The Long Goodbye: Living With Grief

Trigger warning: Please note that this episode and blog will contain discussions of topics including death, grief, addiction, COVID, long COVID and the intersection of a lot of those things.

This episode of Redefining HR is different from my normal format. There will be no video, guests or conversations specifically about innovative HR practices. Today, I’m talking about one of the universal life experiences of being human — living with grief.

We’re all born, and we all die. These are the life events marked across customs, cultures and religions. Despite that ubiquity, discussing death openly is still seen as taboo. Many of us have to battle grief and learn to live with it alone.

This episode came about as I prepared for the annual tribute to my brother Kai, who passed in 2015 after struggling with opioid addiction and mental health challenges. And, as I thought about my tribute, the context of grief stood out, and I want to explore that.

Grief can be isolating, at times seemingly unbearable, and I want to talk about that now. This can be an uncomfortable and even upsetting topic. Be kind to yourself, and know that you can choose to listen in today or come back when we resume our regular programming.

You can also listen/share the episode directly syndicated on any of these channels: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcast | Stitcher | TuneIn

The Grief We’ve All Felt In Recent Years

It’s hard to talk about grief and death in our culture. Many of us don’t know what to say to loved ones or how to comfort them. We don’t know the words or actions that will bring them peace.

In my own experience and talking to others who’ve gone through the journey of grief, having someone there can help a grieving person feel less alone. This is especially important after these past two-plus years of the pandemic. According to the World Health Organization, we’ve lost over 6.5 million lives to COVID-19.

The pandemic has caused grief for huge numbers of people who have lost loved ones. But grief isn’t limited to COVID-related death — 17 million Europeans have experienced long COVID, and up to 4 million Americans are out of work because of it.

People have long struggled with mental health due to grief and unresolved grief, and the pandemic hasn’t helped. That unresolved grief increases anxiety and depression in many adults and affects every part of their lives, including the workplace.

Grief can affect anyone, from front-line workers all the way up to senior executives. Some estimates place the annual cost of unresolved grief at billions of dollars per year. Yes, the human cost comes first, but the workplace costs are also very real.

This all suggests we need to continue thinking progressively about mental health and how we can support our employees as they go through their grief journeys.

Bereavement Policies Need to Improve

Many workplaces are providing better support for people dealing with mental health issues, grief and other challenges, but there’s much more to do. For example, bereavement policies are all over the place.

Too many bereavement policies assign weight to the closeness of the relationship — parent, grandparent, sibling, etc. — but there’s no ideal measurement of time for grieving someone. And the grief doesn’t only begin at death. Companies need to think of grief not just in the aftermath but also at the beginning of this journey — the pre-grieving stage.

If you’ve taken care of a terminally ill loved one, you’ve known what the outcome would be. During that time, you’re focused on doing everything you can to support that person, but there is only so much anyone can do.

Pre-grieving is real and something that we don’t talk about enough. Each grief journey is different and subjective. But the more we can talk about this, the closer we are to removing that taboo and stigma.

My Journey With Grief

My forearm tattoo is a tribute to my family that I got after Kai’s death. One chevron for each family member lost, so they’re always with me.

It’s important to talk about death and grief. This is why I am sharing my story. When I was 5, my mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I had no idea what that meant, much less had experience with progressive degenerative diseases.

Initially, my mother’s walking and motor functions were impaired. By the time I was a freshman in high school, my mother was quadriplegic. She lost the use of her legs and most of her right arm but had some usage in her left, allowing her to continue her love of reading. It’s a difficult experience growing up with that. I noticed the decline more and more as I grew older.

Seeing it up close, I knew what she was going through, even though she was one of the strongest people I’ve ever known. She never felt sorry for herself, even on her hardest days. But for me, I compartmentalized. I didn’t want her to see me sad, so I buried my feelings to be brave and strong for her. I soon realized the damage I had done to my own mental health.

When she eventually passed, I felt relief but was also angry. She no longer was suffering, but when we celebrated her life and people toasted and laughed, my anger was high. I didn’t understand why people were celebrating. Since then, I’ve realized I was experiencing grief. I was relieved she was at peace, but I missed her.

That was my first experience with grief. I experienced the stages of pre-grief and grief a few years later, when my father was diagnosed with cancer. I will never forget the last time I visited him, the last time we spent together. When we said goodbye at the end of that trip, we both knew it was goodbye. We held each other, we cried a lot.

When he passed, I was a grown-up orphan with so much pain, loss and sadness at my parents’ inability to meet my children. Although I had made my peace with my mother’s passing, when I lost my father, it did set me back. It changed my relationship with grief.

Five years later I lost my brother Kai to opioid abuse. Losing the last remaining immediate family member so suddenly was an entirely new type of grief. It crushed me. The finality of that loss and knowing your birth family is gone is such a heavy burden to carry.

I’m still processing this grief. I may always be processing this grief.

Living with Grief

If you’re carrying grief please know you’re not alone. If you’re in the early days of this journey, it may feel like you’ll never recover. I get that. The journey of grief is non-linear. While it may feel impossible at times, you will move through it. You’ll always carry it with you, but the acute pain you feel in the early days of loss will subside with time.

The “Ball and the Box” illustration below is the best I’ve seen that illustrates grief.

In the early stages, the ball is very big. You cannot move the box without it frequently hitting the pain button. It rattles around on its own in there and hits the button over and over again, sometimes so much that it feels like you can’t stop it – you can’t control it – it just keeps hurting.
But as time goes on, the ball gets smaller. It doesn’t disappear completely and when it hits the pain button, it’s just as intense, but generally, it is easier to get through each day.
The analogy can help to be able to talk about how you’re feeling each day. You may say that some days the ball is really big, endlessly hitting the button, and you just have to wait until it gets smaller again.

Grief never goes away entirely, but if we can normalize the conversation, we can remove the taboo and not feel isolated along the way.

If you’re carrying grief, I’ve included some resources below that may help you on that journey. They’ve been resources I’ve used, and others recommended by fellow grievers in my network.

I want to end this post with this message from Andrew Garfield. It’s a beautiful tribute to his mom where he reframes grief as unexpressed love. I hope this message resonates with you.

Andrew Garfield on grief as unexpressed love. (credit: Late Night with Stephen Colbert)