Human Resource Executive

But I digress. Back at the conference, what followed was surreal and horrifying, despite the amazing support I got from friends—including my boss, who immediately shed his conference-co-chair hat and insisted we go eat (a prospect furthest from my mind). Later that night, after calling family and arranging for a funeral home, I had to return to my hotel room, pack my bags, try and sleep, then grab a taxi to the airport the following morning, go through security and sit through almost six hours of flight time before touching down and driving to meet my sons, who were waiting to escort me to the body of the man I would love forever.

What’s followed since has been mind-numbing, energy-depleting, sleep-depriving, appetite-suppressing, chest-quaking and nauseating, not to mention sometimes scary. Because I had used up all the time I was entitled to under the Family and Medical Leave Act caring for my father during his hospice, I was left with my allotted three days of bereavement leave—still the national standard, experts say—before returning to the diversion and demands of my job. In all honesty, many moments were spent staring at a computer screen, remembering what needed doing but asking many more questions about processes and decisions than I had before. Other moments were spent on pure adrenaline, fulfilling all my editorial responsibilities with a determination and directness that probably said to staff and co-workers, “This woman is so strong!” when that was the last thing I was feeling.

I am paying for that now in this second year, which is far harder than the first, which called for antidepressants to get through the 2016 holiday season and beyond. Grief counselors, mine and a few I contacted for this story, say grievers need to grieve. Suppressing and ignoring will only lead to complications later on. Lesson learned.

More than one also described an employee returning to work after a significant loss as “the elephant in the room”—the person no one knows quite what to say to, the person most people tiptoe around. But they also all say employers, in general, can be doing more to help the grieving worker get through the loss—or, in my case, compound loss—and get back to creating and producing sooner than later, which of course helps the bottom line.

Managing Grief is Hard

Indeed, creativity and productivity do take a hit in the face of devastating loss. For me, I’ve been feeding posts and stories to our blog and website, processing everything I’ve always processed, ensuring deadlines and standards are met, but often welcoming the comfort of processes and systems over the prospect of taking chest-quaking creative chances and leaps of faith. This is my first feature since my husband died. I’ve been more

BY KRISTEN B. FRASCH My life changed forever in 2015. My world changed. I changed. On Oct. 20 that year, while blogging from the press room of our own HR Technology Conference and Exposition® in Las Vegas, I got a phone
call from my next-door neighbor. She
asked in tears if I was sitting down.

She had just found the lifeless body of my husband, Jim, in our bed—the victim of a heart attack, according to the responders and police who were already there when she called.

Earlier that day, she had phoned to say she was concerned she hadn’t seen him emerge from our

I summoned the strength to assure

HRE managing editor tells her story in hopes it might shed light on what HR and managers can do when one of their own suffers significant loss and struggles to work through it.

her I had talked with him earlier that day, had asked how he was feeling, concerned before leaving that his ankles were swelling and there was increasing pain in his lower limbs due to diabetic neuropathy.

“My feet hurt,” I remember him telling me in that call, my cell phone pressed to my ear as I ran from a vendor meeting to a session. “My feet hurt.” Those were the last words I would ever hear from him.

Mind you, this same husband had just joined me three months earlier to be at my side during my father’s hospice and final life journey due to metastatic prostate cancer. I can still feel his hands squeezing my shoulders the moment my wonderful dad, his buddy in so many ways, took his final breath. I hadn’t even begun to properly grieve my father with my executrix work at hand, and decisions as my mother’s now-power of attorney. To top it off, a week after my husband died, I had to put dear Rodger down due to kidney failure.