Worker Appalled By The Amount Of Bereavement Leave She Got After Unexpectedly Losing Her Brother
Nothing is more poorly understood or insensitively handled at work than grief.
Rawpixel.com | Shutterstock Grief is arguably the most poorly understood human experience there is, and the fact that it is probably the one emotion people are the most uncomfortable with surely doesn't help. People will jump through hoops to not have to be exposed to people's grieving, which is bizarre given that death comes for all of us, no matter what.
But as bad as we are at dealing with grief interpersonally, the way our jobs handle it is downright barbaric, and completely out of sync with the basic principles of psychology. One woman's experience perfectly illustrates this, as even her job's generous bereavement leave policy quickly turned into something farcically insensitive.
A worker is furious about her job's bereavement leave policy after the unexpected loss of her brother.
The death of a loved one is where American workplaces' "buck up and get back to work" ethos reaches its darkest and cruelest extreme. Most American jobs offer no more than three days for bereavement—if they offer any at all—and it typically comes with stipulations, like only applying to the death of an immediate family member, that bear no resemblance whatsoever to how people's lives actually work.
Marcos Castillo | Shutterstock
Grief experts and mental health professionals say the grieving process typically takes at least a year; "immediate family" means nothing whatsoever to many people, especially in communities where distance or estrangement are common and friends fill in the gaps; and three days isn't remotely long enough to get back to work after someone you consider "immediate family" has been ripped away from you. The whole thing is absurd.
This woman's story perfectly underlines the idiocy of this approach. Her brother died out of nowhere, leaving her family in utter and complete shock. She's lucky that her job offered her eight days of bereavement leave, nearly four times what most people get. It still wasn't adequate, however.
"I understand that is a lot more than others have," she wrote in her Reddit post. "My Dad had 3 days, my sister had 5… I think it’s insane that people think that after the loss of a loved one that they will be ok enough to go back to work so quickly."
When she asked for time to work from home while grieving, she was forced to get a doctor's note.
Lucky though she was to have nearly two weeks off, it was not enough time for her to feel like she could go back to work without bursting into tears at her desk, because that is how human brains work. Nobody is over a sudden death in two weeks. Some people still aren't over it after two years.
So she asked to work from home for the next few months so that she could grieve in private instead of while sitting in a cubicle. "A good 80% of my colleagues are permanent work-from-home as a default," she explained. "...Since I was hybrid already and most of my colleagues were remote it would be an easy ask."
How wrong she was. "Nope. I had to file a work accommodation request to have the honor to cry about my brother’s death at home while working instead of at the office 40 minutes away," she wrote. This includes a requirement that she get a doctor's note — for what, exactly, it's unknown. What is her doctor supposed to diagnose her with? Clinical sad?
On top of this, she can't afford the doctor visit in the first place, on top of reeling from grief and not feeling up to driving all over town to get a note from a doctor about being sad. "Part of me wants to scream, 'my brother just died,'" she wrote. "I know I have to go back to work when I’m not ready — but I thought at the very least they would let me grieve at home without having to jump through hoops."
Bereavement leave is inadequate and misunderstood in most of the world.
For once, there is a "benefit" that the United States isn't that much worse about than most of the rest of the world. While some European countries provide a week or more, and others at least federally mandate their otherwise paltry offerings, most countries have similar procedures to the U.S.: two to three days, for immediate family only.
That said, bereavement leave varies widely state to state in the U.S., with some having more holistic approaches that offer more time, extend it beyond the immediate family, and even include things like pregnancy loss as eligible events to use the leave.
Still, overall, companies' policies are nothing short of cruel. Using myself as an example, in 2002, when I was 23, my best friend died out of nowhere, and I was catatonic for months. I wasn't entitled to bereavement leave because he wasn't even related to me, let alone immediate family.
More recently, I lost two uncles and an aunt six months apart from each other. The aunt and one of the uncles were basically my parents, because my mother disowned me for being gay, and my relationship with my father is strained. Thankfully, these losses all happened before I took the job for which I am writing this article, because none of them would have qualified for the company's bereavement leave policy.
PTO is always an option, of course, assuming you have any banked at the time of your loss (and you're even offered it in the first place). But the U.S.'s offerings there are typically so paltry that it often puts workers in the position of not being able to take any other time off for the rest of the year if they want to grieve a death. Hope you don't mind bailing on your family to work over Christmas so you can take time to process a loss!
This approach is bizarre, unconscionably cruel, and informed by understandings of death and grief that are completely divorced from the facts and realities of people's lives, even after the lessons of a pandemic and opioid crisis that should have woken people up.
When even generous policies like this woman's employer require jumping through hoops to have a doctor "prove" you're sad about your 20-something brother being wiped off the planet in the blink of an eye, it's an indictment of a workplace culture that is sicker than any of us probably realize.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
