Grief & Empathy at Work

An open, epistolary dialog with Laura Sullivan Cassidy

Image: Midjourney AI, prompted by Michael Ventura

We’re all gonna die. But before that happens, we’re all gonna go to work. The thing is, the humanness that we experience in loss, is often some of the most taboo stuff to discuss at work. Death and grieving are decidedly anti-productive and so we too often tamp down our experience and feelings and hope no one asks, or notices, how much we might be suffering until the time comes we can slink out of the office and ugly cry in the confines of our own homes.

My friend Laura Sullivan Cassidy writes about grief and loss and this mixed up kinda way we all feel when we go through it. Her Substack, Griever’s Ball, is a “not-grim” compendium of thoughts and provocations for people who are working on building their comfort with the idea that we’re all here temporarily.

Substack made this new feature that lets authors write letters to each other in a sorta voyeuristic pen pal format. Together, we decided to tackle conversations about loss and grief and empathy in the context of our work lives and what happens when you’re grieving, but you also gotta pay the bills. Laura’s opening letter to me can be found here. Below, you’ll find my response. We’re both looking forward to continuing the conversation and invite you to join in with your own thoughts and comments.

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Hi Laura,

I’m so glad you asked me to join you in this letter writing escapade. In part, I’m grateful because I too think about death and the experience of losing loved ones regularly. Not necessarily in a macabre, grim reaper kind of way (sometimes I do), but more often in a memento mori sort of practice. A way to remember that all of this is finite and there is always an opportunity to breathe a bit more life into our days.

I got your first letter at the start of the year. It was a bad time and so it took a minute to respond. Back in January we got a pretty aggressive diagnosis from our veterinarian about our oldest dog, Darryl. He told us that our little man didn’t have much time left on the mortal coil and that we should start to plan his euthanizing.

That afternoon in between deep, sobbing cries in the shower, I vomited from the grief. Darryl is the closest thing I’ll ever have to a child (my wife, Caroline, and I decided long ago that we would build a family with dogs instead of two-legged kids). Darryl is my first dog and while I have always known his time was going to be shorter than I wanted it to be, I was not prepared to handle this news.

Over the next few days we expanded and contracted, like a harmonium full of sorrow, droning noises of grief and sadness in private spaces of our home, careful not to let our pups (there are two of them) know how much we were hurting. For us, our grief needed to be something we kept them free from so that our time with them was joyful.

A week or two of additional tests, a visit to his oncologist, and some complicated conversations later, we prepared ourselves for the worst. Darryl’s behavior declined precipitously and on a cold rainy January day I had to carry him in from our yard because he didn’t have the strength to hop up the two stairs of our patio after he went outside to pee. That was the day we called a house-call vet to arrange his euthanizing.

How fucking wretched of a thing it is to have to choose a day, and a time, to do the unimaginable. To look at your fucking calendar and say, this, this stupid Wednesday, this will be the day we make an appointment to say goodbye to our sweet boy. But that was what we did.

Three hours after making that appointment something very strange happened. The house was quiet with sorrow. Caroline and I were staring into nothingness. Tired from crying. Heartachingly exhausted. And then Darryl trotted into the room looking like his old self.

I have no idea what happened. Maybe he heard us talking to the vet and realized, “oh shit, I’m giving them the wrong impression.” Maybe it was because the incessant rain we were having let up and he was feeling less arthritic. Maybe he was just in a funk. Whatever it was, we didn’t care. Our boy seemed to be back.

We gave it another day to see if it was just a ruse. A quick, final burst of qi like the flare of a sun before collapsing in on itself, but it wasn’t. It’s been two months now and he’s sorta back to normal. Sure, his bones ache a bit but the tumor seems to have plateaued its growth and he’s smiling and eating and even hopping onto the bed at night like he did when he was a puppy.

We’re not deluding ourselves. We know we’re now on borrowed time. But we’re not living in “days to go” but in hopeful, longer, more precious increments.

Now, I know you asked me about grief and the workplace and so far all I’ve talked about is a traumatic tussle with grief and loss and our dog, Darryl. But that’s the thing, how on earth could I have thought about work, or ‘business as usual’ when it felt like a part of my soul was dying. But that’s what all of us, each and every one of us humans must tangle with when grief and loss arrives between the hours of 9-to-5 (or thereabouts).

So what are we to do about it? What sort of compartmentalizing, distracting, or safeguarding our emotional selves is required to not go dragging our grief all around the office?

I don’t have the answer.

But I do know that all of this is human. All these feelings are feelings we’ve all encountered, or will encounter, and that if we can’t have the space to, at the very least, acknowledge them at our workplaces, the places we spend most of our waking hours of the week, than we aren’t only hurting ourselves, we’re perpetuating a taboo that should have been torn down long ago.

I’m not saying that we need our workplaces to become grief centers. Fuck, most employers have a hard enough time keeping the snacks restocked. How on earth are we gonna rely on them for deep, emotional support for the grieving?

There was a recent Economist article that caught my eye entitled “Don’t bring your whole self to work”. It went on to say that the growing trend of employees feeling empowered to be their complete self, warts and all, was in fact an ugly, overcorrection in corporate culture that needs to be right sized. The article said that in fact, “no one wants to see it [your whole self].” I see it a little differently.

As you know, I am a writer and educator on the topic of empathy. Years ago, during the time my book came into the world, another author had published a book entitled “Against Empathy: The case for rational compassion”. When on my press tour for the book, I would often get asked what I think of Paul Bloom and his view. The thing is, Paul wasn’t wrong, he just took a very narrow definition of empathy and co-opted it into a perspective that sounded academically contrarian and buzzy. The title turned heads because who wouldn’t want empathy to be more ubiquitous? But that’s the thing, it wasn’t really an argument against empathy, it was an argument for a different idea that used an incomplete definition of empathy as a soap box to try and stand taller in the crowd.

The Economist article is doing the same thing.

We do need to feel that our whole selves are safe at work. But the challenge is that our modern workplaces, and more pointedly, our modern leaders, need to be equipped to receive employees as their whole person. Now, don’t get me wrong, general decorum and broadly accepted social norms still apply here. I am not imaging a world where an investment banker feels comfortable showing up at a meeting in the furry outfit he wore the night prior with their plush-adorned lover and regaling colleagues about their exploits. But “fursonas” aside, I do think it’s reasonable to expect that organizations start to make more of an investment in training leaders and emboldening cultures with the principles of psychological safety.

By definition, psychological safety is the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. At work, it's a shared expectation held by members of a team that colleagues will not embarrass, reject, or punish them for sharing ideas, taking risks, or soliciting feedback.¹

Grief needs psychological safety too.

We cannot expect to find everything we need in our workplaces to help us salve the wounds of loss. It would be unrealistic to assume we could. But it is reasonable to expect that our grief will be seen, and understood (to the extent anyone can understand the ultra personal experience of grief), and given space.

So how do we do that? How do we train our teams and our leaders to be better stewards to this sort of culture? It requires vulnerability and trust. These are things that many cultures are uncomfortable with offering their employees because they can be perceived to erode the very things that businesses require to be successful – efficiency and speed.

Trust takes time. Vulnerability is messy. These things are hard to find space for in an organization that’s full of too many hearts and minds that need attention. But it’s the only way. If we can’t find time in our busy lives to acknowledge that life is in fact only about the experience of living and dying, than what are we even doing?

I don’t know if this is helpful. I’m not sure if I can imagine a world where some of the things I’ve written to you in this letter don’t get lambasted or laughed out of the room. But I guess that’s what I mean when I ask for the grace and safety to be my human, whole self.

Take good care,

MV

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1. https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/what-is-psychological-safety-at-work/#:~:text=Psychological%20safety%20is%20the%20belief,taking%20risks%2C%20or%20soliciting%20feedback.