Sudden Loss and Grieving: Live at Work!

T/W: This includes descriptions of death, sudden death, grief, PTSD, OCD, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and other medical and psychological subjects that may be difficult to read. It’s also longer than you might want it to be! If you want to get to my final words of ultimate advice, scroll to the way bottom.

Before I get into this—which I hope to be a guide to better understand and support a coworker going through a sudden loss of an immediate family member, I want to acknowledge that as of 2022 the DSM-5 added the definition for a type of grief that presents much more intensely for a much longer, powerful period: Complicated (or Prolonged) Grief . If the symptoms in this link sound familiar to you, please know you are not alone: an estimated 7-10% of bereaved adults will experience Complicated (or Prolonged) Grief. If you find yourself so overwhelmed by grief you need someone to speak to immediately, in the U.S. please call or text 988 emergency mental health services, 911 (or your local emergency services number), or use the free and confidential Lifeline Chat . You deserve the support and help you need.

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Today is my father’s 5th yahrzeit, the Jewish term for the anniversary of his death. While I hope to honor my father on a daily basis, through sharing his work, favorite memories, direct quotes, acts of service, repeatedly calling, texting, and e-mailing loved ones, or simply making long overdue car and medical appointments— today I want to talk about supporting a coworker who has suddenly lost someone in their immediate family. I am not a grief professional, but I am a professional at grieving. All of the following comes from my own personal experience, the experience of those close to me, my experience in grief group counseling, and one-on-one therapy. This will not be an easy read. I am sorry. It’s not an easy write, either.

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In the American workplace, we aren’t given much grace for the greater pains of life. There’s a great meme about an American’s out-of-office announcing the worker is getting kidney surgery, but they’re still available on their cell VS a European’s out-of-office declaring they’ll be camping all summer—try again in September. This isn’t far off. I have heard from multiple women that have given birth and tried to answer e-mails later in the day. I've met people that have checked messages on their wedding days. In season 6 of Sex and the City, Miranda Hobbs has a meeting with fellow lawyers who are upset about her performance at work and blame it on her spending too much time with her toddler. She tells them, “...let me say as far as the McKenzie brief, Miranda Hobbs' kicking ass. Where I'm doing a bad job is at home. So, if you'll excuse me, I have work to do. And may I remind you that when my mother died, I was back in the office on Monday.”

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What are we doing about this as a larger society? Oh, it’s only getting worse. By far. But what can be done in our offices is up to us. We have fire drills, we have emergency plans for active shooters, earth quakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, you name it. What are we doing about personnel emergencies?

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Whether we sit there waiting for others to tell us what to do, how to act, what to say or we get up and take action—this is who we are. This is what those going through the pain and suffering see. Who we are in the moments when others need us most is who we are. Believe me—I will never, ever forget who everyone was when my father died.

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Sudden death only accounts for 15% of all deaths for adults in the United States, and the top causes are generally what you’d expect—heart attacks, strokes, intracranial hemorrhages, aneurysms. Less commonly, epileptic events, asthma, anaphylaxis. Accidents. There’s no “good” way. The survivors are left in complete shock and horror. Floods of guilt, rage, and severe pain flood our stomachs, our hearts, our brains, our eyes. The last words of our loved ones are seared into the minds of the last person with them. They are in the avenue of “Help me.” Worse, the loved one may have been alone. The family is left to imagine.

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I lost my father the way I always knew I would: On April 24th, 2019 I wake up to missed phone calls from 3 AM, and I’m 3,000 miles away. My father has had a stroke and is in a coma. I have a lifetime of reassurances from my obsessive-compulsive disorder that this is exactly right. This is just what I thought. But instead of doing everything I can to get on the absolute first plane possible and get straight into my father’s hospital room, I have to face some demented sense of reality: I have a shoot today. I’m a producer, and I have a shoot today. I’m expected on set and I have some gold jacket in the back of my car that this production will absolutely fail without (the shoot is not for the jacket, but jacket-minded people at my company have assured me over one hundred thousand times that this shoot, my career, my livelihood, the jobs of hundreds of thousands of people, are dependent on talent wearing this jacket). My father, my daddy, my best friend, biggest supporter, my number one, north star, is in a coma. But this jacket. I am on the floor, absolutely losing my mind. I call a beloved co-worker, who tells me in a voice calm and loving and assuring beyond reason: “I will handle it. Don’t think about this. Don’t think about us. We’ll handle everything, you go to Maryland and don’t think about any of this.”

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ENORMOUS lesson number one: There is no burden on me whatsoever. I am gone. I am not asked for any more information. I am not asked to contact anyone further. I am not asked one single other detail. Why, beyond the fact that my co-worker is an angel with a heart? I was not set up to work in a silo. My coworker understands my work, and has access to it. She understands my job, and can do my job. She can handle the jacket-pocalypse. She knew the fear in my heart. I never, ever want anyone to ever feel the way I felt that day: Like if I didn’t figure out all this stuff for work, that I couldn’t leave, I couldn’t get on a plane and make it to my father’s bedside. Understand your team—do you have someone who would put pressure on a co-worker in an emergency to figure out who is covering their work? Would someone ask someone to define or explain their emergency? Would someone ask them to justify their absence? Would people talk behind their back? Would they be blamed for their absence? Would they be forced to bring something to the office (something useless like the jacket or maybe even something very needed) if doing so would risk them making it to a loved one’s bedside before they passed away? Would you do these things? If the answer is yes: candidly, I hate you. But I’ll ask: What needs to be done to fix these things now before an emergency happens? That emergency could be tomorrow.

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After my coworker has put my job completely out of my mind, I needed someone to physically put me onto a plane. I suffered full panic attacks in airports and airplanes on my journey across the country. Maybe you saw me on the floor of LAX that day? I owe the 4% of sanity I maintained to a Delta flight attendant who lent me her phone mid-flight to contact my brother. My family gives me false reassurances, but I can barely understand what they’re saying. I make it to the hospital very late. I hold my dad's hand and watch him lay unmoving for hours. I watch nurses come in and try and shake him awake every so often. They yell his name into his face. They open his eyelids. I don’t let go of his hand. At some point a doctor tries to tell me there is nothing they can do and I have no idea what he is talking about. Why is there nothing they can do? This is insane. Everyone here has gone completely insane. While I hold his hand, my father flatlines at 9:44 AM on April 25th. I watch the numbers fall to zero. I fall to my knees and dry heave. We sit beside him for an hour. I hug him. I would like to die. I do not eat much for two weeks. I sit shiva with friends I can barely explain this to. They look at me, their eyes just devastated for me. Horrified. Everyone knows I have lost my best friend in the universe. My person. What happened? We don’t know. What can I say? He had just e-mailed me that I needed to check the oil in my car. I just attended his funeral. He had just had brunch with my brother and his new fiancé that Sunday the 21st. Now my brother and I read eulogies we wrote days later. I am living in a state of such unbelievable shock that I cannot bear to consider how the world continues to turn. I wake up and fall asleep sobbing. Everywhere I look, I see fathers. We are all dealing with this loss. We are all dealing with each other’s dealing of this loss, as it means something completely different to each of us. I ask my family on a daily basis if we are sure no one could save him, are we sure he really died? They couldn’t, and he did.

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Oh, my bereavement leave is over. I need to go back to work now. Yes, just like that. I write all of that to help you better understand: This is what could be going through the mind of a coworker who is back in your office, reading your e-mails, attending your meetings, giving notes, asking for feedback. I am not a highly emotional person. But I am a person. I have just suffered the greatest loss of my entire life, and I have suffered it in the blink of an eye. If you haven’t experienced it yourself, I can barely ask you this, but can you imagine that tomorrow someone you love with your whole heart dies with no warning, while you watch and a couple weeks later you’re responding to work e-mails from people that really want answers? As I leave the office, I reach for my phone to call my father and tell him about it. I realize yet again that he is gone. I hope my sobs are quieter inside my car.

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Forgetting your loved one has passed is very easy with sudden death, and not uncommon at all. We talked about it at grief group, and my friends and family will tell you they can’t count the times they opened an e-mail to their loved one, or a text, or a call, or shouted for them in the next room. Changing tenses is something I still get wrong to this day, and I’d say I stopped caring, but I never cared. When we do this, don’t flinch. Just nod and smile. You may do it one day, too.

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An old boss later wisely told me, “My father suffered over the course of weeks before he died. We all said our goodbyes, and were able to say what we needed to say. Maybe that was better for us. But it wasn’t better for him. I think the way your dad died was better for your dad, but infinitely worse for you.” Another friend whose father died of a strong battle with pancreatic cancer later in August 2019 summed it up perfectly, “I don’t envy me, and I don’t envy you.”

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When I was back, I am insanely blessed to say that my coworkers got it so, completely, wonderfully right. First of all, they never put any pressure on me while I was gone. I was sent nothing but love, acknowledgement, condolences, assurances, and even gifts. I never felt the weight of the work on my shoulders. I only felt the support and love that I needed. When I returned, I literally walked in and started sobbing within .00001 seconds and they held me in their arms easily. I should mention the entire office changed entire buildings while I was gone and they’d done the work of packing up all my belongings for me and moving them into a new space, carefully and lovingly. In meetings they never put a barrage of questions or information on me and they went at my pace. My boss had also lost her father when she was around my age (30) and she gave me the exact support I barely knew I desperately needed for my healing process to even stand a chance. This would be a great chance to also say: I’d only been working at this company for a month when my father suddenly died. Yes. A month. What I’m writing was not the product of the foundation of years of working together, it was the result of the leadership and team-building expertise of Sadaf Muncy , who I am not only proud of having worked for—I am better because of it.

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If Sadaf is not your boss, you may not have this experience. So, the bereaved are back in the office. Is it back to work? Physically back and mentally back are mutually exclusive. For the love of all that is holy, ease up and do not inundate this person. Go by their cues. Are they reaching out to you? Are they chiming in in meetings? Do their eyes appear focused? Are they responsive to e-mails? Are they asking questions? What do their hours look like? What’s their social behavior? Are they weeping at their desk? Honestly ask yourself all of these questions. Be aware of how they’re doing without feeling the need to ask “how are you?” – they’re not well. They’re doing everything they can to hear even 10% of what’s being said to them in this first month. Don’t flood them with questions about their work. Do not flood them with information about what they missed while they were gone, unless they ask for it. And then, go slow.

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Did your coworker say “they’re actually doing fine and ready to get back into it”? That’s amazing!—it’s not true, but it’s amazing that they said it and that they might even believe it.

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My dear friend once said that to me, too. She suffered the sudden loss of her beloved stepfather from a cardiac episode in November of 2019 (I wish I could tell you I didn’t have even more friends that lost a father in 2019, but somehow, 2019 was the year we all lost our fathers). Always a devoted worker, she was adamant that she was ready to return to her office. Her team had built an environment that couldn’t survive without putting crushing, toxic pressure on her, and with the whiplash and distorted reality of sudden loss, she thought she was doing what was best. On the way to the airport, she told her mother she thought she was having a heart attack. The EMTs helped her through it, and relieved them by determining it was a panic attack—the symptoms for the two are so similar, the American Heart Association recommends you go to the ER either way. To know that my friend suffered this trauma due to a combination of severe stress and grief related to her loss and the poor management in her office horrifies me beyond words. What could have happened? She left the job and made major changes in her life. I don’t think they made major changes in that office.

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There’s this old gag, “Everyone grieves differently.” That might be true, but it doesn’t mean what the people that say it think it means. Avoiding grieving and the loss, looking for distraction, or otherwise not actively engaging in the actual act of grieving is not “grieving differently”. This person is running from it. They are not handling it. They need help. Help them.

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How to support a bereaved person:

-??????? Please, send them a message acknowledging their loss. Do so within the first week of their loss, or in the time of the funeral. A card, an e-mail, or a phone call with a message expressing your condolences means more than you understand. If words aren’t your strong suit, there are resources online to help with what to write in these types of messages, and if all else fails: ChatGPT.

-??????? If you are able, initiate asking around your office for $5-$10 a person for a gift for the bereaved and their family. They may have asked for donations to a certain organization, or you may know they have a favorite type of flower, or my favorite, a gift basket with an assortment of easy-to-eat delicacies for those with little appetite (and are too depressed to cook or overwhelmed to order food)

-??????? A homecooked and easy-to-freeze meal like lasagna is a great thing to drop off for the family

-??????? Offer to do something like walk their dog, babysit their kids or pick up their clothes from their dry-cleaners

-??????? Be an ear for them. Call, text, e-mail and check in on them in the weeks surrounding their loss and beyond. The beyond is very real. When the shockwave of the loss has left the air, and they’re still alone

-??????? Offer to pick up more of their work from your manager, or make sure that their work is more evenly dispersed among others. Lighten their load. Make sure they know they can count on you as they return to the office.

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What NOT to say to a grieving person: ?

-??????? Nothing. This is the absolute worst thing you can say. I don’t care that you’re not good with words, you don’t know what to say, that you feel awkward or out of place, or anything of this ilk. Not acknowledging the loss of someone who has just experienced the death of an immediate family member is not acceptable.

-??????? “Everything happens for a reason.” Unless you know this person very, very well and know that this is a mantra this person uses in their life already, please to not prescribe this belief to their loss, even if you believe in your heart that it is reassuring. They may not want to believe their traumatic loss happened for some undefinable “reason”. ??

-??????? Anything in the vein of a religion you know this person is not. This is not appropriate for the workplace (or anywhere), and may make your coworker feel extremely uncomfortable.

-??????? Comparing the person’s loss to one you yourself have suffered. I know it feels like a good connection point, but loss is so immensely specific, and unless you have suffered the exact loss of this person, there is going to be a disconnect the bereaved may be too polite to acknowledge. The loss of my father is not the same as the loss of your beloved grandparent, or friend, or pet, just as the loss of my father is not akin to the loss of another’s child. Loss is so specific that at 30, I was unable to relate to those who had lost a parent at an older age when they had had a spouse and children their parent had met. Just as a teenager who had lost their dad might look at me and think I didn’t understand them either. In sum: unless they come to you looking for comparison, please try to avoid it.

- Adding this 4/26 as I remembered it this morning: Someone once said to me "What happened to you really scares me because it's my worst nightmare. I'm so close to my parents. I just can't imagine what I would do." Yeah buddy, it was my worst nightmare, too. Don't say this out loud to people.

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I’m sure I have a lot more to say (I do), but this is what I’ll say today. I have many messages of remembrance about my father to respond to. He was very popular. In the end, what I really want the take away to be is: Treat your coworkers the way you would want to be treated if this happened to you. We only get this one life, with our loved ones in it for whatever time we get with them. Be nice to each other.