Cassidy passed away on Wednesday afternoon, May 4th, 2022, but I didn’t find her until later in the evening. Later that night, as I was lying awake in a bed at my brother’s house, I started to think about the things I needed to do. One of those things was to tell my boss what happened.

I took PTO for Thursday and Friday of the week Cassidy died, and also took PTO for the entire next week. I returned to work on May 16th. It felt good to be back to a normal activity, but there were some things I was not prepared for.

Probably because of my lack of sleep and not eating hardly anything, I struggled to concentrate during meetings. Even basic tasks took longer to complete, and the quality of my work was noticeably diminished. Luckily, the people I work with are very understanding, and they happily picked up the slack. That first week back to work was a struggle. I never really felt productive, and I felt guilty for not doing my best work. Nevertheless, I was grateful to be back at something normal and it was important for my healing.

If I worked in a factory on a manual labor job, I don’t know if I would have trusted myself with high-risk tasks. If you are in that situation, I would encourage you to start with low-risk jobs.

By May 23rd, my second week back to work, I was starting to feel more like myself, but this was the week of the funeral, and as I got closer to the funeral, I found myself distracted again. I took May 26th and 27th, the days of the visitation and funeral, as bereavement leave. This was Memorial Day weekend, so I didn’t have to return to work until May 31st.

I am writing this post on June 7th. My ability to focus at work has pretty much returned to normal with the exception of occasional moments that overwhelm me. But these only happen once every few days and I typically recover quickly.

I am grateful to have a job which affords me the flexibility to take care of things and get myself straightened out before any real expectations were placed on me. If you lose your wife, you should plan on it being 2-3 weeks before you can perform at your work as well as you did before you lost her.

As a final word of caution, there was a temptation to lose myself in my work and ignore the emotional mess exploding around me. I avoided this temptation and I am glad I did. While it may be a useful trick to get back to work sooner, it would have just been a drug to avoid processing what happened, and that would have made the grieving process longer and harder than it needed to be. The only way is to face it and go through it.