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By Danny H. Levin — founder, and part of Austin's family
Somebody on your team is coming back next week. You have been told, probably in a short email with no detail in it, and you have spent a while now composing and deleting things.
Here is what nobody tells you: the hardest thirty seconds of their entire week is the corridor between the door and their desk. Not the work. The corridor. You can make that thirty seconds survivable, and it takes almost nothing.
Start with the thing nobody believes about the timing
They are probably back too early, and it is probably not a choice.
In the United States there is no federal requirement that an employer give anyone bereavement leave at all. The Department of Labor says it plainly: the Fair Labor Standards Act “does not require payment for time not worked, including attending a funeral,” and this kind of leave is “generally a matter of agreement between an employer and an employee.” Whatever your workplace gives, it gives because it decided to, not because it had to.
So when a colleague is back at a desk three weeks after their child died, do not read that as a sign that they are doing well. Read it as arithmetic.
The corridor
Say something. That is the whole instruction, and it is the one people fail.
The fear is saying the wrong thing. The actual risk is saying nothing, because silence from somebody they see every day is not neutral — it reads as we are going to pretend this did not happen, and now they have to manage that too.
Short is fine. Short is better.
“I'm so glad you're back. I've been thinking about you.”
“I don't know what to say. I didn't want to say nothing.”
That second one works precisely because it admits the problem. Nobody has ever been hurt by it.
Use the child's name. This is the single highest-value thing on this page. There is a widespread belief that saying the name will remind them, and it is wrong in a way that is almost funny — they have not stopped thinking about it since. What the name does is tell them the child was real to somebody else, and that they will not have to spend the next year being the only person in the building who says it.
What to do on day one, concretely
- Do not ask how they are in front of other people. It is a kind question that forces a performance. Ask in a doorway, one to one, or by message.
- Send the message the night before. “Tomorrow might be strange. No reply needed.” It lands before the corridor, which is when it is useful.
- Take one thing off them without asking. Pick the meeting they do not need to be in and tell them you have got it. Asking “what can I take off you?” hands them a task.
- Warn them about anything that will ambush them. A client's name. A project with their child's birthday on the Gantt chart. A team photo. Somebody has to say it out loud first, and it should not be the room.
- Do not put them in front of the customer on day one if their job normally does.
- Then treat them as competent. This matters more than the kindness and it gets forgotten. Being managed as fragile for six months is its own injury. They came back partly to be a person who does a job.
Weeks three to twelve, when everybody else has moved on
The condolences arrive in a burst and stop. By the second month the office has re-formed around the gap and your colleague is now grieving in a room where the subject is closed. That is when most of the damage is done, and it is the part the leaflet skips.
The National Cancer Institute's summary on grief, updated in June 2024, puts the reason plainly: “there is not a preestablished linear process through which an individual moves to resolve the grief.” They will not be steadily better each week. There will be a Tuesday in March that is worse than the first week, for no reason anybody can point at, and if the only kindness on offer expired in November they will take that Tuesday alone.
So: put a reminder in your calendar. The birthday if you know it. The date if you know it. One message on the morning, one line long. You will be one of two or three people who did not need reminding, and it costs you ninety seconds once a year.
If you manage them
Say what the leave policy actually is, in numbers, unprompted, before they have to ask. Somebody working out whether they can afford another week should not also have to negotiate for it.
Ask what they want said to the wider team, and then say exactly that and nothing else. The worst version of this is a manager improvising a sensitive announcement with their own flourish on it.
And write down what you decided. Not for them — for the next time, because there will be a next time, and the person handling it will be somebody who has never done it before.
One thing not to do
Do not tell them this will make them stronger, or that it will get easier, or that there is a reason. You do not know, and the last one is not true.
“I'm sorry. I'm here. I'm not going anywhere” covers everything and claims nothing.
If you know somebody going back to work — or somebody dreading a colleague's return and getting it wrong in their head for the third day running — this is for them.
Send this to someone who's hurting.
Sources: U.S. Department of Labor, Funeral Leave, dol.gov, retrieved 24 September 2026. National Cancer Institute, Grief, Bereavement, and Coping With Loss (PDQ®) — Health Professional Version, cancer.gov, updated 26 June 2024.
