Hard Education | Returning to Work While Grieving
A painful transition
Welcome back to Hard Education!
The series exploring the tough issues that often get overlooked, remain in mainstream newsletters archives or don’t reach headlines at all.
If you missed part 5, click below:
The aim of this post is to give tools to those who may be having a hard time adjusting back to work while grieving.
I know that grief is a heavy topic and want to let you know that today’s topic may be too much for some. If you are grieving, please do take care when reading this article.
When a person is grieving a personal loss, it can be one of the most challenging times adjusting back to work.
In a school environment, the pressure is high in the role of an educator to remain professional and to separate personal life from work.
However, for many, grief can be triggered at any time and anywhere.
A teacher may have tears welling up as someone says a phrase that reminds them of their late loved one.
They may continue to face students exerting challenging behaviour unaware of what is going on in their teacher’s life.
Some colleagues may appear more distant often due to not knowing what to say.
On the other hand, there are colleagues who may come across as “too much” with constant questions of whether they are okay.
It can all be triggering.
It’s difficult for many to balance giving space while simultaneously extending support so often they fall into doing one more or in place of the other.
Grief is a stage of life that looks and feels incredibly different to every individual. It has layers to it and how it’s processed depends on many factors:
The proximity of the relationship with the person who passed away
How the person passed
If they got a chance to say final goodbyes
The grieving person’s role in the process e.g. are they responsible for funeral arrangements, executing the will, do they have legal obligations to fulfil?
How supported the person feels in their private life
Their family dynamics
The list goes on.
In UK schools, staff are given compassionate/bereavement leave but we’re talking about days not weeks unlike in some other fields of work.
It is up to the discretion of the head teacher how much extra time is given to a bereaved person and this is usually unpaid leave.
There isn’t any universal school rule for the amount of time taken off therefore it differs from person to person and from school to school.
In cases I’ve witnessed or heard about, bereaved employees are often expected to return to work at full capacity. Opportunities such as temporary workload sharing, reduced responsibilities, or working from home are rarely offered especially for a teacher who works in class.
I’ve noticed that some schools are more effective than others with supporting grieving individuals and others are not so compassionate.
I have experienced grieving while working in a school in two distinct situations.
My first experience was the loss of a colleague.
Our Colleague
At one of the schools I taught in, I arrived expecting to greet a colleague in their usual spot in the staffroom.
I was fairly new to the school and this colleague was very welcoming. She was such a warm, kind and bubbly person. She would always ask me how things were going and would involve me in conversations with other colleagues.
She sadly passed away from cancer during the summer holidays.
Upon returning to the school that academic year, I looked out for her, I wanted to find out how her holidays were, she usually had funny stories to share.
She wasn’t in the staffroom but I didn’t think much of it.
There were no hints that anything sad had happened, the days simply rolled on. One day I noticed a small typed notice with a rest in peace dedication to this colleague.
Although I had only known her briefly, her impact was huge, I felt her absence.
Her warmth, her hilarious loud giggle, her stories…
I was quite taken aback that there wasn’t an official announcement nor at least a shared one minute silence done for her.
She had given so much of her time and heart to the school…
Perhaps this may have been her wish or that of her family, maybe she didn’t want any grand announcements, dedications or sadness…
Behind all the work, there is a human, a life lived, dreams, hopes, struggles, successes and losses, love, heartbreak and more… so when the work they contributed ceases unexpectedly due to their life ending, how can we honour them, not just think of replacing them?
No one can be replaced.
Yes roles can be filled yet it made me wonder where the care was, the remembrance…
How can someone who had dedicated years of their work to a place, a school community just get a small note and everything else go on as normal?
What about the students they supported? What about the parents they helped? What about their colleagues they befriended?
It just felt incredibly cold.
This is a real lived example of what can happen, some schools leave little room to mourn even their own staff at times.
It can fall on the hands of the support staff instead of those in management. It can remain unspoken of who does what and then the days turn into weeks, then into months and all that is left is a forgotten piece of paper that no one has much time to look at.
This is an incredible shame.
My mentor
I had lost someone I was very close to who I’m referring to as my mentor as she was someone I took a lot of general life advice from.
She had passed away from cancer and I was involved in taking care of her in her final months. She lived a lot further away from where I worked in comparison to where I lived so it often meant running a bit late yet always arriving ahead of time before the students would arrive.
At that point of losing her, work was a helpful distraction to me. Only a few colleagues were aware of my loss and I didn’t actually want any extra time off as honestly it was devasting being around her family.
The support from my colleagues that knew was incredible, it genuinely made grieving feel lighter.
However for some teachers, work is anything but a distraction, it can be a place where grief shows up and is dealt with harshly.
The following person in this story has been given an alias for privacy reasons.
Tabitha’s story
One of the worst situations I was made aware of in regards to lack of support for a grieving colleague was when I worked with a colleague Tabitha.
