That dissonance between what grief actually requires and what our work culture allows and demands is where so much of this struggle resides. In a system that runs on production and performance, there’s little space for something that can’t be optimized or sped up. And grief, by its very nature, refuses to operate on that timeline.

I had just stepped onto the court to warm up for my first high school tennis match when my stepmom walked to the fence and told me through her tears that I needed to leave.

“Your mother isn’t doing well.”

Her lupus had come out of remission, and her health had been declining for several months. But she had just been released from the hospital earlier that week and was told she likely had at least another year to live.

Instead, it was a matter of hours.

We raced to my mom’s apartment, where a hospice nurse was waiting with my grandmother and one of my mom’s friends. My dad and two siblings arrived shortly after. Later on in the afternoon of August 14, 2004, my siblings and I held our mother Michele’s hand as she took her final breaths.

Because of her illness, I had some time to prepare for the idea of her death. But at 14, I’m not sure I understood just how final death really is.

That night, hours after saying goodbye to my mom, I went to my high school’s soccer game. And two days later, I was back at school. Friends and teachers questioned it and even expressed concern, but I just kind of shrugged, as if to be confused that I would’ve done anything differently.

I think part of me genuinely wanted to be around friends and continue doing normal things instead of sitting at home thinking about my mom’s death. But I wonder how much of that instinct was formed by the societal pressure to move on quickly and not belabor my grief so as not to become a burden to others around me.

I was young, but I had already absorbed the idea that life goes on.

Maria Kubitz captured this tension well in a 2013 essay titled, “Just Let Me Be Sad: A Response to the Stigma of Grief.”

“In the United States, we live in a society so uncomfortable with emotional pain that when someone dies, society expects the outward mourning period to end once the funeral is over,” she writes. “When the bereaved do not cooperate with these prescribed time tables, they are often accused of ‘wallowing’ in their grief. They are indignantly told to ‘move on’ and ‘get over it.’”

But grief is far from a linear experience. It’s often messy and complex, and there is no easy formula or timeline for which to follow.

Here in the U.S., grief is often forced to conform to corporate timelines. Many companies offer as few as three to five days of bereavement leave — barely enough time to plan a funeral, let alone process a loss that upends your entire life. According to one report, only one in five companies offer more than five days, even as some experts suggest taking closer to 20 days after the death of a close family member to handle the emotional and logistical toll of a major loss.1

Another report, “The Grief Tax” (Empathy, 2025), found that grief can affect people at work for an average of 375 business days — more than a year of workdays.2 Much of that burden falls on Gen X and Millennials — often referred to as the “Sandwich Generation” — who now make up roughly two-thirds of the workforce.3 Many are simultaneously raising children, caring for aging parents, and navigating the logistics of end-of-life care, all while maintaining their jobs and personal lives.

“On average, Millennials and Gen Xers reported feeling negative impacts at work — like considering quitting, reduced productivity and concentration, and missing work — for 16 months,” Empathy’s report says. “The ripple effect of loss can jeopardize both job security and career progression. For many, grief manifests as anxiety — sparking both fear of being let go and a desire to leave.

“Members of the Sandwich Generation felt impacts acutely at work and reported difficulty concentrating, reduced productivity, and feeling a decline in reputation at work.”

These negative effects are felt on a holistic level. Gen Xers and Millennials also reported up to 40% more physical and 36% more emotional symptoms than other generations, including anxiety, cognitive fog, headaches and chronic pain — all of which can inhibit someone’s ability to be present and functional at work, home, and in everyday life.

Grief doesn’t affect us all the same way, but one thing is consistent: when we experience significant loss, we’re expected to return to work and resume normal life almost immediately, whether we’re ready or not. But we rarely come back the same. Instead, we push grief down, and it often resurfaces later in ways that are much harder to process.

“The American path for what is socially accepted in grief is narrow,” journalist and author Cody Delistraty writes in a 2024 piece for TIME Magazine. “There’s the perceived need for a brave face, the getting over it, the worry of becoming a burden. There’s the Sisyphean pursuit of closure. There’s the frequently misinterpreted ‘five stages’ — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — which were neither meant as a prescription for how to grieve nor, originally, even really about grief at all.

“Then there’s the business of getting back to work, back to life while grieving. After a one-off memorial, Western social norms ask us to keep it quiet — keep it private.”

How Other Cultures Make Time for Grief

Many countries — particularly in Europe — have laws that set clear expectations for bereavement leave, outlining how many paid or unpaid days employers should provide. The U.S. has no federal standard, leaving it up to individual employers to decide how much time employees receive, if any at all.

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