grief at – From Diana Wisdom to ER physician Pamela Buchanan and HR executive Carolyn Moore, grieving workers describe the same rupture: a phone call at work, a limited bereavement window, and a return to targets that can feel like abandonment. Experts say the result is
For some workers, the hardest part of losing someone doesn’t start at the funeral. It starts when the phone rings—while they’re on the clock—and they realize there may be no room to fall apart.
Diana Wisdom kept working while her teenage son, Bryce, fought rare kidney cancer. In March 2019, Bryce texted that he had blood in his urine. She rushed him to the hospital, where doctors removed his right kidney. Then came 16 months of treatment—chemotherapy, radiation, doctor’s appointments, and unexpected complications. “Everything felt like an emergency to someone,” Wisdom said. “It’s difficult to find the emotional energy to care about a premium increase while your son is vomiting from treatment and looking to you for comfort.”.
The pressure didn’t ease when Bryce went into remission. A few weeks later, the cancer returned and had spread. Wisdom said the days became “a balancing act between being the mother Bryce needed and the employee my company expected me to be.” When Bryce. 17. took his last breath. he told her: “I’ve gotta go mom.”.
She left her job for a “fresh start” and hoped a new company would be more accommodating. It wasn’t.
At the next company, the support changed only slightly—then broke again when her husband’s health deteriorated in 2024. After suffering from kidney failure and complications from high blood pressure, he was hospitalized and then put on life support. After he died, Wisdom needed nearly two weeks to make funeral arrangements and bottle up her grief. Her manager was supportive, but company policy allowed only three paid days of bereavement leave. “That experience reinforced something I had already learned through grief: Workplaces often acknowledge loss. but they rarely make room for it. ” Wisdom said.
The contrast wasn’t subtle. A year before. when she joined Liberty Mutual. Wisdom took the day off on her son’s birthday and told her team why. Coworkers checked on her throughout the day. When her mother died. she didn’t expect much. but the company gave her five days off. and her manager encouraged her to take more time if she needed it. For Wisdom. that was the first time in her career she felt her employer recognized that grief “does not follow a schedule.”.
The stories travel across industries, but the pattern holds. Grief experts say they hear similar accounts constantly: a loss arrives, and then the workplace’s response—often measured in a handful of days—doesn’t match how long recovery can actually take.
Grief experts say a large share of the working population is affected at any given time. According to workplace bereavement firm Bereave, 1 in 9 workers are mourning the loss of a loved one.
Yet most bereavement planning assumes grief ends quickly. Loss can linger for months or years. but employees in one of the darkest moments of their lives typically get just three to five days of bereavement leave and then are expected to return to work and “back to normal.” Few organizations offer anything beyond kind words and a referral to an employee assistance program. said Rebecca Feinglos. a certified grief support specialist. founder of Grieve Leave and host of the podcast Grief’d Up.
Feinglos said managers often lack training. Co-workers may not know what to say and sidestep conversations, leaving employees to manage alone while still trying to hit monthly targets. The unspoken message, she said, is blunt: leave your emotions at the door.
“What we see so often is that when people come back to work, they feel incredibly isolated. They don’t feel a sense of reintegration,” Feinglos said. “Your world just fell apart. Your person just died. And you are expected to go back to your spreadsheets and to hitting your monthly targets.”
She speaks from personal experience. On a Saturday in March 2020. during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when the world was on the verge of shutting down. Feinglos—then a senior policy adviser in North Carolina—was tapped to help the state declare a lockdown of the state’s schools. On the way in. she called her dad. who had been her best friend since her mom died from brain cancer when she was 13. Something in his voice worried her. He didn’t sound good—short of breath.
Her father. who had taken her to basketball and football games and prom dress shopping. told her to be safe. that he was proud of her. and that he loved her. A couple hours later, she was pulled out of a crisis response meeting after her phone had been ringing nonstop. She says she doesn’t remember collapsing. just “the feeling of the floor falling out” when she got the news that her father had died suddenly. The state had no paid bereavement leave, so she took three weeks of vacation. She was 30, and her world didn’t make sense anymore. She later got shingles, got a divorce, and eventually created Grieve Leave, becoming a certified grief support specialist.
Feinglos said she heard other people’s stories too—stories about getting the worst phone calls of their lives while at work.
In healthcare settings, the collision between grief and job demands can be especially brutal. Pamela Buchanan faced that reality in 2019. when her 80-year-old father was recovering in the hospital after spinal surgery to repair a broken bone in his back. Buchanan said the surgery was risky, but the alternative was possible paralysis. A sister-in-law called to say he was complaining of a stomach ache, and it didn’t sound serious. Buchanan was scheduled for 24-hour shifts every other day that week, so she went to work.
Only later did she suspect he was suffering from an ileus—an intestinal condition where intestinal muscles stop contracting and create a blockage. When Buchanan’s brother called her at work to tell her their father had died. she said she and her father had always been close. He grew up in rural Mississippi. didn’t finish high school so he could help put his sisters through school. and worked multiple jobs to support his seven kids. “He was, Buchanan said, everything to her. And she never got to say goodbye because there was no one to cover for her in the ER.”.
She described the shift after the news as fog. “I was in a fog. I don’t remember much of the shift. I don’t remember what I saw, what I did, if I did it safely,” she said. A colleague covered one ER shift so she could go to her father’s funeral, but that was all she could manage.
Buchanan left that job eventually. She now spends much of her time advocating for the mental health of clinicians, focusing on suicide prevention and workforce retention.
“I used to think how important it is to be at the front lines of medicine and to be there on someone’s worst day,” Buchanan said. “But the fact that I couldn’t navigate my own worst days because I am in service to other people was a bitter pill to swallow.”
The problem doesn’t just land in personal tragedies. Unsupported grief, experts say, can ripple into workplaces through decreased productivity, lower morale and job satisfaction, greater absences and higher turnover—costs businesses billions of dollars.
The strain can look like mental shutdown or constant anxiety. In research studies. grieving workers report feelings of isolation and bouts of anxiety. trouble concentrating. brain fog. headaches and chronic pain. They have difficulty with everyday assignments and miss deadlines. even days of work. which can fuel panic that they will lose their jobs. Nearly 8 in 10 grieving workers consider quitting their jobs after a major loss, according to workplace bereavement firm Empathy.
Sarah Kagan did. Her mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in a scenario she felt she understood—her grandmother had died from it. Kagan told her manager and her five-member team. but she didn’t take any time off because she had a successful career in product marketing and wanted to stay present for her mother. who was also a career professional. “I took on bigger projects than I ever had,” she said. “I wanted it to be like, if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know.”.
Eight months later, her father called to tell her her mother was going into hospice. Her mother died five days later. At the time, Kagan was six months pregnant with her second child. She took five days off and returned to work the following week.
Kagan said she came back to a silence that felt like a message. “I came back to no note, no card, not even a Slack message. That was very uncomfortable to me and immediately planted a seed of: ‘This is a you problem. Don’t bring that here. This is not a place to talk about that,’” she said.
Two weeks later, she got her six-month performance review. “The two main pieces of feedback were that I hadn’t answered my Slack messages fast enough and that I wasn’t in a good enough mood,” she said. “That really pissed me off.”
Kagan said her resentment grew alongside the disconnect between how she felt and the narrative her company used—“We are a family. We care about you.” She quit her job.
Afterward, as she shared her story with friends, an idea took root. She started Keriah Grief Coaching. named for the Jewish ritual of tearing a garment or a black ribbon as a physical expression of grief. Through her coaching. she said she has worked with hundreds of employees and people leaders to build cultures that are better prepared for grieving employees. “It’s not personhood versus professionalism,” she said. “It’s about building organizations that know how to hold both.”.
Some executives described the same contradiction inside the structures they helped design. Carolyn Moore, a longtime human resources executive and consultant, said she understood how grief collides with standard policy—and how quickly it can break people.
Moore’s 31-year-old daughter, who was working as a public defender in Texas, died suddenly earlier this year. Moore said it would be nearly two months before the medical examiner released a cause of death: a heart attack. Moore described being “a ridiculous mess.” Navigating everyday life—basic routines—was beyond her. She loved her work but she said she swore off new clients for six months. She also said she loved to cook but couldn’t stomach going to the grocery store. let alone preparing a meal.
Moore said she had seen years of heartache in her 30-plus years in HR. yet grief still didn’t fit the script managers tell employees to follow. “You’re so devastated for that person,” Moore said. “But as an executive or in management. you are programmed into ‘the show must go on. ’ ‘you gotta get back to work’ and then you expect the same level of commitment and performance.”.
Afterward, she said the lessons were clear: grief doesn’t end; it changes. “Grief isn’t something that ends. It’s something you learn how to carry,” Moore said. Needs can shift from moment to moment or day to day. she said. and with flexibility and compassion. employers can offer stability. “Grief is part of the experience that each individual employee is going to probably have to go through at some point in their work journey and it’s become so clear to me that this is such a missed opportunity. ” she said. “It’s what concerns me the most for workplaces right now. this lack of ability to think about the human in that equation.”.
And yet the impact of how workplaces respond appears in stark contrast when support is real. Caroline Dettman said she was fortunate that her employers and coworkers handled her grief far better than most.
In October 2023, Dettman’s healthy 17-year-old son went to sleep one night and never woke up. Owen—an honors student and a volunteer at the local police department—had recently started working at a senior living community and loved to draw. sing. dance. act. and design fashion. Dettman said he died of a seizure that had never happened before.
She said the unrelenting pain was beyond anything she had imagined. and people around her often didn’t know what to say or do. But her employer, an events company, urged her to take as much time as she needed. Coworkers rallied around her: sending regular deliveries of coffee and food to the house and arranging flowers and plants for her son’s service. Dettman said what she got was something most people don’t—an understanding that grief doesn’t end when a shift begins.
“There was never a discussion of, ‘we need you back in however many days.’ It was very much the opposite. It was: ‘You need to take however long you need to take’ and ‘how can we help?’” she said.
Dettman now works for a new company and recently attended a corporate training at The Second City. an improv comedy club in Chicago. During a small group exercise, she was asked to describe what her smartphone does. Dettman said the prompt struck a nerve because. for her. her smartphone keeps her son alive through photos. videos. and voice. “The anniversary of his passing. the birthday. the holidays. I know those are going to be difficult but. in a million years. I didn’t expect that Second City would. ” she said.
In the exercise, she described a moment where she was laughing and then tears sprang to her eyes. A colleague squeezed her hand. Dettman said the gesture grounded her. “We don’t pay enough attention to grief at work considering that is something everyone will go through at some point in their work journey. ” she said. “That squeeze allowed me to acknowledge what I was feeling and then I was able to center myself back in the moment.”.
For many workers, what’s missing isn’t sympathy—it’s the space to grieve in a way that actually matches the reality of loss. From three days to five, from policy to practice, the gap is often what turns grief into something lonelier and heavier as the calendar moves on.
grief at work bereavement leave employee mental health workplace culture productivity human resources Labor market Liberty Mutual Keriah Grief Coaching