When Employees Are Caregiving or Grieving For A Parent

I started Double Forte in 2002 after my mother was diagnosed with Stage IV Lung Cancer. My parents lived in Wisconsin, I lived with my family in the San Francisco Bay Area. The plan had been to take a high level communication job, but that position would not have allowed me the flexibility to be in Wisconsin when I wanted to be, so I pulled out of that search. Needing to keep a roof over our heads, I started the agency with Dan Stevens.  

My mother, originally given four months to live, lived pretty well for over three and a half years.  I, along with my two sisters, spent half the year for the first four years of the company in Wisconsin, being with and helping to care for my mother, and relieving my father. We got into a rhythm of visiting, caring, working, and regularly celebrating life. We made it work.

And Then It Needed To Work Even More

Eight years later, six employees found out their parents were gravely ill within a three week stretch. Within six months each of them would navigate their parents’ end of life, each in a very different way. Only one person quit her job to move back in with her parents to care for her family. The rest worked through their difficult situations, some full time, some part time, some remotely, others in the office as much as they could be. You can read more about that here.

Everyone handled this time differently from each other and from how I had so many years earlier. It was challenging for each person. And it was challenging for their teams, yet I think we made it work, mostly, by working it out day-by-different-day. Unlike caring for most children which is challenging but basically follows a developmental schedule, caring for your parents is incredibly unpredictable. And there is no guide book — well there wasn’t until Double Forte’s own Liz O’Donnell wrote it. 

Working Daughter, is Liz’s story of her caring for both of her parents at the ends of their lives. The website by the same name is a community for women balancing eldercare, career, kids, and life. The closed Facebook Group is a vital connection for thousands of working daughters handling it all.

Liz’ Story

I vividly remember when she called to tell me that she’d gotten devastating, terminal diagnoses for both of her parents on the same day – her mother with late stage ovarian cancer, her father with early stage Alzheimer’s and dementia. Yet, Liz is the breadwinner in her house, and she needed her income. Double Forte is a small company and we didn’t  have the resources to provide full time pay for long, undefined periods of time. Liz and I figured out a plan to scale back her work and move her responsibilities around. After her mother died four months later, she modulated her work back up.

The silver lining is that her parents granted Liz the ability to write this book so she could share all that she learned in the process — of the job she didn’t apply for. The result is this handbook that every working daughter (or son), and every boss of a working daughter (or son) should read. I’m the boss in the book. It’s not always flattering of me, other colleagues, or the company, but the story — sometimes funny, sometimes devastating, always exhausting — is true. And her advice, told through her mistakes, wins, choices, and trials by error,  gives power and a road map to the impossible challenge that most everyone will face. 

Road Map for the Caregiver 

In Working Daughter you will find a literal 10-point road map for how to handle the challenges that some with caring for your parent. From Accept through Absolve, Prioritize, Flex all the way to Plan and Reflect, Liz provides invaluable information, resources and point of view to help the caregiver make the innumerable choices that come along with caring for a parent. Most important the fact that “you don’t need to be a Pollyanna about care-giving.” 

Liz urges anyone who’s resisting the role as caregiver to “step in and get on with it” because once you accept the role your mindset moves to handling it. Not that it’s easy. And she does not advocate “for you to be a people-pleasing doormat” – quite the opposite! 

One of her most poignant recommendations is to “speak your truth” and use a timer to make sure you make time to do this every day. 

Try this: Set two timers every morning, each for one minute. For the first minute complain, wail, sob, or whine. If you need the time to express your stress, take it. Then move on. Set a second timer, again for one minute. Spend that minute listing all of the things for which you are grateful. It could be big things like your health or your children or small things like chocolate and wine. During the darker moments of caregiving, you can call up this list to remind you all is not horrible. When the timers go off, move forward with your day. After all, there is care to be given.

Also, her 50 Things Caregivers Can Do To Practice Self-Care is a primer for us all! Read it, choose your things, take care of yourself! 

Impact

Liz is an ISTJ – or The Duty Fulfiller – on the Myers-Briggs type indicator, and we all benefit from it. ISTJs have “an abiding sense for doing what needs to be done in the here and now. Their realism, organizing abilities, and command of the facts lead to their completing tasks thoroughly and with great attention to detail.” Caregivers everywhere can thank God for this! I wish I’d had this book before my mother was diagnosed. There’s no way my ENFP self could have done what Liz has done in Working Daughter. 

And her advice for management and legislators is as important as her caregiver advice for the working daughters (and sons) among us. Her insights have helped Double Forte adjust our flex time policy, our bereavement leave policy, and reinforced the importance of strong communication among our teams. 

And Then There’s Grief

Just as every caregiver employee will handle and deal the situation with their parents in a different way, so will they grieve their parents’ deaths differently. While grief may be universal, the expression of grief is not, and the workplace can be a challenging place for people grieving. 

As Gianpiero Petriglieri and Sally Maitlis discuss in their recent HBR article “When A Colleague is Grieving, “strong time-off policies, sensitive managers, and open conversations…make a big difference for employees in times of mourning” yet are “rare in the workplace.”   You can read the article here.                                                                                                              

Petriglieri and Maitlis give pragmatic advice to managers and colleagues of grieving co-workers. The key is to understand that “mourning workers will experience both progressions and regressions after a loss” and that the district phases of grief do not “unfold in a progression.” To be effective leaders and managers of grieving employees it’s important to build capacity to be “present in moments of loss, patient with the inconsistency it generates, and open to its growth potential.” Those managers who do help “organizations do better.”

Which can all do. And in so doing for both the caregiver and the grieving, build more resilient, sustainable businesses.