I distinctly remember reading the bereavement leave policy in the employee handbook when I started my new job as a 22-year-old recent graduate. Three days seemed short to me, but if paired with a couple of sick days it would probably be enough to take a week off to support my family, help with arrangements and travel to a memorial service if an older extended family member passed away.

“I can make that work,” I thought to myself, hopeful that it wouldn’t be necessary. Less than two years later, when I was 24, my spouse Eli died suddenly and unexpectedly in an accident. I don’t remember much from that night, except that I ran to the bathroom after his death was confirmed; nausea was the first symptom of shock. I was shaking so harshly that all I could hear were my teeth chattering as they knocked together uncontrollably.

Eli wasn’t the easiest person to be married to. He was a restless wanderer eager to befriend anyone and everyone, which meant I had to share him with many people and places – an act that frequently required more patience than came naturally to me. But whenever I caught a glimpse of the world through his eyes, I found that I opened my heart and mind and discovered a new dimension of joy and compassion. After he died, it was hours before I could cry. Not only did I refuse to believe Eli was gone, I refused to believe that the world he showed me could possibly deliver us this fate.

One of the first people I shared the news with was my boss. “I need to go on bereavement leave,” I texted her in the middle of the night. According to the employee handbook, I had three days. It was 4am on Tuesday morning. Bereavement leave would get me to Friday morning.

But I didn’t go back to work on Friday. I didn’t get out of bed, eat, or shower that day. In fact, I didn’t go back to work for three months. On the same page as the bereavement policy, the employee handbook detailed the organization’s specific short-term disability leave policy. With a note from a healthcare provider, I could apply for it and take three months of fully-paid leave. My benefits – medical, dental and vision insurance – would remain active for the entire period.

While on leave from my job, I tried to connect with others who could understand my grief. I channeled Eli’s spirit of wandering and traveled across the country to help a newly widowed friend spread her partner’s ashes, hiked mountains in memory of lost loved ones, visited countless cemeteries, forged deep and meaningful friendships with people four decades older than me and searched for community in every nook and cranny of the internet. I found my people scattered across the continent, some were six weeks into their grieving processes, while others were 16 years in.

But while we all shared the tragedy of losing a life partner, we did not have the same grieving experiences.

Heather Marks, 52, also received three days of paid bereavement leave through her job after she lost her spouse John in 2018. Unlike me, she couldn’t extend her leave. Heather found herself back in the office before her husband’s funeral.

“It wasn’t a choice for me,” Heather says about her return to work ​​as a pharmacy network manager. “I was asked to come back early after just two days of leave to help cover things at work. I think I was just numb at that point.”

The US Fair Labor Standards Act, a federal labor law, does not require employers to pay employees for time not worked due to the death of an immediate family member, including for time spent attending a funeral. Some employers offer no bereavement policy at all. Many of the employers that do only offer brief paid or entirely unpaid time off – the average bereavement leave policy for spousal loss in the US is three days.

“My brother died in 2019 and my company didn’t have a bereavement leave policy at that point, so I had to string together vacation days to take time off,” says Krystyn Wartluft, 36. Two years later, her spouse of two years, Krys, died of stomach cancer. “When my wife died two years later, I didn’t have any vacation leave left because I was her primary caretaker and had used it all up while she was in and out of the hospital and then in hospice. I worked up until an hour before she took her last breath.”

“Krys worked so incredibly hard to build a life and future of financial stability for us both, but my life has now become so challenging and unstable. It’s really sad to live a life my wife wouldn’t want for me.”

Krystyn’s company had instituted a bereavement policy in 2020, but the allocation wasn’t long enough to cover the day of her spouse’s memorial service. Fortunately, others stepped in. “Most of the week I took off after my wife’s death was from vacation days that other employees had donated to me,” she says.

“Going back to work as a trauma therapist two days after your wife’s celebration of life is unimaginably hard, but I did what I had to do. Without any additional leave or vacation days, if I was having a hard day or had to run around town doing all the logistical things related to death, I just wasn’t going to get paid. And that wasn’t an option with all the medical bills stacking up,” Krystyn says.

Heather is also very familiar with all the responsibilities that death brings. “What they don’t tell you about death is that it’s so much work. You have to make the phone calls to family and friends, coordinate with the funeral home, plan a whole memorial service, finalize the death certificates, alert their employer, figure out your housing, change your insurance, go to the bank, cancel credit cards and deal with social security.”

Heather pauses before asking me: “I know there’s more. What am I missing?”

I reach for the yellow sticky note attached to my laptop, filled with the tasks I still need to manage from Eli’s death, and begin reading.

Even with the exceptional resources I received, and the support of a large and generous extended family and friend group, my list continues to feel endless 11 months later. I am still going through the probate process (a formal legal process that recognizes a will and determines who will be responsible for administering and distributing assets), I spend my evenings on the phone debating technicalities with insurance companies, all of Eli’s belongings remain untouched in a storage unit that I can’t bear to return to, and my inbox is filled with emails from accountants, government agencies and banks.

Untangling the complicated estate logistics is exhausting enough – and then, around the edges of long days, I continue to reckon with the pain, rage and denial that comes with my partner’s absence.

The consequences of lacking the time and space to grieve can be severe. “It catches up with you,” Heather says. Prior to his death, John was a veterinarian and had infused a liveliness and optimism into everything. He was “a real superstar”, Heather says, “John would bike 26 miles to his chemotherapy appointments and somehow stay optimistic and energetic during his months of treatments.”

As she grieved John, Heather realized that not even her past 12 years of work experience as a hospice worker and grief counselor could prepare her for this reality. “I knew in my head to give myself permission to grieve, yet it is so different when you go through it yourself and when you’re expected to be working in a professional environment and participating in society.”

Six months after she returned to work, her doctor advised that she be admitted to the hospital for suicidal ideation. “I was so exhausted and lonely. It just broke me and I didn’t want to be around any more.”

She’s certainly not alone. Research shows that among bereaved adults, loneliness is significantly associated with a probability of a post-bereavement suicide attempt and of post-bereavement suicidal ideation. A study in the American Journal of Psychiatry examined suicidal behavior during bereavement and found that suicidal ideation was higher among bereaved widowed people than bereaved married people and was most excessive for women that had lost a partner.

•••

In the months after Eli died, the denial only seeped deeper into my brain. I scoured our texts desperately searching for a moment that I could intervene in the past and interrupt the sequence of events that led to his death. What if I had held our last hug just a few seconds longer? What if I had answered his call that morning instead of silencing my phone’s ringer when his name popped up because I deemed my work meeting too important to interrupt? Would he still be here?

On a solo hike in Appalachia I realized that the weight of my guilt felt significantly heavier than the weight of my giant backpack. I whispered “I forgive you” to the empty trail. I forgave myself, Eli and the universe in those three words that I had spent months excavating in the therapy, dreams and support groups that shaped my early grief. I often wonder how long it would have taken to find that forgiveness – how long I would have bore the suffocating burden of guilt – if I hadn’t benefitted from the time off and support that allowed me to tend to my grief.

Other grievers appreciate how precious this time is. “Honestly, I’ve probably had the most ideal widowhood from a logistical standpoint,” Wendi-Starr Brown tells me. She works for the federal government in Washington DC and used two weeks of her accumulated sick leave to take time off in the immediate aftermath of her spouse’s death. “I know it’s certainly more than a lot of people get,” she acknowledges. “So really, other than the soul-crushing grief, I guess I’m golden.”

But short, or nonexistent, bereavement leave allocations aren’t the only policies shaping the grieving experiences of those living with partner loss.

Anita Coyle was a 38-year-old mother of four working part time as a physical therapist when her spouse, Jason, died suddenly from a cardiac event in 2019. She and her young children had been covered by his employer-based health insurance. Jason had worked as a Utah public school teacher for over 13 years, but when he died Anita was informed that the family’s insurance would lapse at the end of the month. Lost in the chaotic fog that comes when one’s world is turned upside down, Anita scrambled to enroll her family in Medicaid.

“We had always had the same pediatrician for decades – since I was a kid – and all of that changed in an instant,” Anita shares. More than three years later, the family is still bouncing from doctor to doctor as they search for more sustainable healthcare. The inconsistency in providers and services has significantly added to Anita’s burden, making it increasingly complicated to manage her children’s healthcare.

Anita’s situation – as a dependent on a spouse’s insurance plan – is one that many Americans experience. A 2021 study found that 23% of women and 16% of men between the ages of 19 and 64 in the United States receive healthcare coverage as a dependent of an employer-sponsored insurance plan. Eli belonged to that 16% figure. He was fully covered as a dependent on my employer-based insurance policies, yet I never once thought to prepare for a worst-case scenario in which my untimely death would limit his ability to fill necessary prescriptions and see his doctors.

I’ve now witnessed others, without the privilege of stable health insurance coverage, struggle immensely through their own worst-case scenarios.

People that lose a spouse who was a benefits provider may have the option to continue their existing health coverage for up to 36 months through Cobra coverage. But these options are typically expensive, as once an employee dies, the employer is not responsible for paying anything towards the insurance. Many of the individuals I spoke with that opted into COBRA were suddenly navigating premium costs higher than their mortgages, picking up extra jobs to make ends meet, and moving across states to save money on rent.

Lythium Zang’s husband had been the full benefits and financial provider for the family while she worked as a stay-at-home parent. When he died in 2021, she faced thousands of dollars in Cobra costs to maintain the insurance coverage for herself and her son. As her premiums neared $1,500 a month, Lyth’s coverage was terminated and reactivated three times within the span of 16 months for administrative reasons – including her husband’s former company first changing health insurance providers and then later being acquired. With each gap in coverage, Lyth, 44, tells me that she and her son were unable to access healthcare professionals and had to skip essential medications.

“I just want to give up,” Lythium says about her frustration with the COBRA process, “I am livid at how much money, time and effort was wasted over the last year and a half to receive basic healthcare.”

Often, bureaucratic and administrative timelines can leave people in limbo. Cerina Boehrer, 38, encountered these complications after her spouse, a veteran who served two tours in Iraq, died from a service-connected injury in January 2022. “I got a letter from Veterans Affairs saying that I am eligible for vision and dental insurance and that I have up to 60 days after my husband’s death to enroll,” says Cerina, “but I received that letter on the 66th day.” Having missed the window of eligibility, she’s not currently enrolled in those benefits. “That’s just how the system operates. It feels like they want you to fail.”

The all-too-thin social safety net in the US means that many people in our communities don’t have the latitude to gain basic necessities – such as healthcare – in times of unimaginable tragedy, let alone process trauma. As the country reels from a Covid-19 death toll of over one million people, and continues to face an uncertain future, grief has taken on an increasingly prominent role in our society. Yet, the relationship between grieving processes and privilege is one that has proved to me that while grief has the potential to unite people, it can also alienate and further burden many.

I don’t know yet if the grief will ever feel easier. But I am sure of one thing: if given the opportunity to choose Eli and this life again – now knowing how our love story tragically ends, how the reality of loss is one that is filled with courtrooms, social security offices and accountants, and how I will spend decades staring ahead to a future filled with excruciating grief – I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment.

I would just grab his hand and leap.