Grief and the Workplace

When I started at my job last year, my boss was in the middle of her second round of chemo for breast cancer.  She had been in remission, but the cancer came back, and had spread to her liver. She seemed to be responding to treatment well, was feeling better.  But, the cancer was getting worse. The last few weeks of June, she wasn’t in the office at all, and as of July first, she was officially on a leave of absence.  Not long after that, an email went out to staff and our board members, she had seen two doctors who both confirmed, her cancer was terminal. Hospice care was brought into her home.  Early this afternoon, she passed away, with her husband, two sons, and sister at her side.

I can not even express how completely saddened I am by this news. Our workplace is like a family, we are a community, and while I only had the opportunity to work with my boss directly for a little less than a year, I know how completely changed by this my co-workers will be.

I’ve dealt with personal grief. I’ve lost family members, and a friend, but I’ve never lost someone I’ve worked with.  This is simultaneously new and familiar to me, and even though I wasn’t as close as some of my co-workers who have spent the last seven years getting to know her, this hurts. Knowing I will never see her again is extremely depressing, but what really gets me, is when I think about her sons. Her oldest just graduated from high school, and the other is only 15.

I’m not sure how I’m supposed to get up and go to work tomorrow. Phone calls have been, and are still being made to board and staff members, and emails have already gone out to some. Tomorrow is going to be an extremely emotionally difficult day. I’m having a hard time handling my own sadness, let alone holding and dealing with the sadness I know will be felt by everyone in our community.

Grief is a very personal and difficult byproduct of sadness and loss, and everyone handles his or her grief in his or her own way.  Typically, the office is a place where your personal life and professional life are supposed to be separate. However, I don’t believe it is ever truly possible to separate the two. Your life is your life, no matter how many compartments you create for it, your life is whole, and not piecemeal. So, today I lost not only a supervisor, a co-worker, I lost a friend, and the world lost an amazing, strong, intelligent, kind woman.

6 Comments

Catherine, July 31st 2011 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in 2011, life

The Art of Losing

One Art
Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

In the past year and a half I’ve lost my paternal grandparents (I never knew my mother’s parents), my mother’s sister, and a close friend.  To say the least, it’s been a bit of a difficult year and a half.   Part of the reason I’ve been MIA is that with my grandmother’s death last week and my great Aunt being not well, I’ve been in a bit of a funk.  I’m hoping to get more motivated, but it’s a process.  I’m working on it.

No Comments

Catherine, May 12th 2009 | Tags: , ,
Posted in life

The Joy is Not The Same Without The Pain

I’ve been thinking a lot about M lately. I’ve been seeing him everywhere lately. But, logically, I know it isn’t really him, and usually upon second glance it’s just some guy who has the same color hair as M had, or a similar jaw line, or dimples where M had dimples. Usually it’s someone who really doesn’t look like M at all, but for a split second, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him. For a brief moment I thought, oh how clever of you, M, to play this trick on all of us. To pretend to have died. Maybe you just needed a break for a little bit. A chance to find yourself without all the baggage that comes along with a life. But, I know that isn’t true either, and while it saddens me to think that M is truly gone, forever, what hurts the most, and I think why I think about him so much, is not the fact that he took his own life. That is something I know we will never fully understand, and maybe it’s not for us to understand. I think what keeps him in my mind so much is that I feel like I never really got to say goodbye. I wasn’t able to go to the funeral, I didn’t get the chance to sit in the church with my friends and M’s family, I didn’t get the chance to cry with everyone and to be there to watch him put into the ground. It sounds morbid, I know, but there’s a certain sense of closure that comes along with the ritual of a funeral. A certain sense of finality that I don’t seem to have with M. Maybe, since I wasn’t there, since I didn’t see the casket, I didn’t watch it lowered into the ground, it seems unreal still. It seems like, if I think hard enough, that I can imagine that B didn’t really call me in August to tell me M was gone. It feels like I can just keep thinking that M is there, safe in San Diego still. Maybe it’s just that I keep hoping if I think that long enough, or wish hard enough, it will come true.

No Comments

Catherine, February 8th 2009 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized

In Memory

The Charge of the Light Brigade
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

1.

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
“Charge for the guns!” he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

2.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

3.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

4.

Flash’d all their sabres bare,
Flash’d as they turn’d in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder’d:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro’ the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel’d from the sabre stroke
Shatter’d and sunder’d.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

5.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Death
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

6.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made,
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred.

–

Marty, you are already missed by so many. You are always in my heart.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

No Comments

Catherine, August 10th 2008 | Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in life