About three years ago, I lost my daughter. She was sexually assaulted and murdered. She was my only child and was just 19. As the shock wore off and the all-consuming grief took over, I lost all meaning and purpose in life. Then my daughter spoke to me. She asked me to keep living. If I am not around, she will have one less heart to continue to live in. With that, my partner Susan and I started our desperate climb out of this deep hole of trauma and loss. In the journey back to the land of the living with grief, we unexpectedly found a rather unlikely and very helpful ally: my work.
At first, I wasn't even sure if I should go back to work. I had a lot of self-doubt. As a senior executive, I'm responsible for thousands of employees and billions of dollars. After all that trauma, is my mind still sharp and creative enough for that job? Can I still relate to people? Can I get past the resentment and regret I felt about all the time I spent working instead of being with my daughter? Is it fair to leave Susan home alone, dealing with her own grief and pain? At the end, I made the decision to go back to work, and I am very glad I did.
We all experience grief and loss in our lives. For most of us, that means, at some point, getting up and getting back to work while living with the grief. On those days, we will continue to carry the incredible burden of sadness, but also a hope that work itself can restore for us that much-needed feeling of purpose. For me, work started out as just a productive distraction, but evolved to being truly therapeutic and meaningful in so many ways. And my return to work proved to be a good thing for the company as well. I know I'm not indispensable, but retaining my expertise proved to be very beneficial, and my return helped all the teams avoid disruptions and distractions. When you lose the most precious thing in your life, you gain a lot of humility and a very different perspective free of egos and agendas, and I think I'm a better coworker and a leader because of that.
For all the good that came from it, though, my reentry into work was far from easy. It was very hard. The biggest challenge was having to separate my personal and professional lives completely. You know -- OK to cry early in the morning, but slap a smile on the face promptly at eight o'clock and act as if everything is the same as before until the workday is over. Living in two completely different worlds at the same time, and all the hiding and pretending that went with it, it was -- it was exhausting, and made me feel very alone.
Over time, I worked through those struggles and I gained the confidence and the acceptance to bring my whole self to work. And as a direct result of that, I found joy again in it.
During that hard journey back to work, I learned the power of having a culture of empathy in the workplace. Not sympathy, not compassion, but empathy. I came to believe that a workplace where empathy is a core part of the culture, that is a joyful and productive workplace, and that workplace inspires a great deal of loyalty. I believe there are three things a company can do to create and nurture a culture of empathy in the workplace in general and support a grieving employee like myself in particular. One is to have policies that let an employee deal with their loss in peace, without worrying about administrative logistics. Second, provide return-to-work therapy to the employee as an integral part of the health benefits package. And third, provide training for all employees on how to support each other -- empathy training, as I call it.
In the first category of policies to help deal with the loss, the most important policy is regarding time off. It's true that there is no expiration date to grieve and time cannot undo a loss, but time away from work helped me figure out how daily life can coexist with grief. We don't want a grieving employee to have to cobble together vacation days and sick days and unpaid leave and whatever else. A formal time-off policy that also allows the employee to come back to the same role they had before their time off -- that policy will make a real difference. Personally, I was so grateful to come back to my old role. The familiar work, familiar people, provided a lot of comfort.
The second category of help companies can provide to employees is return-to-work therapy. Therapy helped me muster the courage needed to bring my whole self to work and merge the two parallel worlds I was straddling into one, and just have one life. A couple of years ago, I spent a weekend scattering my daughter's ashes in the Pacific. It was a -- it was a horrific time. When I returned to work from that that following Monday, one of the first meetings was to arbitrate a very passionate debate on office wallpaper. I needed therapy to figure out how to be considerate of others' normal lives when my own life is so very different. Therapy helped me give myself permission to be vulnerable. Even if vulnerability is not often seen as a strength in the corporate world, when seemingly unrelated and just trivial things triggered deep feelings of sadness right smack in the middle of the workday, therapy helped me deal with them. And when painful anniversaries and events tried to hijack the day, like when I got a call from Texas Rangers regarding an arrest in my child's death, I was at work. Therapy helped me stay productive while still remaining true to the unique realities and the painful realities of my life.
During the course of the return-to-work therapy, I had realized something. I had realized that many of those learnings, they would have been very helpful for me at work all along, independent of my loss. And that realization brings me to the final category of things companies can do. Provide empathy training to the employees. Look, I know it sounds odd, but empathy can be a learned behavior. For some, showing empathy comes naturally. A colleague came to see me; I had this electronic photo frame on my desk, rotating through pictures of my daughter. As she was leaving, she simply said, "Tilak, when you're ready, I would love for you to tell me the story behind each of those pictures." She didn't ignore my sadness; she didn't dwell on it. She simply gave me permission to be myself and made a human connection. This was her version of empathy, of which I'm sure there are many.
But not everybody is a natural with empathy, and traditional work cultures don't always emphasize empathy. One person said to me, "I can't believe you made it back to work. I don't think I could have done it." Boy, did that make me feel awful. Is my love for my child not strong? Another person decided to be my spokesperson, guiding other folks on how and when to interact with me, all without my knowledge or consent. A few folks just maintained absolute stoic and deafening silence, which in some ways trivialized my loss. Some spent a ton of water-cooler time speculating if I would be any good at all at work, coming back from such a devastating loss. Time, frankly, would have been better spent in figuring out how to help me instead. And then there was that moment where I had to console someone, very distraught, who said, "I understand your loss. My dog died last year."
Empathy training can help avoid that inherent awkwardness in dealing with loss. It can give people the confidence to bring their whole self to work, and the people around them, the awareness to accept them for who they are. And together, we'll all be better for it. Empathy training can help people acknowledge that a coworker is a very different person after a life-changing loss, and ask that simple and direct question: what would you like me to do differently to help you?
There will come a day when I finally see my daughter, my little girl, again. And as she always did, she's going to make fun of me for working so much. But she knew. She knew that she was the top priority -- number one priority. And she will be thankful that work helped Dad live a purposeful life after she was gone.
It is such an incredible relief that the loss I experienced is not as common. A child dying ahead of the parent is just absolutely horrific -- the most nightmarish and unnatural thing to happen. But loss in itself is not uncommon. When done right, returning to work can help us survive loss and grief. And companies can help do it right, by fostering a culture of empathy in the workplace. It's not a burden or a lot of effort or expense. And creating such a workplace, where empathy is core to the culture -- it will be one of the best investments a company can make.
Thank you.
