helped me to feel seen and understood.

On the other hand, if you are a coworker who is at a loss for how to be supportive, here are a few gestures that I have appreciated beyond measure:

Listen.

This is the other side of “Talk about it” from the section above. When my team asked me what they could do to support me, I said that the greatest gift that they could give me is to allow me the space to share. They did, and because they did, I didn’t shy away from showing pictures, telling stories, and whenever I was reminded during a meeting or in another forum, paying homage to my dad by sharing wisdom that he had imparted on me.

Through these listening ears, I had a sense that not all is lost because his memory lives on through me.

Show that you?care.

Shortly after I came back to work, I had my regular 1:1 with Tony Xu, co-founder and CEO of DoorDash. I asked him why he didn’t reach out after my dad passed. Through others, I knew that he had asked about me, and I wanted to know why he didn’t reach out directly. He told me that he didn’t because everyone deals with loss differently and he wasn’t sure how I would feel about it. And it hit me: before my dad passed, I would’ve fidgeted uncomfortably and answered the exact same way that Tony did.

Now, having gained the wanted membership to the “dead dads club” (thank you Christina/Sandra Oh from Grey’s Anatomy), I say screw it. Reach out. Especially if you’re in a leadership position. Especially if you’re unsure.

When you doubt your care and do nothing, you are making it about you. One of my favorite quotes from Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead: Brave Work is “Acknowledge and reward great questions and instances of ‘I don’t know, but I’d like to find out’ as daring leadership behaviors. The big shift here is from wanting to ‘be right’ to wanting to ‘get it right.’” This is one where showing that you genuinely care gets you closer to getting it right. To be clear, show that you care is not the same as needing your care to be acknowledged. Again, that is making it to be about you. The person you’re showing care for is entitled to respond however it is that they have the capacity to. If you’re still unsure, start with, “No need to respond” followed by whatever you’d like to express.

When work can feel all-consuming and relentless, your care bears witness to another’s pain. It tells them that they’re human.

Be still (and get tissues).

I still remember vividly having a meeting in the cafeteria with Scott Jacobsen, former Director of People Analytics at DoorDash, when I came back to work. Something must have triggered a memory and tears started flowing. I tried not to apologize, but of course I did, and Scott graciously got me a kleenex and sat there quietly with the kindest eyes until I recuperated. If it made him uncomfortable that I was crying in public while sitting across from him, he didn’t show it.

People need to take a beat sometimes, and the most comforting words are sometimes no words at all.

I was once the coworker who didn’t get it, even as I knew starting from a young age that my dad would not live to old age. Death made me uncomfortable maybe because I was so fearful of facing it in my own life. My experience this year has shaped me in a way that I will now lead very differently, and I am just sorry that it has to take me going through it to better understand it.

The common saying goes, “The best time to start was yesterday. The next best time is now.” If you are grieving, I am so sorry that you’re going through this. If you know a coworker who is grieving, consider how work can be more expansive for those who are (silently) struggling with life’s most difficult truths.

I am beyond grateful to my DoorDash Culture, Belonging, and People Growth Team, the larger People Team, and DoorDash. I am indebted to everyone who extended me a hand and kept me going. You know who you are. Thank you.