Bereavement Leave

I was updating an Employee Handbook for a client this week, and one of the changes was to include the right of bereaved parents of under 18 year olds to paid leave, which became law three years ago.  For employees who have been with their employer for at least six months, they get two weeks leave, paid at the same rate as maternity, paternity and adoption leave, which is currently £172.48 a week.  Each time I’m reminded of this in my job I go through a range of emotions.  Grief at the reminder of my daughters early death, disbelief that until three years ago there was no right to time off in this situation at all, anger that this is far too little time or money to be much help to anyone, sadness when thinking of all those who had no choice but to return to work so quickly while still grieving or who lost jobs and homes because they couldn’t do so,  and lastly gratitude that both my husband and I were so supported by our work to take the time we needed.

I was talking to someone the other day about how I approached my bereavement leave, but actually on reflection, more accurately I was describing how I approached the last two months of it.  There were three weeks between the day my daughter died and her funeral, which then led into Christmas and the New Year.  I remember, on the day that I would normally have returned to work after a break for Christmas, a client texting me to ask if I was back at work yet, and I had to tell him I felt nowhere near ready to return.  And yet, most people would probably consider five weeks as a very generous amount of time to grieve and get back to work.  After all, not only is two weeks the legal entitlement to time off in my situation, there is no legal right to bereavement leave for other family members, and the average amount of compassionate leave given in the UK is five days, of which only 60% of employers offer it paid.

I’ve written before about how I feel our society hurries us up in our grief, wanting us to put on a happy face and pretend we’re ok quickly so that we don’t make everyone feel uncomfortable with our sadness, so I won’t repeat myself, but I do think this is epitomised by our approach to grief in the workplace.  If I had gone back to work at that five week point, my bereavement leave would have been full of all the grief admin that is required, the busyness of all the people who were there to support me, and the preparation for the funeral.  It was only from that point on that I had the solitude, the time and space, to really process what I had been through and let the feelings flow, and so many people don’t get that time.

I remember feeling extremely grateful, and also guilty, that I had been given the time and space to grieve that I needed, when so many are not.  As a self employed HR consultant I was very aware that if I had truly been running the business by myself, and not a licensee within a larger network which could step in to temporarily look after my clients, a grief as sudden and traumatic as mine could very easily have led to the end of the business I had spent twelve years building. 

Having been given the time I needed to grieve, I very much felt an obligation to my clients, my Head Office and fellow licensees to use the time I had been given appropriately.  To make sure that I used those last two months of my bereavement leave to fully immerse myself in my grief, so that I gave myself the best chance of getting to a place of being able to live alongside the grief without falling apart once I returned to “normal” life.  It felt like work, grief work, but work nonetheless.  I read all the grief books I could, listened to grief podcasts, signed up for one to one therapy, joined an online grief group and spent time looking after myself and feeling my feelings.  I wrote, walked, spent time with friends and family, and rested and slept a lot.  As Marisa Renee Lee writes in Grief is Love: Living with Loss;   

It isn’t work that can be monetized or quantified, and as a society, we do not value the work that healing from grief or trauma requires. We simply do not value care. No one is going to give you a prize, a raise, a medal, or a promotion for taking the time you need to care for yourself after a significant loss. ……. We all need to do the work to ensure that healing after loss, that proper self-care, is a right and not a privilege. Even if it is just taking a few minutes out for yourself each day to get quiet and identify that deeper need, fight for that time. Find room for it.

I really believe that the saying “time heals” isn’t true, and it is what you do with that time that helps the healing.  Of course, not everyone can take a few months off to do what I did.  I remember my Brother saying, when we spoke about this, that I would have coped if I had had to go back to work after those first few weeks, and I suppose he is right.  We do what we have to do, and I would have found a way to do my grief work alongside my actual work, but I do question how effective or productive my work would have been in those early months of all consuming grief, and how much harder I would have found it.

A friend reassured me, when I felt guilty for still not feeling ready to be back at work, that my Head Office and clients had really meant it when they had told me to take all the time I need.  I’d got myself into a state of worrying that while they had said that, perhaps I was now pushing it a bit and they were getting annoyed with me.  She rightly pointed out that any sensible company, looking at my situation purely financially, would be fully prepared for me to take a three month break in this situation after 12 years of running their license successfully, and knowing that when I came back I’d be with them for another 12 years or more.  In the bigger picture, three months off in 24 years or more is statistically a very small period of time.  And yet, I know that this is not how many employers would see the situation.  And if we rarely talk about the impact grief has on our brains, our bodies, our emotions and our ability to function, then most employers have no idea why giving their employees time off when a loved one dies, beyond the few days to arrange and attend a funeral, is so necessary.

I’m not in the right place yet to do it myself, beyond sharing my thoughts here and talking to the small business owners that I work with, but I do think there is a gap that needs filling in running grief awareness courses for employers, so that all grieving employees get the time off and support that they need when the legal provision is so inadequate so that “healing after loss…is a right and not a privilege.”