Working whilst grieving

Warning: There are a few naughty words in this post. Nothing top shelf like @@@@ or @@@@ing @@@@ but a few from the next shelf down next to Anglers Weekly and to the right of Woman’s Own.

Blimey - bit of a heavy topic for a Silent Sales blog isn’t it?

Usually if I’m not trying to compare your email to a North Korean despot, I’m dicking around with my puppet on Instagram giving sales tips as an excuse to dick around with my puppet on Instagram. But things have been a bit different for me lately and it got me thinking. At the time of writing this, or at least starting to write it, over 125,000 people have died with Covid-19 listed on their death certificate in the UK. And over 2.6m people have lost their lives globally. Eddie Izzard, one of my favourite comics, once observed that when numbers of deaths become so big it is difficult to fathom. I’ll try and help - if you laid all of those people end to end you’d be a sicko.

And that is my coping mechanism for grief. Cracking a joke. And the more inappropriate the better in my book (don’t worry I don’t have a book yet). And that is what I’ve tried to do since my father passed away in early February. I’ve tried to keep my spirits up and the spirits of those around me by looking on the brighter side and cracking a joke when I can.

I thought that perhaps writing a blog piece about how to work whilst grieving might offer me an outlet but also maybe help some other people going through a similar thing. At the very least it might get me some organic traffic on my site right?

No Rule Book

Like all the major events in life there is no “Haynes Manual For Mourning”. And if there was, certainly in the early stages of grief, reading the back of a cereal box is overwhelming enough, so it would be pointless anyway (Note to self, don’t send the draft email to Haynes about a manual for mourning).

I’m told everyone’s experience of grief is different - and that makes sense. Everyone’s circumstances are different. Their relationship with the late individual is different as is their outlook on life, their environment, their support network and their family situation. So a one-size-fits-all manual for grief just wouldn’t work. Yes, a quick Google suggests there are common stages but how, when and if they’ll land is largely a guessing game anyway. Perhaps being aware of them is all you can do and I’m quite a matter of fact kind of person so maybe it has or will help me somewhere down the line. Maybe if I get to the anger stage I’ll cut myself a bit of slack - who knows?

So without a rule book I decided to give myself a week and a half off work. Doesn’t sound a lot does it? But when you’re self employed, there are limitations as to what you can offer yourself. And for those who are employed, the standard next of kin bereavement leave is usually a week or less and is often discretionary, again proving that this subject isn’t an exact science like astrology or shamanism.

Letting people know

Now I don’t like letting people down. Other than a quality controller in an inflatable doll factory most of us don’t (Note: weak - consider taking that poor joke out in final edit). So I had to let my customers know that I was going to be unexpectedly off the radar for a while. I was very lucky here. My customers were absolute stars and bent over backwards for me (like a gymnast training next door to the inflatable doll factory). Some sent cards of condolence, others emailed in support and this was a huge help. But perhaps others aren’t so lucky. Some people might even have jobs where due to their current commitment they simply can’t take a 10 day hiatus. If you’re an emergency surgeon with a rare speciality then you might have to operate under extremely high levels of pressure to save someone’s life with raw grief still running through you. I don’t know if that is a thing and how that is mitigated but I guess it could happen.

Ever looked for a royalty free photo of an inflatable doll?

Me neither. But I did find this lovely photo which is much more family friendly and rather uplifting.

And of course, not everyone shares their grief. Some people choose not to let people know. This is a very personal choice. Personally I’m quite an open book type of person - god help you blog readers if I ever get haemorrhoids. But my point is that potentially people all around us are working with grief. Air traffic controllers, nurses, road sweepers, teachers, administrators, police officers, artists, gymnasts and of course, we mustn’t forget the plight of the tens of thousands of quality controllers in the world’s blow up doll manufacturing plants. And it is their choice if they want to talk about it.

Burying yourself

See what I did there? By missing off …….”in your work” from my subtitle I’ve not only related the words to death but whetted your appetite for more haven’t I? This is the blog version of a Shakespearean aside - where I address the reader, acknowledging that I am fully aware that I’m writing a blog and essentially breaking through the invisible wall between author and reader. I do it quite a lot, some might say too much but I have blog comments turned off due to an abnormally high number of penis enlargement bots spamming me so that is an assumption really. I’ve lost my way now so please stick with me and I’ll start another paragraph. Just ignore this bit.

Years ago I had a “nervous breakdown”. 7 years of not dealing with something finally caught up with me and my equivalent of driving to Dundee in bare feet, binging on Toblerone was to sit in my summerhouse for 3 weeks not saying a word, in fact not doing anything at all - broken.

I spent a lot of those 7 years burying myself in my work. This cost me my mental health and almost cost me my marriage and life. So I learned that burying oneself in work is probably a bad idea when it comes to the serious stuff. If your team loses the derby one Saturday, its probably fine to get stuck in at work for a few days to take your mind off it. If your dad dies unexpectedly after suffering a series of strokes, having life saving brain surgery and then eventually dies of cardiac arrest after suffering with pneumonia due to Covid-19 contracted in hospital - probably best take the open book approach as it is likely to catch up with you and might hit you harder?

The weight of the world

I’ve suffered grief before. My 2nd tortoise Fred had to be put down due to mouth cancer (possibly due to eating Quavers on a regular basis), my gran died when I was 19 and my nan died 5 years ago (both ate Quavers occasionally too). There have also been deaths on my wife’s side of the family and in close friend’s circles which have been ruddy, bloody sad. As an impressionable teenager the suicide of Kurt Cobain also hit me like a tonne of grunge in 1994 and we all remember where we were when Steve Irwin was taken from us all by a bastard sting ray. But my dad? This was different.

At the end of the first week of grief I had a 48 hour period where it felt like I was carrying a huge boulder across my back. I couldn’t sit up straight. I had to lie face down on a hard floor to feel any kind of respite. “Fortunately” I was very aware that this was likely to be a physical manifestation of mental anguish and/or perhaps a symptom of the tension in my body in the previous few weeks. The reason I know of this is due to another family member suffering with some mental health issues and fibromyalgia. Until around 10 years ago I had no concept of the notion that mental health issues could actually cause you physical pain. But that was what was happening to me.

Stamina

Anyone working for themselves knows that stamina is vital. Whether you be on your own like me or running a small company where the buck stops with you, it is you and you alone that are responsible for maintaining a high level of energy and stamina to drive your business where you want it driven to.

And for that matter, employees know that they need increasing levels of stamina to keep up with mounting work loads as shareholders demand more, costs are cut and you too are expected to magic extra hours out of thin air each week.

So when grief is running particularly strong through me I can practically feel my stamina ebbing away. It feels like I have a leak. A physical and certainly a mental fatigue overwhelm me like a sudden fog on an unfamiliar moorland road. And this road that is often clear, and relatively simple to navigate becomes so difficult I have to pull over for a power nap in a layby uncomfortably bolt upright because I can’t work out how to put the seats back. (Got caught up in a metaphor there I think).

And for anyone who understands depression this is a difficult place to be. I’m reasonably emotionally intelligent and informed enough to realise that grief can hit you in waves and that you have to go through a process but if you embrace the power naps for too long there is a danger that it starts to become too hard to even get out of bed. That road could then become a proverbial slippery slope. The only advice I could give myself was to continue to get up at the same time every day (06:35) and never allow a nap to be more than 30 minutes.

Concentration

Now I’m easily bored at the best of times. That is why “freelancing” works best for me. I can somewhat choose when to do the work I’m committed to do for my clients in between bouts of playing on my Gameboy or reading my latest Japanese cat book. But grieving seems to have the ability to reduce my periods of concentration from limited to miniscule at times.

I’m putting part of this down to it being a period of reflection. When you’re grieving for someone it usually means that they were a part of your life or at the very least affected your life from a distance. So when they’re taken from your life there is a hole. I guess it is human nature to then look for reasons, explore why that hole is there and question how and if that hole can be filled (potential scope for an inappropriate inflatable doll running gag here). But what I’ve found is that during these periods it leads me down rabbit holes of memories that I haven’t accessed for a while. Almost archives if you like that I’m rediscovering after a period in storage. This stuff throws me and it can take me a fair few minutes to get back into any type of flow and produce quality work again after a personal “disk defragmentation”.

Sleep

I’m good at sleep. I’ve been perfecting it for many years. I was put to bed at 6:30pm until I was 8 (not literally - I didn’t go to bed after Crossroads in 1977 and wake up 1985 unaware of what Transformers were). So I think I was programmed over those 8 years to need a good 12-15 hours per night. Now over the decades I came to need less than that and now I’m comfortable with a much less weird 6-8 hours. But when I fall asleep I don’t wake up until it is time to wake up - my body wakes me up at 06:34 most days. But since my dad passed away - my sleep has gone to shit.

I don’t feel in the slightest bit tired until after 11:00pm, irrespective of how demanding the day has been. And then falling asleep is harder than understanding blockchain. And when I do finally drift off the dreams are mad. Truly mad - like Alice in Wonderland trippy, goofball weird. I’m certainly not going to start analysing dreams, that is for experts like MC Hammer or Wolf from Gladiators to do. Waking up randomly is also new to me - sometimes the sleep intervals are only 25 minutes and I’m awake again. This has certainly been something I’ve struggled to adjust to and then when I do finally wake up at 06:34 I’m not exactly as fresh as a daisy for the work day ahead.

Morbid war film obsession

Okay, so I appreciate this might be a bit specific to me but I thought I’d include it anyway.

Now I’m fickle with my fads anyway. I’ve never really progressed from the pre-pubescent days of playing the trombone for a month, getting all the gear and then giving up and moving on to roller-blading or space tennis. But I’ve never been much of a film watcher. I like the occasional film but I don’t really have the attention span for most modern movies which insist on being over 2 hours long.

But whilst grieving, the combination of staying up later and awareness of mortality has led me to seek out war films. Now this isn’t that new to me - I’ve always enjoyed a high quality war film (and book). Whether it be the old classics like Zulu, The Bridge on the River Kwai or more modern masterpieces like 1907 or A Very Long Engagement, I have an appreciation for the genre. But recently I’ve been watching the grittier end of the scale including many of the always depressing Vietnam War films including Platoon, Apocalypse Now, (the amazing) Hacksaw Ridge and (the not so amazing) Danger Close. I’ve even sat through When we Were Soldiers and To End all Wars - both pretty rubbish.

War hey? What is it good for? Well, in film form it has been helping me to avoid going to bed whilst grieving.

I don’t 100% know why I’ve opted for this morbid choice but to play amateur psychologist it might be related to my dad literally working until the moment he died but perhaps it is bigger than that. Maybe it is helping me explore “man’s struggle” and opening up my long standing interest in Philosophy, which I unsuccessfully studied at university in Manchester and have dabbled in ever since. Or maybe I’m just opting for escapism and it just as easily could have been Disney princess movies.

Capacity

My home life is relatively complicated anyway so my working capacity is limited to 4 week days and a bit of weekend catch up. But working whilst grieving means I’m only capable of a “little and often” approach. I decided early on that it was too “dangerous” to give myself random days or half days off. So I’ve opted for a “Very Flexi-Time” approach where I go all in for say 90 minutes and then I take a break. This has certainly been tested since my dad passed. Some of my 90 minute stints can feel like half a day or in a few cases more. I am certainly capable of getting into a “flow state” but the amount of effort required on “bad days” is colossal. So in real terms and in terms of “sods law” as demand for my services is going up, my capacity has actually crept down. This doesn’t concern me, as a go-to piece of advice to anyone grieving is that time heals such wounds but certainly in the short term, at least being aware of this challenge means I don’t freak out about it.

Again though, this isn’t as easy for those on PAYE - particularly if their boss is an arse. The type of archaic wank-mammal who makes a show of coming in when they are clearly too unwell so that they can rub your face in it and make you feel uncomfortable if you need to take some time off to be sick at home or to get some head space after losing a loved on.

No safety net

I’m inherently optimistic - but this is bloody hard when grieving. It certainty seems to be much harder to grasp when someone you love dies. In the case of a parent you’ve literally known them your whole life. And even if you don’t see them every week, month or even season - they’re still there. They’re still at the end of a phone or one text away from sorting out a next visit. But then they’re not.

And this has made me very aware of my own responsibilities and my accountability to my own family and myself. I’ve always struggled with the weight / burden of responsibility. I fall into the “man-child” category in many ways and I suppose this is one of the symptoms. But when a (man)child’s stabilisers are not only removed but cremated then they’ve got to keep their balance. And there is little choice but to keep pedalling. Others rely on you getting there so the path is clear. The game has changed and as the shock begins to die down this realisation presents a brand new challenge.

Nope. Nope. Noooooo. Nope.

Not even with a safety net!

In terms of work, my dad was was very proud and encouraging of my career. He would tell anyone who would listen about any promotion I got or a business trip to some far flung part of the world like Singapore, Finland or Llandudno. But when I decided to “go it alone” he surprised me with how certain he was that I could and should go all in. I know he somewhat regretted not starting his own landscaping business in the 1980s which was perhaps behind it - but either way it certainly fuelled me with some additional courage.

I’ve always very much admired people who either lost their parents at an early age or perhaps never had any or didn’t have parents who were supportive. These people often show a strength of character that I could only admire from a privileged stand-point. Don’t get me wrong, my parents fall / fell into the working class bracket so I couldn’t go cap in hand to them all that often - but there was always the option to get some help when the unexpected happened. And without realising it, that “safety net” is one of the things that helped me sleep at night just that little bit easier.

Life goes on and a bit of Nietzsche

What a brutal reality this is.

But the world does keep turning. I’ve read a lot of Nietzsche over the years - although I now cheat a bit by following a Nietzsche tweet-a-day account giving me more time to read manga and anything else Japanese I can lay my hands on. But one of his views was something he called “free death”. The suggestion was that some people die too old, some die to young and others die “at the right time”. He tried to explain that if someone consummates their life then they can die “victoriously” and show promise to those of us who survive. Perhaps a simplified but somewhat romantic way of suggesting that one should live without regret and to the fullest?

But my dad was taken too soon. And he was taken relatively quickly, without too much warning. I don’t know if this is easier or harder. Certainly people who have to endure the long term suffering of loved ones aren’t to be envied and no doubt wish for a better end - whether that life was “victorious” or not.

But one thing I do know is that I have children now and I need to work, not only for them but for myself. And whilst I am more aware of that thing we all strive for - a work/life balance, than my dad and many in his generation were; it will sometimes evade me and the pendulum will swing too far one way or the other. And in the meantime I have no choice but to work though my own grief and try to put food on the table as things slowly get easier.

And if it takes a long time for the pain to ease, I’ll just have to enter the rat race that is the booming inflatable doll industry.

Best wishes to anyone going through the grieving process. If this has helped anyone in any way then please let me know x