The following was sent to me by a fellow grieving dad to let me know how he was treated at is place of employment after the death of his children. I can’t tell you how much this pisses me off and how I would like to have a few moments with these workplace bullies. This is exactly the reason we need to get the Parental Bereavement Act of 2013 passed in DC. Bereaved parents need time to catch their breath without the additional stress and fear of losing their job. Let me know if you want to help us on this initiative. www.FarleyKluger.com
Kept it All to Myself
written by Ken W.
What if your child died, and when you returned to work your employer greeted you with indifference or hostility?
My daughter Cassie died in early 2012, victim of a rare and horrific progressive fatal neurological disorder called Batten Disease. The same disease had killed Cassie’s older sister Lindsay in 2007. I work in information technology, my profession for nearly 30 years. My employer when Cassie died was an IT service provider that specializes in Cloud based business solutions and subsidiary of a large “Big Box” electronics store chain whose name we all know. My job was to install and support computer systems for our small business customers.
Having exhausted three days’ bereavement pay and then another week of unpaid leave, I returned to work. Or better put, I returned to work in body. Everyday work I had handled easily before Cassie died was often beyond me. I couldn’t connect the dots on the simplest of IT tasks. I made mistakes left and right. I missed meetings when they were right in front of me on my calendar. I would look at the computer screen and see nothing but odd arrays of meaningless characters and numbers. Nearly everything I knew about how to do my job was tucked far away, under wraps inside my head, to be extracted only with the force of a crowbar. This scared me to my core. I knew something was wrong and that it was affecting my ability to work.
I felt I was losing my mind and I kept it all to myself. I have since asked myself why I didn’t let anybody at work know. I conclude it was a combination of things. First, I was scared of the stigma that would attach to me if I announced I was in trouble. Second, I was in a haze. I doubt I could have described the problem, and I would not have known who to call on for help. Finally, the atmosphere at my company was indifferent to anything resembling a personal problem.
After Cassie died, I received little acknowledgment of my loss. It was as if her death were a dark secret. There might have been a card and flowers – I’m not sure. My boss and two co-workers showed up for Cassie’s memorial service. A select few people said nice things by way of email and I got a phone call from a highly placed company executive offering condolences. His call caught me by surprise and it meant a great deal to me.
All in all, though, there was silence. The message was clear – there’s no place for grief in the workplace and my job was to go on as if nothing had happened. I renewed my driver’s license a month after Cassie died; I look at my picture and I see the hollow stare of the bereaved. That was the face I carried on the job when I returned to work. That is the person people saw in the hallways. They had to have seen I was suffering. It was unmistakable.
A few weeks after Cassie died my supervisor tapped me on the shoulder and asked that I step into his office. In a far corner chair was his boss. Both faces were grim. He began by telling me I was on the brink of being fired for my recent job performance and that I was going to be placed on something known as a “PIP.” I had to ask what he meant, as I did not know that PIP in human resources parlance is an acronym for “Personnel Improvement Plan.” Throughout my career in information technology I have been a top performer. The idea of being on some sort of corporate disciplinary status was foreign to me.
Although the meeting lasted about an hour it seemed to go on forever. In raised voices each boss took turns reciting from a yellow legal pad a long list of recent failings. I could see passers-by peering through the office window, wondering what all the noise was about. Many of the items the two bosses read off had merit. In fact, I could have help write their list for them. At the same time, nothing was cause for dismissal. The truly “fire-able” stuff I had managed to catch and correct before anybody noticed. Other transgressions seemed to be tossed in for cruel and vindictive good measure. My immediate boss appeared to be enjoying himself at certain moments as he took full advantage of his vested power.
Neither supervisor, young men in their 30s with children at home, even acknowledged Cassie. They knew my daughter had just died – one had attended her memorial service, for which I suspect he filled out an expense report. There was an unacknowledged 800-pound gorilla in the room. Phrases such as “horrible disappointment,” “we expect so much more from you” and “this gives me grave doubts about you” rang in my ears. I felt about two inches tall. I had no voice. I had been torn to the ground. I left the meeting dazed and about as low as a man can be.
Afterwards I called my wife, Lindsay and Cassie’s stepmom, to tell her what had happened. “My God, your daughter just died!” she exclaimed. “What the hell do they expect of you?”
For the first time in weeks I had clarity and I felt a great weight lifting from my shoulders. I knew in that moment that I needed time off. I wasn’t ready to be at work. Not by a long shot. Two of my children had died. I was exhausted. I was grieving. I had nothing in the tank for work. That day I also decided I would never again set foot in the offices of this company – even if it meant being without work.
Diagnosed by my doctor with acute grief, depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I went on a six-month medical leave of absence and sought help from a grief counselor. Counseling has been incredibly helpful – allowing me understand that my recent poor job performance had been the direct result of grief. It was a perfectly human reaction. I had no choice in the matter.
Time has been a healer and I am back at work, having found a new and better job in a different state far away from my Minnesota home. I still suffer at times from brain fog, but nothing like before. In fact, I sense I am better today on the job than before and it has nothing to do with my technical abilities. Instead, I feel I have grown as a person. I am far less likely to judge. I take a greater interest in others than before. I feel a calm growing inside me at work, for I understand something about life that not everybody is privileged to know, and I intend to use my experiences for the better.
Most co-workers and supervisors at my current job know that two of my children have died, but nobody knows what happened at my old job. I have kept that to myself until now.
I last spoke with my previous boss on a phone call arranged by human resources a few days after our meeting. He began by saying he couldn’t ask me why I was going on a leave of absence because human resources said it was against the rules to inquire. I told him I had been diagnosed with acute grief and PTSD. “Well, that’s too bad. But when you come back you’ll still be on a PIP.”
What’s funny is that I never officially resigned my job and I never asserted any Family Medical Leave Act rights. There was no exit interview, no opportunity for me to tell anybody within the company my side of the story. My last contact with my former employer was fitting and ironic. About a year ago I received an official-looking envelope in the mail. Inside was a letter on corporate letterhead reminding me I had signed a non-compete clause when I was hired and that there would be severe repercussions should I take a job with a competitor and share my former employer’s corporate trade secrets.
I would hope the managers in most companies have greater compassion skills than my managers did. I have wondered if they ever took stock of the great harm they inflicted on me that fateful day. I conclude they probably did not, since they live in an echo chamber of like-minded horrible management. To be clear, I believe any company has the right to expect good job performance from its employees, and my performance had suffered. Still, there was no excuse for management to have regarded this as a personnel performance issue. To this day, I cannot understand their actions or motives. They could not have done worse had they tried.
My experience is one that could be shared by anybody – even my former bosses. Grief is no respecter of individuals. Rest assured it will knock on the doors of each our homes in time. Sadly, federal and most state laws do not regulate bereavement time. In lieu of a collective bargaining agreement, it is up to the employer to determine how long an employee should be away from the job when their child dies.
This needs to change. Updates to the Family Medical Leave Act now before Congress would recognize the loss of a child as a qualifying event. I am in favor of these changes. I also wish there were no need for such legislation, because what I truly wish is that employers would have mechanisms to support and protect their valued employees built right into their HR programs.
In a larger sense, I fear most of us travel to work each day to places devoid of a compassionate moral compass. Nonetheless, I believe in the collective good will of well-intentioned people, because a parent who loses a child is in the worst place imaginable. I would welcome education within corporate America to make sure that management is trained to know what to do when a grieving parent returns to work and his or her job suffers. It should not be up to the whim of a clueless manager to further devastate an employee already in the midst of the worst days of their life.
Lindsay and Cassie were beautiful children with hearts warm as the sun and wide as the oceans. The world was a better place because of them. There must be a way to honor their goodness, perhaps by letting some of that beauty inside the walls of corporate America.
5 months after the loss of my 21 yr old daughter 8 days before her 22nd birthday from an accidental drug & alcohol overdose I lost my job after making a couple of small errors. The 4 other people in my office did not have any legitimate children and none lived with these absentee fathers I worked with. They had no compassion for me at all. No one mentioned my loss or asked me how I was handling things. Funny thing is that I worked at a labor union, which is supposed to uphold workers rights. I was abruptly “let go” was not paid for unused vacation time and I had to fight to get unemployment. Seems that they were planning on getting rid of me right after my loss but must of waited a couple of months so as not to look too discriminating. It will be 3 years this July and I still fight back tears and sorrow every single day.
Ken first no words can express the sorrow that I feel for you and many other “dads” who replied to your post. This is the fraternity no one wants to belong to and truly only those of us in it can understand the range of constant, complex emotions that move through in the wake of a child’s death. I lost my son Evan at age 19 when he was in Scotland on a study abroad trip sponsored by the college he was just finishing up his freshman year in. I remember the shock, numbness, rage and the pain of having to tell his twin brother waking him up at 7AM in his dorm room to do so. Mostly I recall the almost surreal like state that one seems to be in, like its a movie of yourself you are watching. I was so fortunate to work at a place (I’m a teacher) that embraced me and my family and gave me as much time as was necessary to be able to function. In the year and a half since Evy’s death things have returned to the rhythm of before for my co-workers, not for me as suffering a loss is like your skin, it’s all around you and you can never forget that it’s right there. But fortunately there are people who understand that and continue to be supportive when I need it. I was particularly struck when you said that, “I feel I have grown as a person. I am far less likely to judge. I take a greater interest in others than before. I feel a calm growing inside me at work, for I understand something about life that not everybody is privileged to know, and I intend to use my experiences for the better.” I feel exactly the same way and truly have come to believe that our experiences; good or bad painful or not are our teachers if we are open to the lessons. I admire your resilience and compassion and truly feel sorry for your former bosses because even though this is a club I never wanted to join I feel like I know some things that everyone should but do not. Continued healing and growth to you and all the grieving dads.
Reblogged this on Toward building a life that shines and commented:
Sharing this… please take the time to read it and consider sharing if you haven’t already.
Thank you for sharing this story and the link. I have passed it along asking for others to support this. What a horrible tragedy upon tragedy! We were fortunate to not have this experience, but I can certainly see how easily it could happen.
Reblogged this on MourningAmyMarie and commented:
I have been blessed to work at a place that honored the sudden loss of my beautiful daughter, Amy. Amy was 9 months old when I started my job there so many knew of my sweet girl. However, my company offered short term disability, and I had to deal with this third party in order to get paid for the days I did not come into the office since I was working part time. In my heavy grief, I had to plead my case as to why?!? I needed to work part time. I remember screaming and crying into the phone one after the third time they asked my medical doctor to send them records…”what medical tests do you want me to have done to prove my heart and my life has been shattered into a million pieces?!?” Again, I have been blessed as my company would intervene for me when I was too broken to fight for myself. I do not blame the disability company as they too had a a script they were following! I wept when I read this man’s blog because there are days when I continue to feel the same way at work because I am in such a fog! When I was working two days I couldn’t even remember what I wore the other day. There is a light that is gone from my eyes. I am hoping it will come back some day when the pain softens but as I am reminded by many who know, I have a long way to go…
First, I am so very sorry for the loss of your children and for the way you were treated at your workplace. Reading your post just made me weep. I am a grieving mother who lost my beautiful, healthy, fit 27 year old daughter when she collapsed and died on August 4, 2013. I am still experiencing intense grief. My frustration has been that in my grief fog I have had to educate my world on why I need time to deal with this horrific loss and why the light is gone in my eyes. I am blessed to work in a workplace that honored and respected my loss, but had to follow the protocol established at our firm to give me the time off and protect my job. Since we had short term disability, I had to deal or should I say plead with a third party to get the time I needed. They wanted medical records from my doctor — huh? I kept asking them what tests do you want me to have done to prove my heart and my life is shattered in a million pieces?!? I have been working a few days a week since my daughter’s sudden passing and only using the short term to supplement the days I am not working. Working even part time has been so difficult. My company has maternity and paternity leave and although it never occurred to me before, there absolutely should be parental bereavement leave when the worst thing that could happen, happens. Thank you for your posting.
My bosses, owners, colleagues, staff most came to my daughters memorial service. Many, many people sent cards. Over 300 came to the service. Over 75 signed the on line guest book, some from around the world. My boss made reservations and paid for half of eight of our airline tickets to go to California to pick up her belongings and meet her friends. People were very kind. But – it just almost left as fast as it came. And I felt totally alone in my grief. After 2 weeks I guess people think you should be “better by now”. It has been over two years, professional counseling, psychiatry, group therapy, physician visits, reading books, etc. And I just can not seem to break through to a “settled” place. I am sorry for every Dad’s grief – I feel so terrible for all of us. I still can not speak of her for more than a couple sentences and I can not toast her ever because I am crying so bad. This sucks. I understand that there is no way for them to know the grief and suffering. I do. But hang in there a little longer with me. I need your support and your love and your patience. And I need to know that you and everyone else will not forget my precious daughter, and the beautiful soul she has.
Thanks for sharing your story, after the loss of my son Kyle in Oct 2010 I was told by my employer that I could take as much time off as needed with pay and now after reading stories like yours I realize that I work for a very good organization. But despite the time off when I did return no one yet to this day knows how to handle my loss and will talk to me about Kyle and I know they will never understand unless it happens to them which I pray they never have to . I to have supported the act with letters to our state reps and hope they will support this act. Good bless you .