When my grandmother passed, I attempted to take leave but it blew up in my face. The night before my first day of leave, I notified everyone I thought I needed to notify. I informed everyone that I would have to travel and help with funeral arrangements and I wouldn’t know when I would return until after we set a date for the funeral. My hope was to take the week off using my three allotted bereavement days plus two sick days. However, I was also aware that there was a chance the funeral wouldn’t take place until the week after so everything was very up in the air. I let everyone know that I would be checking my email when I could in case anything urgent was needed from me. I was stupid enough to think that people would show some level of respect and restraint though and just email me for emergencies and reasonable requests. Boy was I wrong.
I wound up having to do a few hours of work on my first day of leave. I was willing to write that off though and move on but it didn’t stop there. Almost immediately after offering his condolences, someone asked me to let him know when I would be available that week to discuss something that honestly was not as pressing as he was making it out to be. By the second day of my leave he had asked me about this multiple times via email and IM and tried setting up a meeting. Keep in mind that this was all while I was in the midst of trying to help plan a funeral and I didn’t know yet what day it would be taking place. So I still didn’t know when I would return.
Multiple other colleagues who were aware of my leave and the reason behind it reached out with lists of high priority projects that should have been routed to someone else due to my leave. Technically, these people were not even supposed to come to me directly and were supposed to go through a project manager. Knowing I was out, they CC’ed someone else who should have been able to step up and help but he never said a word despite knowing the situation. This left me struggling to come up with a response and attempting to assess project requests while crying in my grandmother’s favorite chair. Assessing these requests is not even supposed to be part of my job. A PM is supposed to assess and filter everything.
This took up several hours until I gave up around 2am and went to bed. Because of the high demand for my attention, I could not afford to take off a third day and logged in early the next morning to once again try to make sense of the things being asked of me. Things did not go well. By noon I had barely accomplished anything and by 1pm I’d had a mental breakdown in the kitchen.
It was my old project managers who saved me when they noticed I was online and asked me what was going on. By the end of the work day they had met with everyone they needed to in order to clear my plate for the week so that I could have the time to process and grieve. This is all stuff that was supposed to be done by someone else but these two really stepped up for me.
Thanks to them, I’m able to take my third day of leave. With the funeral being next week, I was going to use two sick days but I’m now considering taking this to HR and asking for their permission to take two additional bereavement days since I had to work during the time that I originally requested off.
I’m trying really hard not to take any of this personally but I really feel like I was kicked while I was down by people who are supposed to be my teammates.
Do other people hate grandmothers or something?