"Whatever You Need, Just Ask": A Leadership Standard for Grief in the Workplace

The Morning Everything Changed

Early on July 15, 2014, our family was two days into a new school year. Our oldest, Ellie, was starting ninth grade. Grace was in sixth. Anna was in second. A week earlier, we had been at the beach. That morning, Ellie came to us complaining of a headache, one of several she had been having for weeks while doctors tried to find a cause. I went to check on her. She was watching a video on her phone. Mid-sentence, she lunged forward, put her hand to her forehead, said "Dad," and lost consciousness.

She had suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm. The neurosurgery and PICU teams at UNC Children's Hospital fought to save her through that day and into the next. It wasn't enough. Ellie died early evening on July 16. We had lost our firstborn. Grace and Anna had lost their sister.

Grief moved into our house that week and never fully left.

Grief Doesn't Follow a Script

Grief isn't linear, and it doesn’t resolve on a timetable. It can dominate every hour for days and then recede without warning. It can stay quiet for weeks and then reappear because of something small: a song, a smell, a date on the calendar. Our grief counselor called that sudden reopening "the pit." Over time, you learn to recognize what triggers it. Sometimes you can't avoid it anyway, and the only option is to let it move through you.

Here is what I have learned firsthand: grief does not get better. It gets different. You find a way to carry it and keep moving, but the life on the other side isn't the one you had before.

People also grieve differently, and no one else gets to correct that. Unless someone's process is putting them or others at risk, it isn't yours to question. That's hard for organizations built on process and predictability to accept, because grief refuses both.

Grief Isn't Only About Death

Most people, myself included before 2014, think of grief only in the context of death. Not long after Ellie died, my boss sponsored a Grief in the Workplace webcast for her leadership team, and I had no idea it would hit a blind spot. Sitting through it was the first time I understood how much wider the subject is. Grief shows up in far more places than a death. Divorce. Job loss. Illness. Relocation. Any situation where something you didn't choose has taken away the life you expected produces the same underlying response: mourning what could have been while still functioning in what is in front of you.

Leaders who only build grief support around bereavement are preparing for one scenario out of several they will face on a team.

What Leadership Got Right

My employer at the time had already shown us what they were capable of. Two years before Ellie died, I was in a serious car accident and out on medical leave for four months. They fully supported my family through it, without hesitation. That history mattered, because when Ellie died, we already knew what kind of response to expect.

They checked in constantly during the day and a half she was hospitalized, and again through the days we spent planning a service we never imagined having to plan. At the Celebration of Life, my boss found me in the receiving line and said, "Whatever you need, just ask." The company showed up in force, in person and through our church's livestream. Years later, people who worked there still reach out to tell me something reminded them of her.

76% of grieving employees received no communication from leadership after returning to work, and only 1 in 5 managers feel comfortable addressing grief with someone on their team (Sinclair, 2025; Baca, 2024).

That's not a training problem. It's a leadership behavior problem, and it's the exact gap my former boss closed without a manual telling her how.

A Standard, Not a Policy

Bereavement leave is a policy. Three to five days, an EAP number, a card signed by the department. What my boss did wasn't in any handbook. It was a standard she held herself to: check in without being asked, show up in person, make the offer of help open-ended instead of prescribed and keep showing up after the calendar says you should have moved on.

None of that requires a budget. It requires a leader who decided in advance what kind of person she would be when someone on her team needed her most.

The real question for any organization isn't whether a grief policy exists in the employee handbook. It's whether the leaders in that organization would know what to say if someone needed one tomorrow.

In Ellie's Name

Between 2015 and 2024, our family hosted a race in Ellie's memory nine times, raising more than $350,000 for brain aneurysm research and awareness programs, including work supported through The Bee Foundation.

The foundation was started in 2014 in memory of Jennifer Sedney, another young woman lost to a ruptured aneurysm, and it now works on four fronts at once: funding preventative research, raising public awareness of the warning signs, advocating in Congress for better federal policy and supporting the families and survivors left behind (The Bee Foundation, n.d.).

Ellie's name is also attached to federal legislation. Ellie's Law (House | Senate), formally the Ellie Helton, Lisa Colagrossi, Kristen Shafer Englert, Teresa Anne Lawrence, and Jennifer Sedney Focused Research Act, would direct $20 million a year through 2030 to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for research into detecting brain aneurysms before they rupture (Clarke, 2025). Congress has introduced and reintroduced it across five sessions since 2019. It has never gotten a floor vote.

You don't have to have lost someone to act on either of these. A donation to The Bee Foundation funds the kind of research that finds an aneurysm before it ruptures instead of a family finding out after. Writing a message to your member of Congress in support of Ellie's Law takes a few minutes. It's one of the few concrete things standing between "we didn't know" and knowing in time.

One in 50 people has an unruptured brain aneurysm. Someone suffers a ruptured aneurysm every 18 minutes. It is more likely to occur in women than men, with a higher incidence rate in minorities. Of the people who suffer a ruptured brain aneurysm, half will not survive. Of the 50% who survive, half of them will suffer from a permanent neurological deficit. Knowing the signs of a brain aneurysm is important, especially if you have a family history.

The Essence of Ellie

Before her service, we sat down with our pastor and gave him the list of things that made Ellie who she was, the version we wanted people to know rather than the softened one grief was already starting to write.

She was our first, and we got to be there for her first breath. Fourteen years later, we were there for her last one too.

She was quirky and strong-willed, with a mind that never idled and an opinion about everything, including my beard. If she thought it, she said it. She loved superheroes because they stood for what was fair, and she couldn't tolerate unfairness. She loved without condition, even toward people who didn't return it, and she never seemed to notice that other people were different from her. She just saw people.

Her favorites were the simple kind: pizza, Dr. Pepper, Doritos, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. On our last vacation together, the week before she died, we talked her into trying Caesar salad and spinach-artichoke dip. She liked both and told us so.

Pink was her color, and vivid was her whole style. We still wear it for her.

When it became clear the aneurysm had taken too much, her doctor said something that has stayed with us since: the essence of Ellie was no longer there. When her heart kept beating longer than anyone expected, her nurse called it a strong heart. Both were exactly right.

She loved her family, especially her sisters, along with her friends, her church, her school and our dog. She was making plans for her baptism, so we had her baptized in the hospital in her final hours, because that wish mattered too much to leave undone.

We have a hole in our hearts that will never be filled, but we will find our way on the love and memories of this young woman who was and is so very special to us. Ellie danced like no one was watching and sang like no one was listening. We hope her legacy encourages us to always be ourselves and let that shine through: eat a Reese’s Cup every now and then, feel like a superhero and wear pink somewhere you wouldn’t expect to see it. Thank you for allowing us to share a little bit about her today.  

References

Baca, M. (2024). Grief in the workplace [Conference presentation]. Healthcare Financial Management Association, New Mexico Chapter.

Clarke, Y. D. (2025, April 7). Clarke leads bipartisan effort to advance life-saving brain aneurysm research [Press release]. https://clarke.house.gov/clarke-leads-bipartisan-effort-to-advance-life-saving-brain-aneurysm-research

Sinclair, Z. (2025, May 12). Supporting employees through grief: Five essential strategies. Fast Company SA. https://fastcompany.co.za/work-life/2025-05-12-supporting-employees-through-grief-five-essential-strategies

The Bee Foundation. (n.d.). Home. Retrieved September 16, 2026, from https://thebeefoundation.org/

© Eventcraft Studios. Originally published 2026. All rights reserved.