Grief Work : Work Grief

Grief Work : Work Grief

As a grief support practitioner, I am often identified as someone who does “Grief Work” and that is indeed accurate. I support, listen, and help grieving people navigating a loss. For some of my colleagues the only losses they support are human death losses. However, I support individuals experiencing all types of losses, because as we traverse our lives we often find that losses build on losses. Grief rears its head sometimes in the face of a so-called “minor” loss because it brings up the feelings experienced by all the previous losses in one’s life.

Currently, I am anticipating a loss. The loss of a steady stream of income from my project management work. I have had the absolute privilege of working with a team of highly-intelligent and dedicated software developers and the corporation that we work for is ready to lay us off.

I’ve been to this rodeo so many times, that I see the bull charging out of the shoot way in advance of it actually serving up the pink slip. It will be the usual song and dance of how much they appreciated our work and how they wish us well but this is a cost-cutting measure. One of the things that really irks me at this juncture is that I’ve seen this coming for about two months, however, whenever I ask any of the leaders in my group they refuse to provide any information. One of my colleagues said, “I guess I’ll just start looking for something else.”

Earlier in my career I didn’t see the warning signs and only knew something bad was happening when I ended up in the conference room with fewer people. Being in the conference room with the largest group of people, at that time, meant your job was safe for now.

Another time, the company I was working for had relocated myself and my family over 1,600 miles to be near the majority of the team I was leading. It was great to be near them and the Operations center. 

However, after I had been in the new location for about 10 months, I called the Accounts Payable department to find out why one of my vendors hadn’t been paid for the past two months. The Accounts Payable Representative said, “We haven’t been paying any of our vendors.” The alarm bells went off in my head and I knew an acquisition was in the works. 

I bailed out of that job and landed with Performics in Chicago and worked for Google for 3 weeks before Performics was acquired by the Publicis Groupe, fortunately, without any layoffs. My manager at the previous company was not so fortunate and a few months after I left he was escorted from his office after the acquiring company determined his services were no longer needed.

Then there was the time that my husband and I were in the middle of buying a house. I had this strong premonition that I would be laid off and I just didn’t want to believe it, but sure enough, two weeks before the closing, I was let go along with everyone else in my division. Fortunately, we closed on the house without any issue and two weeks after we moved in, I found another job.

Then there was that time that I was laid off because I refused to take a demotion. One of the Directors that I worked closely with was shocked that I didn’t take the demotion while I looked for something else. I said to him that I had more self-respect than that. My Dad said it was a cowboy move – not accepting the demotion – sure enough it was and it worked out for me. I landed another job two weeks later and gained tons of experience as a contract project manager working with various companies for four and a half years.

And one of the most memorable lay offs I experienced was from a start up that laid us off via a Zoom webinar where we couldn’t see who else was in the meeting. It was incredibly unpersonable and we were given 60 minutes after the meeting until we were locked out of our laptops. This sent all of us into a frenzy of sharing phone numbers and personal email addresses. At the time, I had 16 Scrum Masters reporting to me and two of them were on vacation and, at first, I didn’t know if all of them had been let go. I wasn’t given that information, I just had to ask each person individually. For the two people on vacation, I reached out to them as soon as I could. For all of my team members, I offered recommendations and my professional network and they all eventually landed in roles with other companies and a few of them started their own businesses. Fortunately, this lay off had a generous severance package which helped me enormously because it took me 3 months to find another job.

And last but not least, there was the time I was laid off right after I returned from maternity leave. The grant-funded project I was working on was not successful in receiving another year of funding. As a dazed and confused new mother, I also had to job hunt. Fortune smiled on me again and I found a great new position within a month after that lay off.

I’m sharing this because this is like the list of losses that I sometimes encourage bereaved people to write – depending upon their situation.

For me, this is my work grief. I grieve the many jobs that I’ve been laid off from and miss the people I had the honor of working alongside. I mourn the opportunities to grow professionally within an organization and to contribute to creating products and processes that help a company, and its team members, succeed. And every time I am laid off – or see it coming – grief bubbles up in me – along with anxiety about how I will support my family, pay for health insurance, etc., etc.

Though I may at times think I can overcome or ignore grief, it always finds me in the various circumstances of life. Alas, I have learned not to shun it but to accept that it is a part of loving and living.