Four days off. You are now legally entitled to this if you lose a parent. When a sibling dies, that’s two. “In those days you can only arrange purely practical matters. The personal part of grieving and relaxing is not included,” says Justine Feitsma, chairperson of CNV Youth. The youth union therefore pleads, together with the ‘big’ CNV, for a statutory bereavement leave of ten days. Both for first-degree family (parents, children, partners) and second-degree (siblings).
Not that Feitsma wants to claim that you can go through a complete grieving process in ten days. But it does offer a little more breathing room, she says. “Our proposal is that you can use those ten days flexibly. This means you can start working half days after the funeral, for example, or you don’t have to take a day off if you still have to arrange something.”
The idea that those days are specifically intended for that purpose should lower the threshold for actually taking the days off and taking rest, CNV hopes. Research for this union shows that one in ten workers who have lost a loved one will burn out as a result of the combination of work and grief.
The call for legal bereavement leave has been around for a while, but last November politicians took a concrete step in that direction. At that time, a round table discussion on grief in the workplace was held at the Ministry of Social Affairs, with experts by experience, experts and interest groups such as the CNV and the employers’ association AWVN.
Not everyone at the table is in favor of bereavement leave. For example, the AWVN believes that there are enough other schemes that can be used, such as emergency leave or the personal choice budget. The ministry announced after the meeting that it would investigate the implications of bereavement at work. That has now been completed, but her ministry cannot yet say when Minister Karien van Gennip (CDA) will send the conclusions and accompanying letter to the House of Representatives.
flash days
Mariken Spuij, clinical psychologist and assistant professor at Utrecht University, is in favor of bereavement leave. In fact, she finds the now targeted ten days “ridiculous little” for something so disruptive in life. “But I don’t want to be too negative. With these kinds of days off, you can cut back on the days when you are completely filled with sadness and you can’t work for a while.”
Also read: The death of a colleague can be a complicated grieving process
More important than offering a package of leave days, says Spuij, is as an employer entering into a broader conversation with the worker about what the grief feelings do to him or her. “Because it is always a different and individual process. What does someone need? What work can someone still perform? That is what it should be about.”
Spuij has done a lot of research into grief in children and young adults. She knows that a loss on people between the ages of 20 and 30 often has a different impact than on people who are older. “People in their twenties have a lot of development tasks to perform: moving out of home, finding your way in working life, perhaps living together or starting a family. Grief gets in the way of all that.”
At work, you cannot yet build on routines or years of experience at this stage of life. Spuij: “That already requires a lot of attention and that mourning is added on top.”
The CNV study shows that a quarter of people who recently lost a loved one were unable to function at work for a longer period of time. 16 percent of the respondents therefore had to take vacation days. One in ten eventually burns out.
NRC spoke with two twenty-somethings about their experiences with grief in the workplace. What would they have thought if their bereavement leave had been offered?
For Jeroen Mollink (29) it would not have been necessary. “I just wanted to work. Be with my head somewhere else for a while.”
Inge Heesen (26) just happened to have a free period after graduating when her mother passed away. “That gave me space to arrange all official things: from canceling energy suppliers to collecting the urn and clearing the house. I didn’t know how to do all that in between work.”
Jeroen Mollink (29) ‘At work I just wanted to be busy with work’
Jeroen Mollink (29) from Emmeloord lost his mother in 2017. He then worked as a financial assistant at the Van der Valk hotel in Emmeloord.
When he returned to work after his death, his manager agreed on a ground rule with him. It read: indicate if there is something, because we cannot smell it.
Mollink: “Such a statement suits me well, although I can imagine that it may come across as uninterested to others. But I saw it this way: I could still sit in sackcloth and ashes enough in the evening because my mother was not there. At work, I just wanted to be busy with work.”
Jeroen’s mother died of a brain tumor. He lived at home and worked full-time as a financial assistant and manager in the catering section of Van der Valk, where he had had part-time jobs since he was fifteen.
The work offered him a welcome distraction from the atmosphere at home, where he still lived with his father and brother. Although he sometimes had a shorter fuse that first time. “Normally I was always open to new ideas from colleagues, but now I said shortly after one sentence: no, we don’t do that. Like I was having a permanently grumpy day.”
The mourning occasionally returned, for example when a young colleague suddenly lost a parent. Mollink: „Then your thoughts go back to your own situation. How did it go for me then? What would it be like if my mother were still alive?”
Sitting still for a long time with those thoughts is not for Jeroen. “I often cook. Even if it is ten o’clock in the morning, I already put the meat in the marinade or something.”
Looking back, he thinks his mother’s death has slowed him down a bit in his further development. He left Van der Valk in 2019 for his current job at secondment agency Finanxe. Maybe that would have happened before.
All in all, he has calmed down a bit. “I was always a bit of a wild boy: throttle, throttle, throttle. Now I can also take a step back and put things into perspective better. My mother was a calm and balanced person. Maybe I’ve taken that part of her now that she’s gone.”
Inge Heesen (26) ‘The sadness is more in the unexpected moments’
Inge Heesen (26) from Bilthoven had just graduated when she lost her mother in July 2019. Three months later she started working for CNV Youth.
Sometimes a beautiful moment can also be very difficult at the same time. Inge Heesen experienced this last spring. She was told that she had been promoted within CNV Youth. She was not allowed to share the news with her team yet and because of corona she received the message by phone at home. Heesen: “I suddenly felt very lonely because I couldn’t tell my mother about this. That she never knew at all which direction I went after my studies – I find that very difficult at times.”
Inge Heesen’s mother had been ill for some time in 2019. After an ICU admission, she did not regain her old self, partly due to her COPD complaints (COPD is a lung disease). Inge and her two older brothers took care of her for a while, until she passed away. “I started applying for a job pretty soon after that, I remember. Caregiving came at a strange time in my life: I had just graduated, the big life was waiting. So when I had my hands free again, I wanted to get started on that.”
Once hired at CNV Youth, she did not experience “very pronounced effects” of mourning during work. However, the sadness turned out to be less in calibrated moments such as the anniversary of her mother’s death. “It’s more the unexpected moments. For example, we have a female colleague, I don’t know her further, who is very similar to my mother in height and posture. She walked by my desk this morning and then I always get a bit of a shock because I think for a split second: hey, that’s my mother.”
People in the workplace should be aware that those moments can be different for everyone, says Heesen. You could discuss this with each other.
At CNV Youth, Inge Heesen is the initiator of Mourning & Building: a project in which the union offers young employees grief support. Because of this, she is very involved with the subject. “For the project I was allowed to dive into all kinds of grief and loss studies and I talked about it a lot with my colleagues. I notice that the puzzle pieces are falling into place because of this. That gives me insight.”