Thursday morning. 4:47am. I was dressed for the Regional VP visit, jacket pressed, presentation deck open on my laptop, phone charged, three back-up talking points memorized. I checked my tie in the bathroom mirror before walking out to the car, and for one long second I caught my own eyes and thought:
There is another life happening inside my ribs that no one in this building will see today.
I got in the car. I drove to work. I ran the meeting.
Kailey came with me. She always does.
If you are a bereaved parent who has been searching for how to work after losing a child, because you have a mortgage, or kids at home who need dinner, or a family that depends on your income, or you cannot afford the luxury of indefinite bereavement leave, this piece is for you.
This is not a self-care essay. It is the field guide.
I have been walking into hard workdays for three years since we lost my daughter Kailey. What follows are the six practical tools I actually use. Not “feel your feelings at your desk.” Not “give yourself grace.” Real, physical, doable practices for the person who has to show up to a job while carrying an unbearable weight.
Why “just take time off” is not the answer for most of us
Most grief content assumes you have generous bereavement leave, a long FMLA runway, or savings to pause your income indefinitely.
That is not the reality for the majority of bereaved parents.
The average bereavement leave in the United States is three to five days. Most people get one to two weeks total, if that. Then you are expected back at your desk.
The mismatch is this: your acute, breath-taking grief lasts twelve to twenty-four months at minimum. Your leave lasted a week and a half.
So the question is not whether you will work through grief. The question is how to work after losing a child — practically, sustainably, without pretending you are fine.
Naming the shape: The Double Life
There is a landmark in the Living Legacy Path, the framework I built out of my own survival and now walk with other grieving parents through, called The Double Life.
The core insight of The Double Life is this: grief and work will not merge. You will live two lives that touch but do not blend. There is the father-who-lost-his-daughter. And there is the professional-with-a-Q3-deliverable. These two lives will not become one.
This is not failure. This is not pathological compartmentalizing. It is the structural architecture that lets you keep both realities alive at the same time.
You are not two people. You are one person carrying two truths simultaneously.
What The Double Life is not:
- Hiding the loss
- Pretending you are fine
- Putting on a brave face and performing wellness for coworkers
Those are performances. They are exhausting and they lead to collapse.
The Double Life is different. It is a set of practices that let both realities exist without one destroying the other.
Here are the six practices I use every workweek.
The 6-tool workplace toolkit: how to work after losing a child
Tool 1 — The pre-work ritual
Grief that has not been given a container in the morning will leak into your meetings uncontrolled.
The pre-work ritual is not five minutes of deep breathing. It is a structured, non-negotiable morning practice that gives your grief its own room before the workday begins, so it does not spend the day banging on the office door.
Here is what I do, every workday:
- Green drink. Whatever your version of clean fuel is … mine is a green smoothie with spinach, protein, and greens powder. The body reads it as care.
- Tony Robbins priming. Ten minutes: three rounds of thirty deep breaths, followed by two minutes of gratitude visualization, followed by two minutes of the day I want to have. This trains the nervous system out of grief-freeze before the day starts.
- Silence with the shadow box. We built a shadow box that holds a picture of Kailey and me the day her cross-country team finished second at the State Championship, along with her medal and the uniform I ran in with her. I sit in silence with it for a few minutes. This is where I visit her. This is where I say good morning. Then I get up.
- Ten-minute workout. Not my real training session, that comes later. This is just blood pumping. Push-ups, air squats, kettlebell swings. Enough to move the grief chemistry through the body.
- Cold shower. Ninety seconds, cold as I can stand it, at the end of my regular shower. Moves the lymph. Wakes up the system. Signals to the body: we are here. we are functional. we are going.
This whole ritual takes about forty minutes.
I know that sounds like a lot for a bereaved parent to do first thing in the morning. It is exactly why it works.
A ritual this substantial says to your nervous system: “I am not skipping the grief. I am attending to it. And now I am going to work.” That distinction is what makes the workday survivable.
You do not need to copy my ritual exactly. You need to build one of your own. It needs one part that honors what you lost (my shadow box; yours might be a photo, a candle, a specific song), one part that regulates your body (breath work, cold water, movement), and one part that fuels your day (food, sunlight, or whatever your body reads as “I am cared for”).
Whatever it is, do it every workday. Non-negotiably.
Tool 2 — The 90-second bathroom reset
Grief waves at work do not honor your calendar. One will come during a client presentation, during a one-on-one with your boss, during a Slack thread that should have been a two-line answer.
You need a protocol for the moment it hits.
Mine is this:
- Excuse yourself. “Give me a minute, I’ll be right back.” Nothing more.
- Walk to the bathroom.
- Sixty seconds of cold water on your wrists (this is the dive reflex from the 3am Toolkit, it slows your heart rate and shifts your nervous system out of the panic).
- Thirty seconds looking at yourself in the mirror. Say quietly: “you are still here. this is a wave. it will pass.”
- Walk back to the meeting.
Why this works: grief waves have a physiological arc. If you let them move through the body rather than fight them, most of them last sixty to one hundred twenty seconds. The bathroom is the socially-acceptable container for one wave to pass through.
The bathroom reset does not stop the grief. It gets you through the meeting.
Tool 3 — One trusted colleague
One person at work needs to know the real weight of what you are carrying.
Not the whole company. Not HR. Not necessarily your boss. One human.
Someone who, when they see your face on a Tuesday morning, knows to check in with a private text rather than a comment in the group thread. Someone who can quietly move the 3pm meeting to tomorrow when they see the day is going sideways for you. Someone who does not need explanation.
How to pick them: choose someone who has lost someone themselves. They know the shape. They will not perform sympathy at you. They will just quietly know.
If nobody like that exists at your workplace, the second-best choice is someone with high emotional literacy and low gossip risk. You will feel it when you meet them.
Tell them once, briefly. You do not owe them ongoing updates. You just need them to know.
The loneliness of grief at work is the worst part. One person who sees you breaks the isolation.
Tool 4 — The 60% energy budget
You do not have 100% to give at work right now. You have 60%. Maybe less.
Trying to give 100% while grieving is how bereaved parents burn out and lose the job entirely.
The move is to ruthlessly cut. Cut the discretionary meetings. Cut the “quick coffees” that were nice-to-haves. Cut the polish work on projects that will not move the needle. Cut the low-value performance of visibility.
Save your 60% for the work that matters most — the deliverables your role is actually judged on.
Here is the strange truth: 60% of you while grieving is often better than 80% of you was pre-loss. Grief clarifies. It cuts through the noise. You will find yourself doing less and yet delivering more of what actually matters.
You cannot outrun the deficit by working harder. Trying to means the crash arrives at month six instead of month eighteen — and it is louder.
Tool 5 — The end-of-day decompression
You cannot switch from the professional-life to the father-life at the snap of a laptop lid.
The Double Life needs a physical bridge between the two shores.
Mine is the drive home. Thirty minutes. No podcasts, no calls, no music with lyrics. Just the road, and the grief coming back to full volume where it belongs.
If you work remotely: a ten-minute walk between closing the laptop and re-entering the house. Around the block. Around the neighborhood. Around the yard if that is what you have.
The point is not the specific practice. The point is that you give the two lives a bridge. Otherwise one bleeds into the other, and you end up snapping at your kids in the kitchen because you never actually left the office in your body.
Tool 6 — The trigger-day protocol
Some days at work will always be landmines.
Her birthday. The anniversary of the loss. The first day of school she should have started. The Mother’s Day or Father’s Day that nobody at work realizes is different for you.
These days are one hundred percent predictable. Fighting them in the moment is the losing strategy. Planning for them is the winning one.
Mark every trigger day on your work calendar as “personal / do not schedule” a year in advance.
Pre-block them. Move critical meetings BEFORE the day. Take PTO or a half-day if you can. If you cannot take the day off, at minimum protect it — no big deliverables, no client-facing meetings, no performance reviews.
The trigger-day protocol is where your organizational skill and your grief cooperate. You know the calendar. You use it.
When the toolkit is not enough
This guide is a path. It is not a substitute for clinical care or workplace accommodation.
If you have been unable to function for more than thirty to sixty days, if you are missing meetings you should not miss, if you are numb through entire quarters — please:
- Talk to a grief therapist. This is a real specialty, not general therapy. Grief-informed clinicians know things a generalist does not.
- Consider FMLA. In the United States, the Family and Medical Leave Act provides up to twelve weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave for a serious medical condition. Grief-related depression qualifies with a physician’s certification. Your HR team will not tell you this unless you ask.
- Talk to your primary care doctor about whether short-term medication support might help you get through the acute phase.
- If you are in active suicidal crisis, please call or text 988 in the United States, or your local equivalent.
I have used a version of clinical support myself. There is no medal for grieving alone.
These are not failures. They are professional tools.
How The Double Life fits the bigger framework
The workplace toolkit above lives inside a larger framework I built out of my own survival — the Living Legacy Path. It has five landmarks, walked in a circle rather than a staircase:
- The Call — Waking up to grief
- The Tools — What to do at 3am
- The Walk — Learning how to carry grief, day after day
- The Double Life — Functioning in the world while carrying the loss ← you are here
- The Legacy — Letting love become something that still lives
The Double Life is not a stage you graduate from. Some bereaved parents live inside it for years. Others move in and out of it in cycles. Neither shape is failure. Both are the actual work of carrying a permanent loss through a working life.
If you want the full framework, the free companion guide walks through all five landmarks with practices for each.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should I take off work after losing a child?
Whatever your employer, your finances, and your body will support — but the honest answer is that no amount of leave will match the actual grief timeline. Most bereaved parents take three to ten days of formal leave. The acute grief lasts twelve to twenty-four months. That gap is the reality this piece exists for. The toolkit above is designed for the fact that you will almost certainly return to work before you feel ready.
Should I tell my boss?
For most bereaved parents: yes, tell them what happened, but you do not owe them ongoing updates. A one-sentence email is enough: “I’ve experienced the loss of my child. I’ll need some flexibility over the coming months and will let you know if I need specific accommodations.” That is the whole message. You are not obligated to explain, justify, or offer a timeline for feeling better.
How do I handle it when a colleague talks about their kids?
This is one of the sharpest wounds of workplace grief. There is no clean answer. What I do: breathe, small nod, quiet exit if I can. What I do not do: correct them, explain, or try to educate them in the moment. Colleagues who know your story will learn to be careful. Colleagues who do not know are not being cruel — they are being normal humans in a normal conversation. The wound is real, but it does not require your response.
What if I completely cannot function at work anymore?
That is a real and serious signal. Please talk to a grief therapist and/or your primary care doctor. Consider filing for FMLA. Consider whether a lower-intensity role — temporary or permanent — might be right for this season of your life. Losing a child can change your capacity. Sometimes that means changing your job. That is not failure. That is grief reshaping your life around what has become possible.
Where can I get the full Living Legacy Path framework?
I built a free guide — 5 Gentle Steps for Carrying Grief Without Moving On — that walks through all five landmarks of the framework in detail, with practices and reflection prompts for each. You can download it here.
Walking with you
If you are reading this at your desk with your throat tight, or on your phone in a bathroom stall between meetings, or at your kitchen table dreading Monday morning, please hear this:
You are not weak. You are not failing at your job. You are not doing grief wrong.
You are doing one of the hardest things a professional human being can do — figuring out how to work after losing a child, remaining employable while carrying an unbearable weight.
The Double Life is not a trick or a hack. It is a structural reality that many of us live inside for years. The six tools above will not eliminate the weight. They will make the weight survivable.
One meeting at a time. One workday at a time. One paycheck at a time.
I am still walking it too.
— Justin
Justin Fox writes for grieving parents through the Living Legacy Path. His work has been featured in Tony Robbins’ official RPM transformation campaign. A path for grieving parents who are still living, still loving, and trying to build something meaningful from the love that remains. The free guide for the first 30 days after loss is at justinfox24.com/guide.
