In September, my mom died after a short battle with colon cancer. She was 83 and lived a full life in which she had a fulfilling career in education, traveled the world visiting 100-plus countries, and was married to my father for more than 60 years. It’s hard to lose a parent, and my workplace (like many) allowed me time off to be with family for the days before and after the funeral.
But no matter how generous the policy at your workplace is, you’re going to have to come back to work before you’re done grieving. Grief happens following any significant event that creates a tear in the fabric of your life story. The death of a loved one is an obvious source of grief, but many kinds of events can trigger the grief process, including a fire at your home, or the loss of a job. Indeed, you may have heard of the “five stages of grief.” Those were originally described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who studied patients who had received a terminal diagnosis.
The problem with Kubler-Ross’s “stages” of grief (denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance) is that they’re purely descriptive. You need not go through these stages when grieving. They also don’t form a linear path. You may bounce around among these emotions or actions—or experience only a few of them. You may be fine for long periods of time and then find yourself sobbing uncontrollably at a comment someone makes or a scene in a movie. It’s a messy process that’s different for every person (and different within a person for each thing you grieve).
So, how do you deal with that messiness at work?
Cut yourself some slack
First things first, don’t try to be a superhero. You don’t have to have it all together immediately upon returning to work. If you’re still feeling fuzzy and foggy a month or two after a significant loss, don’t beat yourself up. Don’t assume you should be over it already.
By allowing yourself to feel what you’re feeling, you can avoid the common trap of amplifying the difficulties of grief by feeling guilt over your grieving process. Instead, accept the process. You may not yet be at the point where you can accept your loss, but you can accept that grief itself is complex.
In addition, you need to recognize that for some period after a loss, your work products may not be as sharp as they were before. That doesn’t mean you’ll never recover. It just means that it takes time. Grieving can be a lot of mental work, and you need to let the process unfold.
Let others know
When you experience a loss, your work colleagues may or may not be aware. Even when you have a death in the family, there are likely to be some people around you who have not heard. It’s okay to let your colleagues, clients, and other people in your work community know what’s going on.
There are several ways that letting other people know can benefit you. For one thing, people are often willing to give you some grace when you make mistakes when they know you’re going through a difficult time. In addition, people may be willing to take on a little extra work on your behalf as you recover from a loss. It is not a sign of weakness to rely on others during a difficult period.
Measure twice, cut once
No matter how careful you are when you’re working at your peak, you need to be extra careful in the stressful times that accompany grief. Slow down a lot of your work to minimize the number of mistakes you make. Reread emails and reports before sending them off. Take extra time when making important decisions to ensure that you haven’t missed anything important. Ask other people to look over key documents before sending them off.
In addition, there are many decisions you make at work that have an emotional component. You may use the way you feel about an option to elect to go forward with it. The more anxiety you’re experiencing, the harder it can be to separate that from the way you feel about a particular option. As a result, you may feel paralyzed when trying to make a difficult work decision. At times like that, bring in a decision partner to help you. That will help you to avoid significant delays in key projects.
Don’t go it alone
Even people who have been psychologically healthy for most of their lives may struggle when grieving a significant loss. If you have never engaged with a mental health professional before, you may feel that there’s a stigma associated with needing therapy.
There’s no reason to avoid working with someone if you find the emotions and thoughts you’re having in grief to be overwhelming. You would not stay away from a doctor if your foot was hurting significantly enough that you couldn’t walk. Don’t use fear of engaging with a therapist as an excuse to suffer without help. Instead, reach out to your community to get recommendations for a therapist who has experience working with grief. The resilience skills you learn are likely to benefit you beyond the situation you’re dealing with now.
In addition, there are many great resources out there that can give you suggestions for how to move forward. I was fortunate enough to interview Lisa Keefauver recently, and her book on grieving (while irreverent) is an excellent guide to dealing with loss. In addition, there are many great blogs that people have written with helpful tips that may get you through your worst days. Remember that when you walk down the street and see people walking with friends laughing and talking, that many of those people have suffered significant losses in their lives and have eventually emerged from grief. It may take time, but you’ll learn to integrate significant losses into your life.