At a loss

A week ago Monday, I took a phone call at work from an unfamiliar number. The introduction was quick and to-the-point: Hi, I’m your coworker’s daughter, he died unexpectedly over the weekend, we had no idea how to contact anyone from his office, your name popped up on his cellphone, can you help us? {1}

I was taken aback. The conversation wound on for about half an hour. He had gone into the ER the previous Wednesday — this part I knew, since he’d messaged me (his supervisor) then to say he needed to take leave{2}—and things had been up-and-down until the weekend when he finally succumbed. He was well past retirement age and had been dealing with some health issues, but for personal reasons he hadn’t been willing to finally walk away from his career until very recently. He had just announced that he was filing paperwork to retire at the end of the year, less than three months away. (The human-resources people we contacted were stunned at the death-in-service news, noting they’d already begun his outprocessing.)

The daughter recounted how he had not provided his family any contact information for his worklife. It was only by chance that a text message I’d sent on Friday (asking how he was doing post-ER) popped up on the lock screen of his work cell, giving them a point of contact within our agency. She was concerned with both how to return the office equipment in his home to us and what this meant for her mother, who would be dependent on his retirement and/or survivor’s benefits. I assured her we’d figure both of those things out as soon as possible.

After the conversation ended, I found myself tangled up in all the administrative processes that spring up from and overwhelm human events. I reported his passing to my higher-ups, so they could spread the word as appropriate. I called my other team members to let them know the news.{3} I closed out his performance plan for the just-ended fiscal year, conscious that his bonus would just be rolled into the payouts now being routed to his wife. I looked through projects and messages and requests he would’ve been involved in, to see what obligations I now incurred. Over the next couple of days, I dug in and just kept up with my work.

I felt sad, but in a way so muted I couldn’t react to it. I had become a supervisor just over a year earlier; among the quirks of the position was gaining a team member more than 30 years my senior. He was gracious, knowing himself to be an expert in the specific program area of his specialization but willing to cooperate and collaborate with no fuss. In the back of my mind, I had flashed on this possibility but hadn’t considered what it would be like if it actually happened.

He wasn’t even the first coworker who had died without warning in the past year. I tried to recall the emotional outpouring over the first one — a lovely lady in one of our more remote offices with whom I’d had an easy rapport — but I just felt unable to let this one sink in. I remember saying to one or more of my colleagues last week that this felt like a shock but not a surprise, or perhaps the reverse. I felt abandoned, but abstractly, with no blame to place.

I talked to his daughter again on Wednesday, to share updates and to get info about the memorial the family was planning. It felt positive if fictive.

On Thursday, three days after the news broke, there was a regular meeting on the calendar that my now-deceased team member had chaired up until that point. In an extension of his past efforts, I put together an agenda of topics he would have wanted to cover, with an “in memoriam” as topic #1. When the meeting began, we ended up talking mostly about him and scrapped the rest of the agenda. It felt right.

Friday I had a video chat with another colleague who was currently away from our office, but had worked closely with him for well over a decade. They had had a lot of common experiences and she made no bones about her devastation. I watched her cry via MS Teams. When she asked about how I was doing, I shared my own situation: tired, glum, unable to do more than go through the motions. Where you are in grief is just where you are, we agreed.

I drifted into the weekend not wanting to socialize much, apart from a smattering of previous plans — a bike ride, a movie date. I spent a lot of time on the couch absorbing various distractions.{4}

A week has passed. It feels like a very long time and also like I’ve ignored most everything around me. I got very into playing around with a PowerPoint that I will spend 10 minutes presenting later this week and then no one will think about again. We don’t have a cultural framework for what to do when someone at work dies, someone you’ve been on good terms with but not closely enough to call a friend. My colleagues and I talked about the importance of reaching out to people in ambiguous circumstances (as with the fateful text message that served as the family’s only avenue for contacting us) and about how it’s reminded us all that we want to enjoy life after work but so many of us have been wishy-washy about retirement.{5}

I pause, reflect, write this essay to put some feelings into words, take a breather; tomorrow I will march along, rolling with whatever news comes next.

— —

{1} She had left a voicemail to the same effect on Sunday, the day prior. I hadn’t listened to it yet since unfamiliar numbers usually mean spam and anyone who needed to contact me for work reasons usually did so via email.

{2} For the most part I find generational distinctions overblown, but there’s something undeniably septuagenarian about going to the effort of requesting sick leave while having trouble breathing and getting taken to the hospital.

{3} More by chance than plan, we’re a “distributed team” so we live and work in different parts of Northern California, only occasionally getting together in-person.

{4} Amidst all of this I meet up with a friend after work, who then tells me his dad had just died. I offer my condolences and we talk about their relationship. Later, when I mention my coworker, he says I’m sorry in sympathy and I feel embarrassed by the contrast.

{5} I will gladly take an early buyout. Gladly.