“She died. My sister is gone!” That’s what my team member yelled through the phone during the first week I became a new manager. She was hysterical, understandably.
I froze and didn’t know what to say, except I instinctively just uttered the words “I’m so sorry. Please don’t worry about work at all right now, you should go be with your family.”
I never understood what it felt like to grieve. I knew what it was like to feel sad about the passing of someone, but those “someones” were usually more distant. A grandparent. An aunt of a close friend. There was always a bit of a distance, and I luckily hadn’t had to face that direct piercing of pure grief, until my father-in-law, Bob, and my favorite 16.5 year old Yorkie girl, Emma, passed within one and a half weeks of one another.
I joined a pet loss grief support group on Zoom yesterday. 5 strangers were there. It was fascinating to me how we were all willing to join a cold call with 5 other strangers and cry—sob, even—meanwhile not do the same with people we see every single day. And it wasn’t as though they didn’t have family or friends. We talked about our personal lives too. Our spouses, our coworkers, our friends. It’s ironic how something so deeply painful as grief, which could impact our lives in profound ways, is also the same thing we cannot bring ourselves to talk about openly with the people we see in our lives regularly. Why is that?
When I joined my seemingly endless meetings this past week, especially in 1 on 1s—I usually got a brief question of “how are you doing”. Not the normal sentence spoken out of courtesy or etiquette. But the genuine “how are you DOING?”, meaning with your grief, your loss, your pain. And when I begin to share details of how I’m actually feeling, how the events rolled out to lead to the death of Emma and Bob, the room starts feeling tense and uncomfortable. Then there is a brief pause, and a quick transition maybe with a little bit of humor, to dive right into the work-talk.
Why is it that we as humans are so uncomfortable talking about emotions at work? It’s as if there’s a force field as soon as you enter work-mode, that you’re somehow supposed to completely erase your mind that you’re human. Like that scene in Men In Black where their mind is completely erased in less than a second. Erasure of the fact that you have feelings. That you are carrying something, constantly—whether it’s with your parents, or siblings, or what your best friend said to you the night before. It’s as if there is this invisible rulebook that says “DO NOT BE HUMAN”, and it constantly battles with you whenever you have the wave of emotion come up at work and you want to just say “F- this all, this isn’t that important”, as you figuratively flip the table. As you’re reminded that you’re human. With complex, deep, sometimes uncontrollable emotions that are too heavy to bear alone.
Something one of the strangers in the Zoom grief support group said stuck with me.
And I’ve been talking to so many friends and family members over the past 55 days since saying goodbye to Emma. To try and get some solace. They all had words of comfort that they shared from their own experience. But this single thing that that stranger said to me was something new, that I hadn’t heard before. It stopped me in that moment. I was sitting on a train ride back home from San Francisco, after I had just finished delivering a keynote at a career summit. I was dressed in a simple crew-cut black shirt, with a black belt, and my black slacks stopped at my ankles, paired with black leather shoes. All topped with a light gray blazer. People were all around, also trying to get home after a busy day, and here I was staring at a screen with 5 other boxes and faces—just crying. Tears rolling down my eyes. I didn’t feel an ounce of embarrassment, or shame, or any self-doubt. I didn’t feel uncomfortable, like I do when I’m sitting in that same Zoom screen, but with coworkers whom I’ve worked with for years, some even over a decade. It’s so strange how it feels so free sometimes to show emotions and cry with strangers watching or seeing you, without a care in the world. Maybe it’s something about the lack of consequence that makes it easier. Maybe it’s because I knew that after I left that train, I probably would never see these people again. And if I did, I likely wouldn’t even be able to pick them out from a crowd. Because they’re unfamiliar to me. But their presence allowed me to feel familiar to myself. They allowed me to open up and feel, without fear or thoughts of what they would think of me. Because, who cares? They were mere strangers.
What this stranger said to me on the Zoom call was: All of that pain and suffering our pets would have felt if we continued to let the days go on—especially those with a terminal illness—that pain and suffering is what we made a decision and choice to take on. Instead of having them feel it, with whatever remaining days they naturally had, our decision was to take on that pain and suffering ourselves, through the form of grieving, and missing them, and twisting and turning with this inner turmoil in the days after we decide to let them go peacefully through euthanasia. And that trade, is yet another act of love. What I added on afterwards was—for the amount of unconditional love that Emma and our pets offer us, the trade off of me feeling this pain and suffering is something that I am willing to bear, because it is just a fraction of what they offered to us their entire lives. And for that, I am forever grateful and in awe.
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