Grief affects job performance, so giving workers time off to grieve can lead to stronger outcomes at work.
There's no easy path through grief and trauma. Learning from the experiences of people who'd been through similar losses was helpful.
After my husband, Dave, died, I called my friend Adam, a psychologist who studies how people find meaning in our lives, and I asked him what, if anything, I could do to help myself and my kids get through this. We started talking about resilience, then reading about it, then talking to other people who had gotten through grief and other huge challenges. In time, those conversations and that research helped me heal.
If I didn't write in my journal every couple of days, I felt like I was going to burst. Later I learned the research about how important journaling can be to recovering from trauma and grief. That was definitely true for me.
Grief comes and goes, it ebbs and flows. I think one of the lessons of this for me is that there's no one way to grieve. Everyone does it in their own way, in their own time, and we all process life and its challenges and its ups and downs as they come.
