What I've Learned Grieving On the Job

When Black women experience a loss, we navigate two separate grief journeys: our internal healing process and the parallel challenge of going about our work lives and daily routines under the shadow of loss. Employers are woefully unprepared to talk to employees about unfolding situations, much less offer their support and make reasonable accommodations. As a professional therapist, well-being coach and entrepreneur, I believe we can do much better. As a Black woman, I can also tell you that our norms for handling grief in the workplace weren’t built to handle the intensity or the complexity of grief that women like me experience.?

Let me share an example from my own life: 28 years ago, I was married and working as an associate pastor. I had two miscarriages and lost my father to suicide, all within 18 months. What’s worse, I found myself officiating a funeral just hours after the first miscarriage and walking across the hospital campus to visit church members in their rooms after the second. When my father died, I gave his eulogy and returned to work just three days later. I didn’t even touch that grief until several years down the road, as a result of accumulated grief before and after my father’s death.

Stories like mine are far more common than you might believe. Until we can have more deliberate conversations about grief in the workplace, underrepresented groups and Black women in particular will continue to be under-cared for. I’d like to explore what an expanded definition of grief might look like so we can create caring options that support Black women as we continue to grieve while working.

Expanding Our Definition of Grief?

Expanding our definition of grief makes room to expand care options in the work sector. This expanded definition must include an understanding of the collective grief each generation of Black Americans has suffered in America's long history of racism and racial violence. We have to take into account how enslavement, systemic inequities and multi-layered loss are still impacting Black women professionals today, including the loss of loved ones, community members, loss of rights and privileges, loss of safety, loss of quality healthcare, education, housing and numerous other opportunities. This staggering reality shrouds each and every loss that normally allows for bereavement benefits and many that go unspoken.?

To apply the Kubler-Ross 5 Stages of Grief Model adds insult to injury. Anyone who has ever tapped into complicated, multi-level, intergenerational trauma and grief can testify that grief is not linear, nor can it be packaged neatly. In fact, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross developed her model based on interviews with patients who were terminally ill. Their process of dying followed her now-famous 5-stage pattern. Kubler-Ross never meant to imply this process was applicable for the family members and loved ones of these patients. Loss in the Black community is such an ongoing visceral ache that to simplify the pain into this format ignores and dishonors the generational experience.?

Grief isn’t linear, so it doesn’t follow predictable patterns, and multiple losses compound, extending the recovery process and increasing the use of unhealthy coping mechanisms. All of this amounts to why an average policy of a few days off to make the necessary arrangements, attend a funeral, and have some time to check in with how you really are doesn’t meet the bare minimum of how employers should support grieving employees. Employers can begin to extend care and empathy by increasing budgets for benefits packages and inviting Black women to help create new options that will make a difference in the health and well-being of this group in particular.?

Black Women Experience Grief Differently?

The grief that Black women experience is not singular in nature but layered with generational communal ungrieved grief. A 2008 study found that African Americans reported higher levels of complicated grief symptoms than Caucasians, especially when they spent less time speaking to others about their loss experience. Unfortunately, much more research is still needed on the emotional experience of grief among Black women. A disproportionate number of us are still suffering and dying in silence.

Does the name Chelsie Kryst ring a bell? Remember, she was an attorney, former Miss USA, activist and entertainment news correspondent who suicided at 30 years old.

Black women are often ignored and our grief is minimized even by professional caregivers. Most of us are in a perpetual state of grief that has become so familiar we don’t notice the mental, physical or spiritual impact. Instead, we notice the symptomology: we’re twice as likely to die of heart disease and at we have a 50% higher chance of a high blood pressure diagnosis. Black women have a lifespan six to seven years shorter than white women of the same age, and suicide rates are higher among Black women and girls. It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO or part of the maintenance team; Black women have been archetyped as super strong, with apparently no ability to experience pain. If this wasn’t the case, Chelsie might still be with us today.

Like I said earlier, grief from multiple losses compounds, and many Black women have no alternative but to keep moving as their personal burden of grief keeps growing. We feel it when we see young Black people being killed on the news because we know it could have been our children our partner, our niece or nephew. Just recently a five-year-old Black boy was shot in the head during a drive-by just miles away from where I live, and I felt it. Each incident hits us differently, adding to the cacophony of despair in our heads, so we look for ways to numb the pain so we can make it through the day. Black women have to sacrifice more of our time than others, work harder and improve ourselves more because we don’t have the same resources and connections as others do. Moving up in the corporate hierarchy means losing comrades in leadership, people who look like you and have similar perspectives.?

Grieving On the Job: What I Learned?

Caring professionals like pastors and therapists take on other people’s grief to a certain degree. During my 18-month period of one loss after another, I stayed busy, but I started to feel disconnected from myself and my body. I wasn’t doing a lot of crying, but I was getting irritable and not as interested in doing the things I enjoyed. I avoided simple things like certain movies and songs, and I couldn’t keep still even when I had the time. Eventually, I had to acknowledge that something was wrong and I needed to recommit to my own therapy in a whole new way.?

There were a few things that helped me get reconnected with myself and start to sort out what I was feeling. I started journaling to separate the different heartbreaks and work through the layers of my grief. My husband was there for me, but I realized I needed a different kind of witness to my grief: a community of women where I could show up and be a mess in their presence. I needed the freedom to talk or not talk, cry and show anger without any judgment. I needed to practice telling other people I wasn’t okay. After I started to come to terms with my emotional burden, I was able to care for my physical health. I finally rescheduled the appointments I had missed with my doctor and dentist.?

Make Space for Healing and Renewal?

We need to get rid of the expectation that anyone should leave their grief at the door and show up with a smiling face when they’re having a hard day. That’s not how emotions work, and that’s not how we heal. Life has many cycles of death and renewal. As much as it hurts to lose someone or something we love, we can experience renewal.

Join our vibrant online community of Black professional women that are all about supporting one another. You can also listen to my podcast, Insideout Conversations.

Resources for Support

Healing Black Women

Ethel's Club

Heal Haus

Center for Black Women’s Wellness

Sista Afya

National Queer & Trans Therapists of Color Network