Danielle Moore, managing director of AE3 Media, opened the event, saying grief was one of the least understood and talked about subjects in the workplace.
Note: This article describes death, illness and child loss
She spoke about her dad, who passed eight years ago after a long illness. Moore said she “experienced grief before I lost him” as watching someone she loved become progressively unwell brought its own kind of loss.
“In some ways, you begin mourning the future before it actually happens,” Moore continued, saying one of the saddest things was that he “never got to see what happened next” in her life, such as her professional achievements.
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One thing that stood out to Moore at the time was the compassion she received at work, as AE3 Media gave her space while allowing her to continue working, even from hospital rooms, to maintain structure, focus, and a sense of normality.
Moore said there was not a single way to grieve, noting: “Some people need time away, some people need routine, some people need to talk, some people need quiet. The greatest gift we can give someone is not telling them how they should grieve, but [to] allow them to have the space to grieve in the way that they want to or need to”.
She said eight years on, she still “wobbled” around the anniversary of her dad’s death.
Grief is not something that can be fixed
Lucy Herd, grief consultant and campaigner, said everyone could be carrying grief around with them each day, as they could not leave it at home when they went to work – “it’s often sitting quietly beside us”.
Herd spoke about her son Jack, born in 2008, who died at home after falling into the pond at the family home.
She described him as a “joyous” boy who wanted to make everybody laugh, and Herd said she missed him every day.
“Nothing prepared me for that day,” Herd said, describing how she had turned her back on her son for 10 seconds before realising he had run out into the garden.
Herd said, “the day that Jack died, I died”, saying grief changed people and was not linear – “we all learn to live with it the best we can”.
“Before Jack died, I thought grief was something people eventually got over; I thought you grieved a little bit, then everything would be okay,” Herd said, adding that she now realised it was not something that could be “fixed” and it had become part of her story.
She said no two people grieved the same, even within the same family, as everyone had a different relationship and experience with a loss.
Herd said there were around 40 events that could cause grief, such as the loss of a home, job, best friend or the end of a relationship.
She also disputed the idea of grief stages and said different feelings could come up at different times.
After her son died, Herd found there was no employment law for how much time someone should be allowed off after a bereavement.
She decided this needed to change, and set up a petition to create a law, which Herd said was also her channelling her grief into keeping busy.
Jack’s Law, referring to Statutory Parental Bereavement Leave, was then created to give employees time off work after the death of a child.
Supporting bereaved employees
A panel discussion followed, where Sharon Midwinter, head of benefits and wellbeing at NatWest, said the bank offered bereaved employees a minimum of two weeks and encouraged them to make full use of that time.
She said it was good to have the policy, but not so helpful if people were not aware of it, so it was important to inform employees.
If a colleague at NatWest dies, the company brings in counsellors within 24 hours.
Lisa Margolis, head of people at Stonebridge, said the network had a similar approach and put “people over processes”.
Rob Gill, managing director at Altura Finance, said that within a smaller team, it could sometimes be easier to be aware of what employees were going through, as everyone tended to be closer. However, he said it could be difficult to have a single policy as it would not suit each employee, but said the familiarity helped colleagues support each other.
Margolis said it was important to remind people of the support that was available in the moment.
Mentioning the different ways people might need to grieve, Midwinter said NatWest had resources to support people from diverse backgrounds and respect different cultural practices.
Margolis and Midwinter both said their companies tracked how supportive their policies were by how many people accessed resources.
The different faces of grief
Author and poet Michael Rosen then discussed the different ways grief showed up during his life, starting with the realisation that he had a brother who died before he was born.
When Rosen was 11, he came across a picture of a baby on his mother Connie’s lap, and asked his dad Harold who the baby was. His dad told him this was his brother Alan, who died as a baby, and this was the first time Rosen and his living brother Brian had heard about it.
Rosen said this was one example of how some people, even members of the same family, handled death, as his dad spoke about it from time to time, but his mum never mentioned it.
Rosen’s mum, Connie, died from cancer aged 47 and years later, when his dad died, Rosen’s step mum gave him a letter that his dad, Harold, had written right after she passed.
In the letter, Harold described crying while he sat next to Connie in the hospital, who told him to stop and sent him out of the room. When his dad came back into the room, Connie said: “I was just unlucky, that’s all.”
Again, Rosen said this was one person accepting their death with relative apathy and the other expressing sadness.
In 2020, Rosen caught Covid-19, became quite ill and was in an induced coma for six weeks. “I tried not to feel sorry for myself and I think about it in terms of the death that didn’t happen,” he added.
When he was better, he visited his local NatWest branch, where he had struck up a friendship with one of the employees, and was told that the friend had died from Covid-19. The bank created a memorial for his friend and asked Rosen to write a poem.
Rosen continued to visit the branch every year to remember his friend, with Rosen reflecting on the impact of what was a “casual acquaintance” and a light-hearted friendship.
Referring to the earlier panel regarding bereaved employees, Rosen said that when his son Eddie died in 1999, aged 18, from meningococcal septicaemia, he was working at the BBC, and it was here that Rosen was shown another way employers dealt with a bereaved employee.
“It was very, very sensitive and kind. Every now and then, people would sit with me and wouldn’t say anything,” Rosen said, adding that they also gave him “interesting things to do”.
“I treasured the way in which five or six BBC producers [had] their way of showing kindness, [by] sensing that I liked doing new stuff and to go with the flow,” he added.
Rosen said his son’s death was such a shock that he could no longer write, saying that for many people experiencing grief, “there is something they can’t do anymore” as it might bring back a memory or cause them to lose that faculty.
He then had the realisation that to “experience grief, you have to go through it and understand it”, prompting him to write a set of poems about his feelings, later becoming his Sad Book.
Rosen’s writings explored his need to demystify death, turn the extraordinary into the mundane, pretend the death had not happened, be around other people experiencing similar kinds of loss and understand all sides of grief.
