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Dealing with Loss

How fast do you expect people to "get over" dealing with loss?

Really?

I find that often we expect people to be over it all too quickly. We move quickly thru our own loss on the surface to give the appearance of normality and cling to some kind -- any kind -- of routine to get us back on track. But what is back on track? To what extend is there no going back? How do we acknowledge our true sense of loss and how do we allow others to do the same?

I saw a funny play the other night, "Becky's New Car" at the Theater Company of Lafayette. It's a charming comedy filled with human foible type laughs and some serious explorations into what makes us who we are. Comedy that also provokes thinking is a treasure.

One of the characters is broadly sketched for his many faults. He's funny because he's so seriously concerned with his own needs that he hardly sees the needs of others. So we laugh. And we laugh at his tight clinging to the past, especially the loss of his ex-wife. It's a death that society would expect him to be over and ready to move on. The audience laughs as he references his loss (and his attempts at recovery) over and over. And, there is something funny about repetition. But it's not all funny.

I talked with the actor, David Bliley, briefly after the play was over. As an actor myself, I could sense that he put some serious work into his role and was taking the grief component seriously. He was. "I'm not really playing some of those lines for laughs," he said, "and I don't necessarily think they're funny..."

"I could tell," I said. "In part, that makes it even more funny, and yet it's poignant at the same time. We expect people to be over grief all too soon..."

"I agree," said David. "I've never lost a wife to death but I know that breaking up is grief enough that you don't get over all that fast...I wanted to show that grief is serious..."

Thank you for that, David. Grief is serious and long lasting. Some parts of our grief never go away. Some loss we never fully recover from. We go on. We build new lives. We try new things. We launch new relationships, but the loss is a permanent part of our lives. And why not?

It is not a judgment of someone's character that they continue to carry their loss. It's an act of respect and love for the person they lost. Or the people they lost, for as we get older the losses keep adding up. One person after another leaves our life and we must face the future without them. We can still smile, we can still laugh, but we must not pretend that we aren't still effected that they can no longer share that laughter.

I've experienced loss in my life, as I'm sure you have. This has been a tough year, losing both an ex-mother-in-law that I dearly loved and a step father who was always kind and generous to me and who had become inseparable from my mom. The losses are fresh, and the effects persistent. In conversation with my mom yesterday, she cried telling me a story about her beloved Jack.

I cried a little, too.

What does this have to do with high performance leadership? What do centered leaders have to do with grief?

Everything, perhaps. As leaders it is our job to help people navigate change and to provoke new directions. All of that produces loss, which produces grief. We need to experience that grief, understand that grief, empathize with that grief, and support those others whose experience of that grief may take longer than ours.

Centered leaders are compassionate, patient, and generous with their flexibility toward recovery. People can be relied on to be people, and people in loss are not always ready for work Monday morning -- even two weeks or two months after a profound loss. We can hold people to standards without crushing them under the wheel. The art of leadership is remaining human while getting the work done. Building the kinds of teams who not only tolerate grief but support those who are experiencing it can only lead to greater long term loyalty and success. It's not easy. Attendance policies direct us to weed out those who miss too much time. Goals call for immediate and constant action. But as leaders it is our responsibility to keep both courage and compassion in the game.

And so I ask leaders everywhere to keep in touch with their compassion. Remember that just because you may have forgotten someone's loss, that they haven't and they never will. It's not an excuse to avoid work, because we all have losses to deal with, but it is a reason to remember that some days that grief is more present than others.

When we are gone, don't we hope that we are missed?

Why would it be different for anyone else?

Centered leaders show compassion, courage, clarity, and creativity in their daily work. Sometimes, some days, that component of compassion is all that people need to see...

-- Douglas Brent Smith


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