Chaplain Clair Hochstetler on caring for your co-workers

Handling Colleague Grief in the Workplace

Many chaplains find themselves coordinating or getting involved with grief and bereavement support, but it is especially challenging when it is you and your colleagues who become the bereaved when a colleague, whose life touched many, has died.

What are “best practices” when a close colleague from the workplace, or a well-known co-worker’s family member, dies? What if a tragedy impacts multiple people in your workplace? If we are grieving, what can we as professional chaplains do with our grief while keeping up an intense schedule? When death and other types of loss (such as divorce or layoff) touch our workplace, the resulting grief is too often unrecognized and unsupported. Chaplains know how to reach out to patients who are grieving, but when we are faced with the sudden death or catastrophic illness of a colleague, who cares for us?

We may easily anticipate that the death of a family member or close friend will precipitate intense grief, but when a colleague dies, either suddenly or after a prolonged illness, many of us are not as prepared for the intense feelings of the loss. In his 1917 paper, Mourning and Melancholia, Freud theorized that the more strongly one identifies with the deceased, the more profound the bereavement, and that the relationship’s intensity affects the bereaved one’s ability to let go of the deceased. Rando, in Dying: Facing the Facts observes that Freud was not the first person to examine the effects of bereavement but that his observation that grief is normal – and that a lost love object is never totally relinquished – is congruent with current thinking today.

The arduous process of relinquishing attachment to a deceased coworker – and moving on without forgetting their gifts – is often a gradual process. If not guided effectively it will most certainly happen in some unstructured way.

In recent years our health system has been utilizing Dr. Wolfelt's book and companion journal, Understanding Your Grief – Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart as a primary resource and discussion guide for a periodic nine-week bereavement support group co-sponsored and promoted by seven area funeral homes and cremation societies. We have a group meeting for an hour, then break up into smaller process groups, according to similar grief issues. Afterwards, two other trained chaplain volunteers, the evening's presenter, and I hang with those individuals or families who want to stay and talk about their own issues privately. We've been doing this for more than four years. I helped to start this community-wide support system, and it is a formula that is really working!

Except for one population: I've noticed that very few bereaved hospital colleagues have had the courage to attend these community-oriented group sessions. If they do come, they sometimes express that they feel “out of place.” I suspect their usual level of professional sensitivity to issues of confidentiality and self-disclosure often constricts their freedom of sharing. Realizing we need to be more intentional, we’ve started offering colleagues a variety of opportunities to process feelings and experience, depending on the nature of the grief: e.g. Critical Incident Stress Management sessions, a colleague-only bereavement group, individual counseling via EAP, to deal more effectively with this natural process.

Recently I came across Dr. Alan Wolfelt's latest book entitled Healing Grief at Work. Dr. Wolfelt seeks to address the questions I raised in my second paragraph in a practical, compassionate style. Topics include: effective ways to channel grief during the workday, support for coworkers who mourn, participation in group memorials, negotiation of appropriate bereavement leave.

I'm interested in hearing how other chaplains work at issues involving grief and bereavement support, especially when it is one's own hospital colleagues who become the bereaved.