Usually, I don’t write about politics and grief, yet this time it would benefit us all to address this situation. I would love to know if any of you had challenges with getting bereavement leave when you needed it. Someone I love got her dream job working for a non-profit. She worked there for years and was well respected. She loved her job so much that she didn’t use her sick leave or vacation time that she was able to build up over the years. Her husband knew that he was ill, but each time he went to the doctor, they told him to lose weight and he would feel better. No matter what he did, he kept getting bigger until finally a doctor listened to him and discovered that it was his malignant tumor that was gaining the weight.
As his health worsened, my friend started using her vacation time to help care for him. Her employer would not allow her to use her sick leave since she wasn’t sick. She used her vacation time for a week after his death. The organization was unhappy that she took so much time off even though it was time she had earned, so they terminated her employment, her lifetime dream job. She went into a deep depression after losing both her husband and her career to the point that she couldn’t deal with what had happened to her. Ultimately, she died too.
With all that happens in our country, bereavement leave is something we don’t have a good national system to address. Now we have an opportunity to address this. “In mid-August, the U.S. Senate set a process in motion to determine if our losses are important enough to deserve wage and job protections.” https://live-evermore.org/protect-our-jobs-congress/ Please click on this link to see the 16 US Senators who are working on this in committee right now. They need to hear from you before September 15. Please contact all of them before this deadline. Contact information for all of the senators who are working on this is on the web site included above.
If you are reading this, you most likely have experienced the death of a loved one. You know how you felt as your loved one died, and how you felt that first week and probably longer than that week. We are now in a position to help make it possible for employees to be granted five days of bereavement leave. I encourage you to help make this possible for your fellow grievers.
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