Why going back to work after a parent dies can feel impossible
Her mother died on a Thursday. She went back to work the following Monday. Everyone said how strong she was. She nodded and said thank you and felt nothing.
Three weeks later she woke up and could not make herself leave the house. Not would not. Could not. Her body simply refused. She called in sick. Then again. Then she stopped calling.
People asked if she was okay. She said she was fine. Like someone reading from a script they no longer believed.
We do this. We show up when someone dies because showing up is what strong people do. We answer emails and attend meetings and keep the refrigerator stocked because stopping would mean admitting something we are not ready to admit. That the person who died took a piece of the machinery with us. That we are not actually fine.
And then one morning the body makes the decision the mind could not.
She had spent months telling herself she was handling it. Handling it meant functioning. It meant not burdening anyone. It meant being the person people could still count on even though the ground had dropped out from under her.
What she did not say out loud was that work had become impossible. Not difficult. Impossible. She would sit at her desk and stare at the screen and feel like she was watching herself from very far away. Tasks that used to take twenty minutes now took hours.
She was not lazy. She was not broken. She was grieving, and grief does not keep office hours.
The question she kept running into: is it okay to stop? We are taught that strength means continuation. That real grief happens quietly, in the margins, without inconveniencing anyone.
But what if the strongest thing is admitting we need to stop?
She did not have an answer. What she had was a body that would not move and a mind that kept asking how long she could keep pretending this was fine.
Maybe it is about recognising that some losses are too large to work around. That the most honest thing we can do is stop trying to carry what we cannot carry and sit with what remains.
Grief does not care if there is a meeting at two or a deadline on Friday. It shows up when it shows up, and sometimes it shows up as an inability to function in the ways we used to.
The hardest part is not the grief itself. It is the guilt. The feeling that we should be over it by now, that our inability to show up makes us weak. But strength is not the same as pretending.
She did not know if it was okay to stop. What she knew was that she could not keep going. And maybe that was enough.
Something to sit with:
What would change if you stopped measuring grief by how little it inconveniences others?
Who taught you that needing time makes you weak?
What if stopping is not giving up, but finally being honest?