What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies

It took place over a holiday, and I noticed he hadn't shown up afterwards. After a couple of days, I asked my boss if he was on vacation, and he said no, so I emailed him. His body and his family were found the next day by his neighbors. I actually saw his face on the evening news and my heart started racing, because they made it seem as though he was the murderer, but as events came out, he and his beautiful children were the victims.

It was really horrible because he was one of the star programmers at work and responsible for a lot of the success in the company. Everyone loved him and he deserved to be loved. It really hit our company hard, and we had things like counselling meetings but all that did was fuel our anger.

Basically there's nothing you can do. You just have to deal with it and move on. It's been 10+ years, but I'll never forget him though, he deserves at least that.

In one case it was a very popular and looked-up-to engineer. Out for a jog one day and an unknown heart defect dropped him dead before he hit the ground. People were very broken up over it and donated food and all sorts of things to his widow and kids. I think a small charity was set up in his name.

In another, nobody really knew the guy outside of his group. But he had had a very bad cough for a few months that to be honest, had become kind of a workplace annoyance and was blamed for everything from loss of productivity to a rash of URIs that ran through the office for a few weeks. He didn't show up one day and everybody assumed he had finally decided to take some time off and attend his cough. The next day it was announced he had died. There was no further information and nobody outside of his immediate group and management really knew anything about him or how to reach out to his family. His desk was filled the next week.

Finally, a guy I knew and my friends all used to work with, broke off to try his hand in the restaurant business. Things didn't go well and mired in debt and suffering from some mental illness issues took his wife and daughter hostage and committed suicide (his wife and kid made it out with very minor wounds). I think everybody was in such shock over such a mild mannered person doing such a crazy thing that people wanted to get over it as quickly as possible and pretend like we all didn't know him at all.

He died of a heart attack at age 42 after pulling three 90+ hour weeks. It completely changed my attitude towards work. May he rest in peace.

Someone discovered the guy, called 911, and went about their business. Due to some combination of bureaucratic bungling and security nonsense, the ambulance folks didn't know someone had died, and were either turned away from the building or taken to the wrong location in the building.

Long story short, the body wasn't removed until early evening. People thought he was taking a nap. I always found that so sad. The poor guy probably had a family and people who gave a shit about him, but the people around him couldn't be bothered to treat him with respect.

I was working as tech support at a manufacturing plant. As I'd be walking around a lot fixing things I got to know everyone fairly well.

Manuel was the production manager. A nice guy, always seemed relaxed but always got shit done. He had been working there for about six months.

One morning I get in and hear the news from the somewhat insensitive IT manager, can't even remember how he said it, just remember not liking him at all after that.

About an hour earlier Manuel had been waiting at a round-a-bout. A semi carrying a load of fuel comes down from an off ramp approaching the round-a-bout and the breaks begin to fail. The truck driver attempts to veer but then the trailer starts to skid and pivot.

It crashed to the ground in front of Manuel's car and everything explodes.

I drive past where it happened every time I go to visit my folks. It's been at least 15 years. Someone is still putting flowers there.

I grew angry, and could not figure out why. Was I sucked back into this reality that we all die when I had been working hard to deny it? Was it that someone could die, and some stranger like me had no interest or comprehension of his accomplishment? Was it that I only judged people by their accomplishment, when hypocritically, I had none of my own? Why did I suddenly hate this man, who I never knew existed, and only knew because of his death?

He was a father. He surely comforted his children on the first day of school. He went shopping for them on their birthdays. He had loved ones who grieved for him. Loved ones who had no talent to describe how great he was to them, but only knew he was great to them.

I still don't understand the oddness of my reaction, or why it still haunts me. We are all born in a blur of a gigantic population, and he was simply deleted from my inbox as my company insisted I delete my emails when it approached 150 mgb capacity.

I kept him new and unread as long as I could.

Not sure if it's a disassociation of the difference between/loss of real friendships and acquaintances or perhaps the constant need to get attention which people are starting to use the death of others to get (amongst other things)

I can't tell if this story is true or not, it's certainly well written and of literary value.

But it is not normal to light candles, create movies and put people who have passed away's photos up in the workplace.

Those true friends in the workplace will go to the funeral, this sort of darkness in getting off on people who we barley knew who have died, kinda scares me the most in this story.

I'm very senior here and know that I worked with the people but don't remember any of their names by now. Very few people do, in fact. Only one person I know remembers the name of the guy who killed himself.

There is one name that I remember though. We had a guy who had a very debilitating stroke and tried to come back to work. After about a month of some incredibly strange behavior from him, he was let go. He just never came back the same after his stroke.

Sitting down all day is really bad for your health. So is not having regular interaction with other people. When working remote it's really important to have some regular group activity that you do.

He died by driving fast, impatiently, killing his wife and unborn child. We shared a love of fast cars and recklessness.

His death has helped me re-evaluate. Selling (trying) my fast car, going part time to travel. Working hard for a company and dieing suddenly seems so ultimately unfulfilled.

While he had been sick for a few years, at times appearing in colors no human should ever appear in, he had been improving steadily and was in very high spirits. To say it caught us off guard is one thing, it caught his doctors and family off guard as well.

It is very odd to have lost two friends who just happened to be coworkers since I started at my current company almost sixteen years ago. I lost my former manager six years ago and this friend who recently died was on the same team.

As a group, those closest never ventured into terrible. Oh we hit the gutter for humor but only in how it relates to our other loss years before. Jokes/comments along the lines of "God probably needed help keeping so and so in line" or "Great, now they are going to team up and take over the place".

Mourning will really hit Saturday at the funeral, its possible that terrible is reached the days after that but only directed at those who don't come who should have come. You know the type, there people you work with who really don't care about anyone else but they sure make a show of it when someone higher up is around. Got them, should be interesting if suspicions are right.

Forgetting, well that won't be all the quick. We still bring up the name of the first to pass from time to time, some people have an over sized impact on organizations when they are alive and when viewed with the rose colored glasses of the past. Yet shouldn't we always only remember the good days?

Many of us went to the funeral in the east bay. I remember it was very cold and rainy, and that I didn't mind.

We put Ko's name in the "About Newton" page. Nobody in management objected to that.

It really does make you think for a while that you shouldn't take any day for granted. But, just like in the article, after a few months we all just settle back into our routines.

I worked with a business analyst once who dropped off his laptop for me to take a look at on a Friday afternoon. Odd, because we did regularly scheduled maintenance and he brought his external monitor in.

On Monday morning his mother called to report he had killed himself.

It was so abrupt and took the group by surprise. I do remember thinking that it would change everything. Life went on, though.

The last two passed away about eleven and twelve years ago.

One may think it's haunting to still see e-mails from them in my archives. But the really haunting thing is listening to them speak in the voice mails our phone system e-mailed back then. Voices from beyond.

Honestly, I've had a fear of being 'Colin' for years.. that if I were to be gone one day, all people I come in contact with, besides family and friends, would remember are the inconsequential things about me. Its an ego thing I'm sure -- that I feel I should be remembered.

I make an effort to have some real impact on as many people as I can. Something they would remember. I have no idea if I've been successful. All anyone really wants is to do something meaningful.

I hope that Colin had a great group of people outside work that could memorialize him properly.

FWIW, I think it's good and healthy to think about death, perhaps even to think about it often. There used to be a time when people put skulls on their desks to be reminded.

I mourn for Colin. And I mourn for the dry wind, devoid of intimacy, that blows out across the open plan stage of our working lives.

Sadly, as I approach 50, it happens in my workplace, in my private life, and in my family pretty much every other year.

About 2 years later, her replacement was struck by an aneurysm at her desk and died several weeks later. I had been interacting her a lot for work-related projects and had had learned how stressful, difficult and important that job was and did not begrudge her her salary at all.

This is going to become more of a common occurence as the baby boom generation start moving towards an era of high mortality and are in senior positions. There are actually companies around which can help with transitioning through a period like this, including grief counselling for staff, strategies, etc. I worked with someone on a project once who worked for one of these firms. Up until that point, I had never even considered that they would exist.

Still think of them both from time to time. Some of my now-ex colleagues still comment on the anniversary of their passing on Facebook. I don't think I could honestly remember the dates if they didn't... Their names always stick with me though.

[1] http://www.inspirationandchai.com/Regrets-of-the-Dying.html

Fast forward another few years, and I was Googling (or was it Facebook searching?) ex-colleagues who I'd lost touch with. My search led to news articles that referred to his death. He was killed in a bizarre road-rage incident, where he was clearly the aggressor.

His family had created a memorial page on Facebook, but hadn't reported him deceased. I reported his FB profile as deceased, it was memorialized and I moved on.

I spoke to the ex-coworker about what happened (the same one who told me about him being fired a few years earlier), and he pointed out how kind the eulogies were- not really describing the arrogant prick we worked with.

His parents requested that his name was not mentioned on social media until they had a chance to take him home to Europe and tell their family at home. We got together to honor him and express condolences to family and after a week or two, things went back to normal on the outside. On the inside questions still remained, not about what happened, but about the implications it had on us, his classmates, who are just like him in too many ways to count.

But many years ago I reported a pretty severe vulnerability in a common piece of software. A patch was issued and that was it. One of the developers then stopped answering emails and later I learn he died, probably by suicide. To this day I don't know if both events were related but I try to be extra nice when reporting vulnerabilities to developers since then.

I wish I could say that his death motivated me to have more meaningful contact with everyone. But it didn't; it simply made me realize that you can't force that even if you want to. At least not for me. Some people seem to have meaningful exchanges easier than others, and I'm just not one of those people.

That being said.

Go in to work tomorrow and make a forceful effort to engage with anyone that you think may have any issue with failure overwhelming them. The only weapon that can help is others.

Soon found that someone had jumped from one of those galleries. An sms from the individual to his elder brother blamed the extreme work pressure. Knowing his team and manager, surely that did not seem to be the case.

Cold.

The military (US, especially) seems to rely on tradition. I still think the US Army "last roll call" is among the best.

There were contractor and local companies who did basically nothing, and where the big issue was getting personal effects packed up/returned, and risk that final paychecks (or, in some cases, 6+ months of pay held until completion) would be paid out. And some where the loss of enough people led to the company folding, too, so there wasn't even anyone to pay that money.

Probably not frequent enough to be meaningful for a silicon valley tech company with mainly 20-50 year old employees, but maybe in an industry with older people (or, in 10-20 years, in tech), there will be companies which differentiate themselves by how they handle this kind of thing.

There are some conferences where one of the first parts of the yearly meeting is listing all the former attendees who have died in that year; for the more ee-specific conferences where the average attendee is ~50-60, it's a much longer meeting.

It's interesting though, the way a conversation like this will turn in a community like HN. It goes into religion, but sort of the opposite of how it turns out in RL (or at least here in the bible belt of the U.S.) - most people will say "I'm praying for you and your family." and it's usually received with a "thank you" or similar, here on HN though (and in a lot of communities, such as at a university) these sorts of comments will be met with anger that someone believes something differently.

Personally, I've never had much use for religion. Most of my family is highly religious, and it's never seemed to do them much good though it does help them cope when bad things happen. And that's where I see the value in it. I know it's unhealthy to try to runaway from past pain, but that's how I cope. And when my family says things like "Well, God works in mysterious ways." I know that they are just trying to cope as well, and I have no right to judge them for that.

Empathy is a very important thing, I think, and people who get all defensive when religion comes up should take a step back and think about their own beliefs. The majority of these people (myself included) will talk about science, how we believe in things we can prove. But the simple fact is that isn't really true, is it? I believe, for instance, in the speed of light, and that highly gravitational objects can bend light and even space itself. However, I personally have not measured light or the effect that gravity has on it. I've read papers about it, and I've watched documentaries. But it's still just faith.

I think the company was quite lucky to get through the experience intact, and it was probably only the presence of a couple of older, more detached execs that made that happen.

Holy crap, it's been a couple of years since I even learned he died and it still breaks me up a little.

I went to the funeral which was heartbreaking, the place was never really the same again without him. I still think about him every now and then, even though that was more than 10 years ago now.

But I would like to thank everyone and OP for sharing tough and eye opening moments, others usually go silent about.

Even-though people prefer not to talk about deaths, it is an ultimate force to rethink our own lives.

    Colin’s boss is on vacation this week. He recorded a message by webcam. 
    He’s lying on his side on a hotel bed. He talks about the clarity of 
    Colin’s press releases as palm trees shudder in the wind behind him.

    “I wish I had gotten to know him better,” he says. “He seemed nice.”

Tragic, but the inequality, and the indifference free market creates, makes me steer clear away from corporate environments. I'd rather be a writer or an artist working on one's creation and dropping dead than die for someone's marginal materialistic desires.

I know this is just one way of looking at it, maybe the company was a great place to work at and the words alone do not carry justice.

Unsettling. Knowing that you can die at any moment, yet you work to fulfill the desires of those above you.

When I start a company, I don't want people below me or be insensitive. I'm gonna pay them well, make their work not overwhelming (by creating more software to automate and lighten their workload). Maybe I'm just young and naive. but I sure as shit not going to be an insensitive jerk to my partners in crime. Nobody is killing themselves or getting sick because of being overworked. Fuck that ferrari man, if someone kills themselves in the process of making money for you, I'd be devastated. I don't know how I'd feel when I turn old though, as your frontal cortex deteriorates, causing you to have less empathy and concern for your surrounding.