Grief & Empathy at Work, Part 2
The continuance of an open, epistolary dialog with Laura Sullivan Cassidy
Still-Life with a Skull by Philippe de Champaigne
This is the 4th in a short series of letters between myself and my friend, Laura Sullivan Cassidy. If you didn’t check out her work the first time we exchanged letters, you should. She has this way of writing that sounds a lot like the voice in our heads. The one that is smart, and curious, and also fully aware of the complexities and messiness that life wings in our direction.
Letters 1, 2, and 3 are all helpful context for what’s to follow…
Hi Laura,
You part-timed at a funeral home?! How fascinating. There’s more to hear about that some other time, but I do think it’s an interesting nugget from your last letter that got me thinking…
How can we possibly offer bereavement support at work if we don’t understand grief?
Sure, far too many of us have certainly grieved, but that doesn’t mean we’re practiced in it. And what a god-awful thing to have to practice. But it stands to reason, much like anything else, if we don’t practice it, how could we learn to do it better?
In my first letter I touched briefly on my own memento mori meditation practice. More often than not, when I tell people I spend a portion of every morning contemplating impermanence, I get a look that says, that’s dark. But to me, and to others who practice this, it isn’t. It’s life. And learning how to get comfortable with our consciousness’s short ride in these meat suits brings greater comfort to my days. So, while doing this morning practice is helpful to me, and working part time in a funeral home helped you, I guess one of the big questions we’re asking each other in these letters is, how does one get better at empathizing with grief and death for others when it’s just so darn personal?
And the truth is, I’m not sure you can.
What I am (mostly) sure of is that while the ability to understand the Byzantine world of someone else’s internal grief is largely unknowable, having the tools and the grace to create a container for them to feel into their bereavement is a vital skill that many of us can acquire and share.
Back in 2017, the New York Times published an article entitled “The New Death Experts: Death Doulas and Death Midwives”. In it, they talked about a rising interest in having stable, well-trained guides working in hospice centers and elsewhere to help people confront their forthcoming demise. I’ve personally wanted to go through the training for this for a while and perhaps this exchange was just the nudge needed to get me into motion.
Over in a different corner of the internet, for the last few years I have been stanning for Caitlin Doughty, a mortician with a couple hundred thousand Instagram followers who has been a huge advocate in the death positive movement. She founded The Order of the Good Death, which I’m sure you (Laura) know about but others may not. Their charter:
The Order is about making death a part of your life. That means committing to staring down your death fears—whether it be your own death, the death of those you love, the pain of dying, the afterlife (or lack thereof), grief, corpses, bodily decomposition, or all of the above. Accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety and terror of modern culture are not.
Gosh I really love what they’re doing. And the branding and tone of the work is [insert chef’s kiss] perfect.
So with a growing legion of death doulas, an Instagram-famous mortician, and a death-positive zeitgeist shift on the come up, how do we ensure our workplaces become safe harbors when Anubus’s skiff arrives at our shores?
When I teach empathy to a team, one of the first lessons we focus on is the cultivation of non-judgmental curiosity. This is a ten-dollar way of saying be open. Too often we let our own conscious or unconscious biases color the way we see the world. We close ourselves off to so much by doing this. And to add insult to injury, rarely do our work colleagues take the time to slow down and ask thoughtful questions that connect on a level deeper than the KPI du jour. We’ve attuned ourselves to efficiency instead of empathy.
Empathy takes training. And noticing. We need to rewire ourselves to catch when we shift into automatic “work mode” and lose the grip on our own humanity. Often it’s the ugly cry that erupts at our desk, or the sprint to the restroom when our well of grief overflows that finally rattles colleagues loose from their flow states and circling-backs and needless reply-all-ing. It’s in this moment that their humanity returns in a whoosh and attempts to caretake and salve come hard and fast, which ironically, is rarely the way we need these (albeit thoughtful) efforts to arrive.
During the pandemic, one of the exercises I would ask folks to practice was considering what they learned or discovered about a colleague since switching over to remote work. You see, for a long while most people knew their colleagues as Judy in accounting or Frank in Marketing. They were one-dimensional character actors in the play called Work. But now, because of a tenacious viral outbreak, you’ve been (virtually) invited to Judy’s home. Behind her, while you have your umteenth Zoom call, you notice for the first time the Phish poster on the wall. “Is Judy a Phish head?!,” you ask yourself in disbelief. While waiting for the perpetually late colleague to join (we all have one) you practice some of that non-judgmental curiosity and ask her about it. She lights up. She’s surprised it’s taken so long for someone to notice it, but she happily leans into a story about her long forgotten, dreadlock festooned college days where she traveled for a whole summer following the band.
This is the sort of thing we got the opportunity to discover when the pandemic invited us into our colleagues homes. They became dimensionalized. Frank likes to fly fish and Enrique has two great danes in a one bedroom apartment and Suzanne prefers to work in her 6-year old’s bedroom because “it’s the quietest room in the house.” This, THIS, is the sort of stuff we can empathize and connect with when we slow down to notice, to listen, and to ask questions. It helps us to see our colleagues in a more complete way. A real person with hopes and dreams and dirty dishes in the sink and an unpaid parking ticket.
So how does this bring us back to grief?
Well, frankly, it’s the same thing. We need to notice the sometimes imperceptible changes in the people around us. Is someone more quiet than usual? Do they feel a bit removed? Maybe it would help to ask how they’re doing.
Grief takes many forms and often the bereaved resist the complexities that might ensue if they overshare in an environment not built to receive their grief. Building comfort with grief is a way to create space for it to occur.
And for what it’s worth, this isn’t a new thing. Back in the 17th century there was a whole artistic genre known as Vanitas, which were artwork featuring symbols of mortality meant to encourage reflection on the meaning and evanescence of life. The photo I’ve used at the top of this article is actually from this body of work, with items symbolizing life (tulips), death (skull), and time (hourglass).
Today, a few centuries later, the working definition of a good death is, “free from avoidable distress and suffering for patient, family, and caregivers, in general accord with the patient’s and family’s wishes, and reasonably consistent with clinical, cultural, and ethical standards.”
However you define it and allow yourself closer to the topic, perhaps it’s time to welcome a greater comfort with the dialogue around death in the workplace. Perhaps we can bravely embrace the hard conversations and the effort it takes to be able to hold space for someone grappling with grief. It certainly won’t be comfortable at first, nor will any company get it all right. But in the end, isn’t that a perfect and poetic reflection of life?
Take Good Care,
MV
