I Tragically Lost My Best Friend in the Middle of the Work Week. Here’s How It Affected My Job.
It was 2:32 p.m. on a regular work-from-home day when I got a text saying that my best friend Leslie* was in a medically-induced coma. She went into surgery that morning to remove a massive brain tumor that doctors discovered just a few days before. We all hoped it was benign. Instead, it turned out to be a rare, aggressive form of brain cancer.
Leslie and I had been the closest of friends from preschool into our early 20s. We had a deep, kindred friendship that leaves you, as author Alexander McCall Smith says, “bound to one another with hoops of steel.” And you’d think that when cancer snaps those hoops into a hundred splintering, piercing shards, I might've told a few colleagues, or maybe even my boss, and closed my laptop. But when I found out that Leslie was in critical condition and might not make it, I finished out the work day with tears streaming down my face in complete and utter shock. Two weeks later, she passed away.
This was back in the fall, and even now I still question why that was my response, or why I’d occasionally open up a story draft in the hazy week of unofficial sick days I took following her sudden death (the company only provided one bereavement day since Leslie "wasn't family" and I used it for her funeral).
Maybe it was because the shock rendered me entirely unable to identify what I needed in that moment, or maybe it was because “50 Unique Gifts for Moms Who Have Everything” was easier to face than the gut-wrenching realization that the world wouldn’t stop just because Leslie died. Didn’t everyone feel the pulse, the ripple effect, the searing loss on that day? Haven’t we all not been able to fully recover since then?
It's only been seven months, and working while grieving has become the norm. I go to therapy or talk to my pastor on my lunch breaks. I listen to Leslie's favorite songs while I write. I ask God how she’s doing up there. I'll say no to events, slip out of parties unnoticed, reread our old text messages while laying in bed in the dark.
In a haphazard attempt to make some sense of all of this, I attended the MAKERS 2024 women's leadership conference and asked some pretty darn important women (like Leslie Jones, Karen Pittman, and Gretchen Carlson, to name a few) how in the world they survived grief in the workplace. They shared some gems, like how it makes you wiser, more compassionate, more authentic. They also confirmed that it kinda sucks. Which, admittedly, was a bit comforting since this has felt wildly isolating.
And as I sit here attempting to write a pretty, summarized conclusion for an article about the loss of my best friend that is more painfully honest than I ever thought I'd be at work, a part of me is tempted to not bother. Leslie's death was abrupt and wrong. It led to a grief that will never nicely conclude. In fact, I might be entrenched in the pain of it all for the rest of my life.
But I have to believe that though grief will not become smaller, my life will become fuller. That the jagged edges of pain might soften one day. That maybe years from now, I will be a more empathetic leader if a young, 20-something writer comes to me with the death of a friend. That there is still goodness in store for my life, my one beautiful, precious life that I am so privileged to live. That, as Johnny Cash sang, "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day."
In loving memory. (2000-2023)
*Name has been changed.
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