Stephen: When something like this happens
you are intimately involved, not just from a corporate point of view
but for us personally as human beings.
Claire: You feel hugely exposed, it’s extraordinary and you shouldn’t
feel so bad about it because it’s grief.
Carol: For a lot of people, getting back to the normality
of what they did is the lifesaver.
They just need to be supported.
Kate: Shona McKerkin was the child development team leader
working with children aged three to five.
One day she came in and just said
‘Kate, I have to tell you
they have discovered hot spots on my spine,
but I’m sure it’s nothing.’
Shona never acknowledged…
never said the words ‘I have terminal cancer.’
Every single day she came in with the same smile on her face
and the same attitude.
Meg: There are a number of client’s we’ve helped that have been
diagnosed at the outset with terminal cancer
and they want to remain at work
and legally there’s no reason why they shouldn’t remain at work.
I think the starting point is the employee should communicate
with the employer and tell them what the situation is.
If they do that the employer can then consider
can they make reasonable adjustments to keep
their valued employee at work.
Thinking about some of the clients we’ve helped
it wasn’t the cancer that was preventing them from working
it was maybe fatigue
which the employer could accommodate quite easily.
It may be that the employer could then work with
Occupational Health or the GP to say we want to keep our
valued employee at work, but we might need some guidance
and support to make sure that we are looking after them
and not exacerbating the condition that the employee has.
Kate: Shona wanted everything to be kept normal.
She wouldn’t tolerate duties being taken away from her.
So all we could do was to speak to staff and make sure that they
understood that Shona had limitations now.
Although she didn’t want to talk about it
but they would have to do as much as they could to support her
to take on certain tasks so that she never felt things were
being taken away from her,
that her role was being eroded in any sense.
Stephen: Lincoln joined us as a graduate recruit.
Three or four months after he starting working for us he was
sadly diagnosed with bone cancer.
I think the thing that particularly upset me was he was so young.
He was only 22, it was his first job after leaving university
and it just seemed awful for this to happen to him at
that stage in his life.
Throughout his illness we always kept Lincoln’s job open for him.
He came back into the office a couple of times for visits.
I think it helped everyone to sort of see him
but the last time he came in was about two months
before he died and at that stage he looked very, very thin,
he was very, very tired and it was clear that he was very seriously ill
and I think that really was quite upsetting.
Kate: Shona called in one morning because she physically couldn’t get out of bed.
It was agreed that Shona would phone us every four days just to keep in touch.
The next four days she didn’t call.
So I made a decision to go and pay her a visit.
The vicar told me that Shona had passed away
and it was just totally unexpected.
We didn’t know what… we were shocked, we were crying.
We were like, what do we do now? What do we do?
Carol: How managers can support their employees at work
when one of the colleagues has died,
it’s a difficult situation.
They’re having to manage other colleagues cope
with the loss of their colleague
when really they’re probably trying to cope with the loss themselves.
So I think it’s always better to talk about things.
You know, the unmentionable is unmanageable.
Kate: When we returned, I wasn’t sure how everyone was going to feel
So I thought it would be helpful if we had some time together
and I made a decision to get a nice candle
lit the candle, put it in the middle of the table
and I said a few words about Shona
just to acknowledge how we were feeling
and we just sat quietly together.
Staff had been worried about children coming back
and if they ask questions, what will we say.
Nobody tells you what’s the best way to deal with this.
So I made the decision that
we could tell parents certainly, but it may be better if parents
themselves were able to talk to their children.
It was up to them how they deal with death and bereavement
in their own way.
But because we had the six-week break and children are very resilient
they came back, they skipped in the door
they’ve seen familiar faces and they got on with it
and that helped us.
Carol: When a manager needs to contact the family of someone who’s died
it’s being aware of the sensitivity of the situation.
The biggest pitfalls that managers and colleagues might fall into
when going to someone’s house
is they’re so desperate not to sit with the silence
they come up with ‘well he was insured, well you’ll get this,
well you’ll be alright financially.”
You know, they’d give up every penny of their finance,
they don’t want to hear that.
It’s better just to go there and listen to the family
because the family have been wanting to talk to you.
Stephen: After the practical issues had been resolved and so on
Lincoln’s brother asked if he could come and visit the office and
bring his mother as well because firstly
he wanted to say thank you to us as a company for supporting
Lincoln, but also I felt that he wanted to actually see where…
have a connection with the place where Lincoln had worked.
Claire: My sister Lizzie died from pancreatic cancer just over two years ago.
On the day that Lizzie passed away I contacted work colleagues
and you know, my boss. Needing to do so I did that just by text
I couldn’t really trust myself to talk to people.
The funeral happened the Friday week after that
and then after people had gone on the Saturday
you think Monday… work.
And I thought oh, now what do we do?
You really are striving to get back,
but at that point you’ve got to try and be so
damn kind to yourself as well because you’ve got to…
You know… it might be that you just need another day,
or sometimes it’s like you need an hour away from something
just to feel that you can breath again.
The problem can sometimes be just once they get back
into the workplace they realise actually they need
a little bit of time, you know,
graduated return to work to be able to do the job.
Carol: Unfortunately there’s lots of companies think
once you’ve got over that two weeks of staged return
that’s it, they’re embedded back into work
and everything will be okay and that’s not really true.
They need to be treated as normal as possible
but they need to be very much aware that there’s help there
if they feel as though they’re getting
a little bit out of their depth with work.
Claire: It wasn’t too long after Lizzie passed away
that I had the first of the reviews of the year
and found I was marked down.
But I actually felt I’d overachieved because I’d managed to cope with
all of that situation and still achieved everything
that needed achieving at work and hadn’t missed
any deadlines or anything.
I lost loyalty to the company for the first time ever
because I felt I hadn’t been looked after
I thought well, crikey
how I’m going to have that feeling again towards you the company?
Carol: Bereavement affects everyone differently.
A lot of people struggle in the work place because
one of the first things that go when you’re grieving is your concentration
and you know, they think they were excellent at their job before
but they’re not now.
They think it reflects badly on them, so on top of the stress of
the grief they have the stress of probably thinking they can’t
do the job they did before.
But the manager could recognise that they need someone to talk to
someone that’s not involved in their family,
that’s not involved in their working life
so that they can deal with these thoughts and emotions.
I’m visiting a couple at the minute,
the husband is having a dreadful time
because he isn’t getting the support at work.
Nobody says anything, nobody acknowledges that his child’s died.
His wife is going to work now and is being very well supported.
She’s very much aware where she can go if she gets distressed and
you know this has all been spelled out to her.
Just walk out, you know, at first someone won’t follow you
but then we will.
They’re really good to her and I would like to think that
all employers would sort of take this attitude to their workforce.
Kate: The team wanted to make sure that Shona wasn’t forgotten
and we decided that we would do some fundraising.
Everyone became involved.
The community, parents, staff, children.
There were lots of laughter, there was lots of tears.
Everybody put money in a bucket
and when we counted up our money we had raised over £1,300 for Macmillan.
So we hope every year to be doing something special
in memory of Shona.