14 ms·

My partner sat in the same cube pod as someone who took their life. One day they were just gone and a crying family member came by to take away a box of things.

• vlunkr 5y ago
  Is this the norm? I don't see why they wouldn't at least announce it an email. It's a bit of a weird topic for a work email, but it's certainly better than doing absolutely nothing.
  • NAHWheatCracker 5y ago
    Not acknowledging a death is wild, but a lot of organizations normalize only discussing positive project-related accomplishments. When the day-to-day doesn't address the simple human aspects of work, it becomes even harder to address the difficult aspects.
    • catlifeonmars 5y ago
      This is an interesting take. I strongly suspect you’re right about this, but would like to find more data to support it.
  • bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
    Apathy is the path of least resistance.
    • TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      Maybe if you are apathetic by nature?
  • VariableStar 5y ago
    I do not know if it is the norm but I have also worked at an organization where one employee committed suicide. Leadership said nothing and everything was toned down. Some people spoke up and complained though. My interpretation is that the response was a combination of culture (although suicide is not "taboo" here it is not a preferred topic) and not wanting to bring undue attention to the organization.
    • refurb 5y ago
      What do you mean “said nothing” as in they stopped showing up and management pretended nothing happened? Or the person died and they didn’t say it was a suicide. Because if it’s the 2nd, that seems pretty normal. My right to know doesnt trump the family’s right to privacy.
      • VariableStar 5y ago
        Colleagues knew it was suicide and wanted to talk about it. Leadership did not want to discuss the issue. Normal, as you write.
        • refurb 5y ago
          But coworkers could discuss among themselves? This just seems bizarre to me to expect a special “all hands” session or something to discuss this. Provide counseling services? Sure. Put a “how Jimmy died” meeting on everyone’s calendar? That’s odd.
      • newaccount74 5y ago
        I'd like to think that if you spend 8 hours a day with someone everyday, and suddenly they are gone, it would be a decent thing to tell you what happened to them.
      • pc86 5y ago
        Framing discussions around cause of death as privacy is a double standard. If you say someone died in a car crash, nobody gasps and tells you to respect the deceased's or their family's privacy. It's so extreme that is anyone even brings up privacy with regard to a death or cause of death everyone assumes they committed suicide, or did something criminal that ended in their death, or something else negative. Cause of death is posted in the newspapers and otherwise discussed in public all the time, there is no right to privacy around that piece of information.
  • kn0where 5y ago
    Yeah, I’ve worked at a couple places where someone died, and it was definitely acknowledged by management and I feel like it would be incredibly weird not to. At one place, a guy who had left the company a few months prior died in a car crash. The guy had a wife and newborn baby. The CEO shared the news and the company made a contribution to a GoFundMe for the wife and baby. I think the company offered grief counseling. At another, larger company, someone died shortly after I joined, so I never knew them. We were all notified, once again I think a grief counselor came, and the guy’s desk was left as a memorial until we moved offices a few months later.
    • TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      Reactions from management and everyone else is typically different for suicides than for car crashes and other causes. In my experience, suicides are hushed and not discussed while car crashes and heart attacks are. It’s a terrible double-standard.
      • freedomben 5y ago
        Same. I don't think it's with mal intent, I think it's the result of a (misguided) attempt to give the passed privacy or spare them the embarrassment/humiliation/stigma that some people (mainly those who have never struggled with depression/suicide) think is attached to it. A good friend of mine committed suicide several years ago, and it was like pulling teeth trying to get somebody to just tell me WTF was going on. The most I could get was "Douglas passed away." Nobody even wanted to say it was a suicide! We really need to start talking more openly about these things. If your coworker dies in a car crash nobody feels like they can't talk about the car crash or even acknowledge the cause of death. Yet with suicide, nobody wants to say it. The result is even more pain mixed with frustration.
        • TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
          I've had the same experience - when someone passed, no one would tell me the cause of death. I surmised the cause because of that, but never got external confirmation. It was just so ... strange.
  • 9530jh9054ven 5y ago
    Depends on the company. I know for a fact that if I died tomorrow, only two people would actually notice at all and neither of them are coworkers. It doesn't seem particularly helpful to send out a notifications to people other then those that would be affected by having to take on my workload. And what good would come from them being told I was dead vs just left?
    • rvp-x 5y ago
      Not noticing doesn't mean the world doesn't care. There are a lot of reasons people vanish and it's harder to notice the absence of something than its existence, and people usually vanish for positive reasons, so I think nothing of it. I cried after discovering some people I hadn't known personally but were adjacent to me have died. I didn't notice their absence but I can empathize with the suffering they felt before their death, or the feelings of their family coming to grip with their absence. While I have a strong emotional reaction to it, I don't think it's a bad thing, it is a part of life and a reminder for me to savor life.
• avgcorrection 5y ago
  > There's more to being a leader than shipping a volume of features, you are also an important figure in the lives of your team and they need you in a time of crisis. deleted
  • idontknowifican 5y ago
    this isn’t work related, this is human meeds and suffering. i understand management is ass, don’t become an ass yourself
    • avgcorrection 5y ago
      > this isn’t work related, So give them time off to grieve. Once you say that “they need you [the manager] in a time of crisis” you are putting the tragedy in a work-related context. The crux of the issue is the tragedy that happened. Not how the supposed leader responds to it. The worker bees can get space to grieve alone or among their peers.
      • eyelidlessness 5y ago
        Several years ago, I lost a friend to cancer. He had previously worked on my team, and was well liked there. My boss at the time, who I adored and still do, hadn’t known him as well but understood that his death devastated to me. I came in on a Saturday to let the team know of his passing, and to work. We had scheduled a weekend hackathon—if I recall, this had been my idea originally. My boss, very sincerely concerned, asked me, “why are you here? You can go home.” I told him there’s no where else I’d rather be. That wasn’t only because he was such a great boss, but that was a large contributing factor. He kindly, gently said he understood and that I should stay and contribute whatever felt comfortable and leave whenever that felt like what I needed. That didn’t make mourning feel any less difficult, but it made me feel like I was right that work was where I needed to be that day. My point is not that this is the form all leadership should take. It’s true that giving people time off to mourn is almost definitely the best default. But there is a compassionate kind of leadership that can be this welcoming and compassionate comforting.
• evancoop 5y ago
  During my doctoral years, two students in my department took their own lives (separate events, to be clear). The events themselves were horribly tragic, but the lack of even a clear acknowledgement of the causes of death left a surreal sense of denial. Mental health is an enormously under-discussed issue in an increasingly digital society that hides suffering in so many of us. Work becomes an increasingly integral element of our connection to others while certain employment becomes increasingly transactional. We all can do better. So sorry to read about another human being lost too soon.
  • maleldil 5y ago
    Do you think it wasn't acknowledged specifically because it was suicide, or was it an overall culture of not addressing the cause of death in general? Because the second one sounds fine to me.
    • BoorishBears 5y ago
      How is it fine? Causes of death are not fungible, dying in a freak accident and dying from suicide in a high pressure setting should not be treated the same. Especially since we know that suicide can act like a contagion: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262/#_sec_0078_ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262/#_sec_0078_ and the demands of the program they were in were almost certainly a factor
      • maleldil 5y ago
        If it's specifically with suicide, then the company has a stigma with mental health, which is not okay. However, if it's always "teammate died" with no extra information, I can respect it. Your teammates are not entitled to know your cause of death. That's a personal thing, but you aren't there any more to choose if it's okay to share.
        • BoorishBears 5y ago
          If there's whispers the cat is out of the bag... the most respectful move is to simply address it and extend counseling Your cause of death isn't a personal thing either by the way, it's a matter of public record in most states (and of course word tends to get out with something as emotional as a death)
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  That is the worst! I remember when a long-time team member died unexpectedly one weekend. We all learned about it at the Monday standup meeting and we luckily had the common sense to cancel the standup because no one wanted to talk. A number of us went to the funeral and his wife told me (I had met her once before) that she was so happy that his co-workers came to pay their respects. It made her feel that he had a larger impact than she knew of and it was comforting to her. I hate, hate, hate the way corps try to brush away any unpleasantness like ignoring it means it didn't happen!
  • anonporridge 5y ago
    > I hate, hate, hate the way corps try to brush away any unpleasantness like ignoring it means it didn't happen! I personally don't mind it. It's a good reminder that we as individuals are just replaceable cogs in the machine, that all of us are only as valuable as the productivity we can contribute in the future, and that our sense of loyalty to it should be adjusted accordingly. Don't ever expect a corporation of any kind to act like a human or a family, because it's not, even if they try to put on a humanoid face. Having said that, I expect more corporations will start trying to act more humanely in the face of this kind of trauma, precisely because those that don't will engender a sense of deep distrust and disloyalty from their employees, which will make them weaker in the long run. The more generations of people go through the machine and see how it really works, and teach their children the truth, the less they'll be able to take advantage of naivety. This also tends to be a reason that the powers that be want tighter control on social media, so people can't as easily share widely the truth of their lived experience that will preemptively poison the trust of others towards machines designed to use and discard people.
    • gunapologist99 5y ago
      Corporations are like a computer program. Sometimes they act a bit sentient, but mostly they just do what they're told. The only people who are people are people.
    • ajkjk 5y ago
      The corporation may not be kind as an entity, but it would be nice if the individual people are.