Dealing with Grief: Losing a Job/Losing a Loved One

I came across a somewhat interesting discussion on one of my LinkedIn groups: "I know losing a friend or a loved one can be devastating but how does the feeling compare to the loss of a job? Do we go through a similar grieving process?"

At first glance, there's just no question of a comparison, right? The loss of a loved one is far more painful than the loss of a job. Like one woman posted, "I lost my husband. Between that and losing a job - I'd pick losing a job every day for 10 years."

A lot of people felt the same way and posted similar responses. But some saw through the question: it wasn't so much about comparing the two losses as it was about looking at the loss of a job individually and asking if we go through the same stages of grief. When you lose a loved one, you lose a lot more than just their physical presence in your life. You lose whatever they brought into the relationship: a confidante, a sense of dependability, a sense of knowing where to go when you needed them. But can we say the same about losing a job?

If we're going to answer that, we have to ask ourselves, "Does my job give me more than just financial security?" We spend more time at work during the day than at home, interacting with our family members. So, of course, we forge bonds and form work-relationships that come to mean more than just idle chat at the water cooler. Losing your job could mean losing this support structure you created for yourself. I saw this when my mom was one of the hundreds of people who were laid off from Philips. It was the company my mom had started her career with and she'd been a part of the company for 20 odd years. I still remember how hard she had to struggle to come to terms with her loss, even battling depression. Over those 20 odd years, she had associated herself with her work and not being part of the company any more had made her feel...unwanted.

A couple of weeks back I got to know about an ex-colleague who passed away in a motorbike accident. I later heard that a lot of people from my old organization attended his funeral. Though I had never worked with him myself, or interacted with him personally, I wished I had been able to attend the funeral simply because he was part of an organization that I had come to love in the 4 years I had worked there. I'm guessing a lot of people who did attend his funeral would have felt the same way. Some would have been there to pay their respects to the individual but for others, perhaps, the bond they shared transcended any individual.

So my response to the LinkedIn discussion would be, yes, when we lose a job (or give one up prematurely) we do go through a similar grieving process as when we lose a loved one. The intensity would vary greatly, but the grief would probably go through the same phases: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance; denial that such a thing happened to you, anger because you didn't deserve it, bargaining over whether you could have avoided it, depression because you cannot come to terms with what you've lost, and finally acceptance because you realize it's time to move on.