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January 2002
When Crissy died, I never got a chance to mourn at all. I got the sense that we weren't supposed to talk about it. She had severe allergies, some kind of skin problem that covered her whole body. They gave her medication, and they didn't realize the medication was affecting her heart. She ended up having an enlarged heart and then heart failure by the time she was 12 and died in a hospital. My earliest experiences with death and mourning were so horrible and awful. It's like this big awful secret we didn't want to discuss. I don't remember specifically what my parents said. The whole idea of death was such a surprise. I just couldn't imagine that [Crissy] wasn't here anymore. How she could be gone, and where did she go? One of her favorite songs was "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," and so I just started singing that to myself—thinking about her being over the rainbow. I was awfully lonesome. I cried and cried, trying to understand what it would be like to be over the rainbow. But I didn't have anybody to talk to or help me understand. The next death experience must've been when I was 16 or 17. My grandfather died. I remember...I'm getting choked up about this because I haven't thought about this for years...my mother getting the phone call. We never got phone calls from the mainland because it cost $24 per minute. She dropped the phone and went into hysterics because she learned that her father had died. She had been very close to him, and I was close to him, too. I loved my grandfather. All I knew was the sudden flurry of activity. [My mother] packed up for California to be with her family. Suddenly, there I was—the eldest of my siblings—with them and my abusive alcoholic father, without my mother who was gone for over a month. Once again, there was no one to talk to and no way to grieve. I had the feeling that she wasn't going to come back because their marriage was pretty awful. Overall, it was pretty terrifying. It seemed like I had lost my grandfather, and my mother was disappearing. I didn't know what was going to happen. The first major thing that changed my thinking was when I had a near-death experience. It happened when I gave birth to my son. I was 24. At that time, I was an atheist. I didn't believe in God. Growing up in an alcoholic family will do that do you, I guess. I hemorrhaged while in childbirth and lost a lot of blood. All I remember is later waking up and having tubes hanging out of my arms and not knowing what was going on. I call it a near, near death experience because I wasn't in physical danger any more. It was a few hours after I was in emergency for the hemorrhaging. But I suddenly experienced being out of my body, and I believed I was dead. The key thing was the amount of love and power that came with it, and I was right in the middle. Power can be quite terrifying. There was such a sense of ecstasy that I wanted to stay forever, but I had just given birth to my son. So I asked to come back. As soon as I had the thought about coming back, I was suddenly in my hospital bed. It was dark, and a bunch of people were standing around my bed looking very concerned and worried. I didn't quite understand what was reality at that moment. Which was the reality-the one I just left with God or being in the hospital bed, surrounded by people who wondered if I was crazy? I had to understand what had happened to me. Was I crazy or was this something profound and real? [If the latter], why would it happen to me? If somebody is allowed to come back from being dead, why me? That's a heavy burden. What was I supposed to do—save the world? Why was I led to come back? It was really overwhelming and frightening. At that point, I was just planning on raising a family. I'm of the age where women got married and had kids, not careers. I just thought of earning money as a secretary to add to the family income. I wouldn't say the near-death experience led me toward any professional direction. But it certainly made me know that death is only an illusion. It helped me feel so much more comfortable about seeing it as a transition place, one state of being to another. In 1987, I had been working for Honeywell for two years. I was an organizational development consultant. I was doing team-building and got information from some interviews that said we were making faulty ammunition and selling it to the government and putting our servicemen's lives in grave danger. When I found that out and could verify it, and since I knew enough about statistics, I ended up blowing the whistle inside the company. It was a big mistake, although I guess there's no mistakes. Things happen the way they're supposed to. I blew the whistle internally, and that led to all kinds of negative repercussions. My anonymity wasn't protected. Later, my life was threatened. I was told by the company to disappear for my own safety. This was a couple of years after I had gotten my Ph.D. in organizational behavior. I had spent years and years, preparing myself for this career, to do this kind of work that I love, and I loved all the things I was doing at Honeywell: training, teambuilding, developing the culture. There was so much I believed in. After finding out that this culture was a cover-up for making money, screwing the government and putting people's lives in danger, the heart went out of me. Everything about me was centered on doing this kind of work-to help with employee empowerment. Now, my beliefs were being called into question. Did I really want to help corporations anymore? If they didn't have any ethics and only cared about money, was I just being used? Was all my education for nothing? So I ended up being depressed for a year and not being able to work. I just didn't know whom I was or what I was supposed to be doing in the world. That's the dark night of the soul that I write about. Then, suddenly out of nowhere, somebody called me up and asked me if I'd like to teach a course on women and management at the university. I was out of money, looking for something meaningful and loved teaching, which I had done before. I was able to teach from this new perspective of questioning what the corporation is about and whether it's aligned with our values. I had this classroom of women who asked some pretty deep questions about their work, the values of their company and big life changes. I felt I was having a great impact on these women's lives and their work. It became a calling. I could take my negative experience and turn it into something positive that could help people and organizations not sink into that incredible, negative, unethical money-driven place. My sense is that many women often have a strong sense of integrity and are willing to quit a job over their values. As women are getting promoted into higher levels, it gives me hope that organizations will [develop] a higher consciousness. I still see us as a nation, though, as being uncomfortable with death and the dying process. Let me give an example of something that feels different to me than most experiences. I had a wonderful experience with a friend when I was teaching at the university. We found out that he had pancreatic cancer, which tends to kill very quickly. I called Bob up as soon as I heard the news. I said, "Let me know what I can do, and can I come see you? Do you want to see people?" He said, "I need friends now, more than any other time." So I went and spent about two to three hours with him. We just talked about life and death. He talked about how he felt that he had lived a whole life, but still had a whole lot more to do and wasn't ready to give up. He believed in prayer and wanted people to pray for him. At the same time, if he didn't win the battle, he felt incredibly blessed with his life. We had this wonderful conversation about how it was affecting him at the moment. He ended up living over a year, which is really miraculous. I saw him several times after that, and I remember the last time I saw him, which was a month before he died. He said that he was pretty sure things weren't working and told me, "I'm going to figure out how to control things from the grave. So I'm giving my money away, and here's the stipulations." There was someone at the university he didn't want to be in charge of a project, so he gave some money and said, so-and-so had to be in charge of the project. He also set up a trust fund for his son. He wanted his son to do certain things and [made it so he] couldn't touch the trust unless he did these things. There was this playfulness. "I may be dying, but I'm still going to have some control." That was so incredible to share that experience with someone from work. The other part of this is that when he did die, we held a memorial service for him at school. I sang for that. I had written a song when I first heard he had cancer. The first verse was about praying and healing. I sang that at his memorial. It was so touching to see how many people in the community came out for him, and we were there together for each other. My thoughts went to...if I died, I know people would come out for me. It made me feel a whole lot better because I had been feeling isolated in this academic community. After losing a colleague, I found we were made of stronger stuff than I had thought. I think this was unusual. At Honeywell, if someone lost a loved one and had to be gone, people would say, "I guess they're going to take all three of their funeral days. They'll do anything to get out of work just because their dad died." In general, I think we're still in the old mechanistic paradigm of Frederick Taylor. The models of management in the workplace originally were based on man as an extension of machines. How can we figure out how to get more time-and-motion in a shorter period of time? As managers, we didn't see people as human beings. We only saw them as modes of productivity. And managers got rewarded for that. It's become part of the culture to look only at how to get things done fast, more efficiently and with less costs. There's no heart in so much of the work. But I definitely see opportunity and see things evolving to a higher way of thinking, a more holistic way of thinking about people. At least we now understand that workers have an emotional life. It's fairly typical that if someone is struggling with something at home, they'll get help through the EAP. But the focus is to get the support so you can continue to work hard. It's to always get more work out of you. I've been reading stories in the Wall Street Journal. It seems like September 11th has created one extreme reaction or the other. Either [people are] incredibly compassionate or clueless. The incredibly compassionate [reaction] really understands that the shock of loss—even if it's not a personal one—is a national one. There's so many wonderful stories of employers sending their employees home to be with their families that day, letting people work at home and finding ways to make them feel safer and giving them time to talk at work. Knowing that productivity wasn't the most important thing right then. Taking care of people was. Then there were other stories that asked, "Why don't people just get over it? It's been four weeks now. Why can't they just get back to work?" When my mother died in 1988, she died three weeks after I started my job at the university. I was a management professor at the University of Connecticut. I found out on a Wednesday night and went to school on Thursday and didn't tell anybody. I know I could've called in, but work was the easiest thing to do. What I needed to do was do my job. It was my only way of coping. I was like that for several days. She died in Hawaii, and only my brother was out there. There wasn't going to be a funeral. There have never been any funerals in my family. So I went through the motions of living for three or four days. Maybe a week later, I found myself just crying and crying and crying. It felt like I was crying for no reason. I called up a former therapist of mine and said, "I don't know what's happening to me. I can't stop crying." I kept bawling on the telephone. She actually came over my house because I couldn't drive and didn't know what was wrong with me. She sat me down with a cup of tea and said, "You're grieving!" I had no clue and was about 41 years old then. I had been very close to my mother, so it was a big loss. For the next year, all I had to do was think about her and I'd cry. My heart was heavy for that whole year. It was like slogging through water. I also had nightmares. She died of alcoholism and had lost lots of weight and weighed 80 pounds. It was awful to see her waste away like that, so senselessly. Finally, one day, the following year, I shook my hand in the air like I was talking to her in heaven and said, "Help me get out of this. I can't stand this anymore. You have to give me some sign of how I can get over this grief and connect in some other way." I sat down and just listened for a while, to see if I'd get any message. The thought came into my mind about a music tape she had sent me years ago. It had a song on it—"Paauau Waltz"—from Hawaii, a song she had asked me to learn, and I had never learned it. I dug it up and thought that if I learned the song, there might be a sense of completion. I had suddenly made the connection of how I had sung "Over the Rainbow" for Crissy. And music is such a healing thing for me. I found the tape and heard my mother's voice. She said, "Hello, darling. How are you? I wanted to let you know that Lyle [her boyfriend who died two months before she did] and I are here having the most wonderful time. I'm so sorry I can't be with you, but I know you'll come and join us sometime." When Lyle died, she had said she wanted to be with him. It was like a voice from the other side. And there was only one thing in there that helped me realize that she had taped this right before my graduation from grad school. It was as if she was talking to me from the other side, and I'm sitting there laughing and crying, holding myself and mostly laughing. She used to do these taped letters, and I had completely forgotten. So I had gotten my message. After that, I was fine. I could now think of her living, not while she was dying. Any dreams I've had of her since are of her being vivacious and full of life. That was a real healing process for me. There were two points in telling that story: I lived a very long grieving period for her. I was in that grief process pretty intensely for a whole year. Secondly, I didn't feel like I could go to work and grieve. This was another example of my grieving alone. What's starting to emerge is that we're now saying that human beings have a spiritual nature, spiritual hunger and spiritual deeds. Someone said, "Spirituality is the competitive edge in the workplace now." Some words I've been using lately are that spirituality in the workplace is like "working with what's invisible." Part of what's invisible in talking about death, dying and grieving is that our human essence is invisible. When we die, the body is left behind. With any spiritual belief, there's a view that something exists beyond our body. That which sustains us when we're alive and which continues to connect after we're not living is our spiritual nature. What I do in corporate environments is talk about spirituality in the workplace. People ask me to come in and speak directly about what this is. I'm not sure how it all translates into policy, but I think we'll be able [to measure] that in the future. What I see happening in leadership development programs is that there's more awareness of our spiritual nature. Many programs urge people to ask the spiritual questions in their lives. What's the purpose of their life? Why are they here on the planet? What are they meant to do? I do offer one training program called "Team Spirit." In this exercise, we ask people to think about people who have been great teachers to them, whether living or dead. People who've made a difference in their lives and have influenced their work, identity, beliefs and values. We ask them to make a list of all these people. Then, they choose a life issue or a work issue for which they really need some guidance. After that, they choose somebody who has been a real teacher who might provide wisdom. With pencil and paper, I ask the participants to write their question on a piece of paper: "How can I...What I am supposed to do? Then I ask them to sit for a moment and call the person in. Picture themselves sitting down with the individual and listening to him or her and see what the person says. Write it down. Then write down your response to the person. It could be another question or a comment. Do it for a minute or so. Imagine doing this with a team of people who work together...where they actually spend an hour doing this whole exercise with all the people they've listed. We call them "wisdom figures." I've also done guided meditation whereby I take the participants to this place, where they meet this wisdom figure and have conversations. Almost like automatic writing. Then, the group shares their experiences. There's always tears, and something healing happens. They really get answers to questions. What people learn is that they can always get in touch with any of these guides, whether living or dead. By just sitting down, calling in their image, energy and love, you can get their guidance. That's a beautiful way to work in the workplace. What I want to question is why everything is about the bottom line? Why isn't it about being more caring? And how can we make compassion a value at the workplace? One of the things concerning me about corporate America and industrial culture is our whole sense of time. Time is speeding up, and we're trying to squeeze in more things in less time. We're moving faster and faster and faster. I'm as guilty of this as anybody. We're going to need a different relationship to time at the workplace. Death, grieving and dying is going to be part of our teacher for understanding that. When we lose a colleague or someone loses a loved one, it's really interesting how everything stops. Things we think could not stop stops. We saw that in a real big way on September 11th when Wall Street went down for three days. All worked stopped all over the country. And it wasn't the end of the world. We were frozen by the shock, the death and mourning. We have been moving slowly since then. I don't know if any one is back up to full speed. I'm still always close to tears whenever I think of September 11. I'm mourning for the human race that took this big hit that day, and it aches in my heart. I'll mourn for a long time, and we have to take the time to do it. This whole thing around time seems out of control. We've gotten to the point where we don't even have time to be friendly or nice, much less compassionate when someone's going through something very difficult. We think we don't have time to be compassionate, to grieve, heal and deal with difficult issues. If we don't, we find people crashing and burning. My own son who works in the financial center and lives three blocks from the World Trade Center. He and his wife were able to escape. They overslept that morning and saw on TV that one plane had hit. They were watching television when the second one hit, and they felt the impact. They grabbed their wallets and ran out of the house and escaped over to Staten Island. My son is one of these high achievers, climb-the-ladder successful young men. He does extremely well working for Merrill Lynch. When I worry about money, he says, "Well, you could've had a different career." But suddenly, he's really questioning this whole fast-paced life that's all around money. I knew the time would come. And I think that's going to happen to more and more people. If corporations don't tune into these deeper questions, they're going to lose their best talent. I do feel very hopeful about the next generation. They're very innovative, entrepreneurial and have watched our generation. As baby boomers, we had the values of the '60s. Among young people, I see a revival of the art, the culture, the music, the experimentation of those years. I see a real willingness to look at how to build a better world. In the last few years, I've also seen more spiritual seeking among the young people. When I first got involved with spirituality at the workplace openly, in 1994, this was definitely a middle-aged phenomenon. All the conferences and workshops I went to had baby boomers and mostly, whites. That's changing. It's now becoming more of a global phenomenon. There's more young people wanting to integrate spirituality into their lives and work and taking leadership positions in that. One of the things about the United States is that even if we have all these problems, we've always been interested in welcoming (sometimes more and less) other cultures and learning from other traditions. We're curious. We're more creative in this country, especially when you compare us with countries, such as Afghanistan. When I think of the lack of freedom that women have in some Islamic countries, we have amazing freedom and affluence. Even when we think we don't have the time, we do have the time to indulge in our spiritual hunger. A few years ago, I was worried that spirituality was a fad and was going to fade away. But that's impossible. The media has had its day with it. Between 1995 and 1997, articles were coming out fast and furious in the business press. They've moved on to other topics. I've been doing Spirit at Work issues since 1994 and keep seeing an increasing number of individuals who find and call me. So it's not a fad among individuals. It was a fad among the media. There's a spirit-driven movement that's shifting on the planet. Our job is to find each other and support each other. A movement forms out of that. For me, if someone has a terminal illness, my first reaction is to go toward them, as fast as I can. Most people's reaction is to either freeze or slowly move away. It there's something going on about dying, I want to know because I want to be with them. I know that it doesn't scare me, and I want to honor the sacredness of that. Even before I get out of bed, I say prayers of gratefulness. This came from a tribal council meeting I attended while doing work with the Mashantucket Piquots. They're the wealthiest tribe in the United States and own the Foxwoods Resort Casino. This woman said a Native American Morning Prayer. I don't remember the exact words. But it was something like, "Thank you, Great Spirit, that I am alive. Thank you for the bed I'm lying in, the roof over my head, my family and friends, the trees around my house, the lakes in my neighborhood, the mountains in my state, the moon and stars. It kept expanding into this list of gratitude. I do something like that each morning when I wake up and before I even get out of bed. I begin with, "Thank you that I am alive."
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