The hardest week of my professional life

Until now, I’ve always said the hardest thing I ever had to do as a manager of people was to tell one of my 1099 employees that I had no more work for him as he’d had a psychotic break at a client site. I had to tell him that until he got help, we couldn’t send him on jobs. But that’s no longer the hardest thing I’ve gone through as a people leader (as we call it at work).

Last Saturday, I got word that a woman who worked for me had died the evening before. She hadn’t been sick, she was in reasonably good health, she just . . . died. 

People talk about work families and normally I roll my eyes hard at that idea. Work is work, family is family, and the two rarely co-exist. If they do, it can often be a highly dysfunctional and toxic work environment.

My team isn’t that way, and I take little to no credit for this. Four of them have known each other for nearly a decade; they take care of each other’s kids or house sit or go out on the weekends. Our birthday celebrations at work are full of fun, love, and affection. Take my word for it, this is an unusually tight team. So, to have Mary die like that was even more traumatic than usual. 

This past week has been a blur of emotions, tasks you just never think you’ll need to do like figuring out how to reach her mother so Benefits could talk with her, notifying everyone she’d worked with over the years, being there for my team, and also dealing with my own emotions. 

Her funeral was Thursday. She’d already been cremated so there was no casket, which was hard for some of my team as they’d hoped to actually see her to help them accept that yes, she was gone, and this wasn’t some insane prank. I think we all secretly hoped it was but of course that wasn’t the case.

On Friday my new director, Ro (who herself has only been my director for a couple of months), planned a virtual celebration of Mary as we haven’t yet returned to working in the office. We invited everyone we could think of who might want to come and share a memory of her with all of us. As part of getting to know us, Ro had asked us all to fill out a little “getting to know you” survey, and she shared what Mary had written. That virtual celebration was a good way to end an awful week. I miss Mary, I can hardly believe she’s gone.