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.
When Grief Hits Home
at Work
HRE Managing Editor Kristen Frasch and her husband, Jim Johnson, in a photo taken in 1999.
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Reflectıon