By When my father passed away, I was flying back home, and arrived too late to be present for his final moments. What I felt then was an ambivalent relief, guilt for not saying goodbye in person, yet gratitude that I had already done so in my own way.
My mourning had extended over the decade prior, during which I had been slowly letting go of the relationship with my father, grieving what it had lacked, and accepting the limitations of our connection. I had put time into the emotional labor of grief before death came knocking, so that when it was time, I had already clocked out.
Grief Work: Mourning as Labor in a World That Won’t Stop Working
I stayed with my mother for the next two months and met the demands of the external world head-on. I kept functioning, assisting my family in the logistical issues that required immediate attention, contacting family and friends, making funeral arrangements, sending out memorial cards, composing an obituary, and designing a memorial service—as a stage actor in a small town, my father had been a public figure, and former colleagues, friends, and a faithful audience wanted a space to pay their respects.
In all of this, my guilt returned, albeit with a different face: I couldn’t let down my work. I had an internalized expectation to keep going, even in the face of loss. I canceled exactly one client call, but otherwise continued working on the side—on top of the organizational tasks, consoling my family, and sleepless nights.
Deferred emotional work accumulates grief debt, which, like monetary debt, disproportionately impacts the economically underprivileged.
Outwardly, I was composed and efficient. On the inside, I was operating under the self-imposed pressure to live up to the identity of a reliable freelancer. I attempted to resolve this tension between productivity and presence with a trade: substituting time for grief work with freelance work, and emotional processing with a functional performance of the logistical tasks at hand. The professional calm with which I approached what needed to be done at a time of mourning mirrored my freelance discipline.
I believe this kind of trade-off, or bargain, is common among the working classes, where the more income-dependent you are, the less time off work you’ll allow yourself for any emergency, including loss. Bargaining is among the five Kübler-Ross grief stages, and I’d argue that the denial of time for grieving leads to anger over having to strike this kind of bargain at all, and the cycle repeats until burnout and depression set in.
Is bargain-thinking the mechanism by which capitalism colonizes grief, entangling psychological frameworks for understanding loss with economic thinking? Saying, “I don’t have time for this, I need to work” is a negotiation based on limited resources that will demand payment later. Deferred emotional work accumulates grief debt, which, like monetary debt, disproportionately impacts the economically underprivileged.
Grief work is one manifestation of invisible labor—the often unrecognized, uncompensated, and undervalued work that goes unseen because, without measurable output, it doesn’t fit into structures of productivity or profit, where work hours, skill, deliverables, and, ultimately, the bottom line determine the value of labor.
In business, growth has quantifiable metrics, but in self-development, growth is an often non-linear process where healthy improvement requires a decoupling of (self-)worth from mere output results that are immediate, tangible, calculable. Yet neoliberal ideology has crept from the economy into society at large. The principle of individual liberty with the inherent duality of empowerment and responsibility has made entrepreneurs of all of us, in charge of our wealth, our health in body and mind, our self, and our morals, for achieving success in these areas is the highest virtue.
The summary “YOU can do it” with the implied “by yourself, alone” demonstrates the pressure for autonomy the self-help industry places on the individual. Working for oneself, or on oneself, is a puzzle of optimization to solve through self-reliance and neatly packaged apps or subscription services. Failure remains a personal shortcoming, a lack of self-efficacy—a character flaw.
Paying our respects alone doesn’t settle our grief debt.
The self-help language of healing and growing reveals larger patterns of inequity, because healing and growing are processes that require time, a scarce resource those who can’t stop working have to bargain for. The expectation of being functional to partake and compete in an entrepreneurial society controls the permission for grief, regardless of who gives allowance, the individual or the environment.
To grieve well requires time, slowness, and permission. Affluence, inherited wealth, and stable employment afford grieving without bargaining, or at least with favorable terms. In economic survival mode, the negotiation and trading away of emotional processing has a disproportional impact, because paid leave, access to healthcare and therapy, and other structural support are inaccessible.
“Working for oneself, or on oneself, is a puzzle of optimization to solve through self-reliance and neatly packaged apps or subscription services.”
What do these bargains cost us, collectively? Performative sorrow and overly emotional mourning are not common in (Western) society, where we have marginalized death itself. We obsess over youth, healthy living and longevity, we work until we die, and we die alone.
Paying our respects alone doesn’t settle our grief debt. I’d arrived at acceptance through a radically honest view of my father, which conflicted with the nostalgia of others. For the memorial service, he’d envisioned his voice to appear from tape, giving his own farewell as a poem he’d written about retirement, a mime’s final exit from the stage, and to me, an expression of certain self-obsessed traits of his personality.
I honored my father’s will, and in the absence of a recording, recited the poem in his stead, to an audience who largely had fond memories only of his performer self. Grappling with that dissonance of perceptions became the post-mortem growth I still had to do, grief work for which I had to cannibalize time already otherwise designated, and nearly three years on, I’m writing these thoughts for the first time.
The compression of grief under economic pressure makes our lives smaller.
More time for grief work allows for a larger, richer life, especially when extending it from grieving for people to other forms of loss, the slow erosion of something once held dear. Do we acknowledge grief for estranged friendships, broken keepsakes, squandered opportunities, unattained dreams, lost selves, missed chances, unlived futures?
I grew up with a model for healthy mourning. For over a third of her life, my mother’s volunteer hospice work showed me grieving as normal and necessary. Whether we do that alone, or with the help of others, the time invested only pays an unquantifiable dividend.
The compression of grief under economic pressure makes our lives smaller, and the deprivation of meaning and connection is not merely personal, but cultural; if we don’t even try to integrate these, what collective insights into loss, growth, and emotional complexity are we missing?
If we let grief exist without demanding an immediate pay-off, we can treat it as “life, interrupted” and ask ourselves how to hold both loss and life simultaneously, without productivity canceling mourning. True growth means becoming large enough to encompass both, the version of oneself that wishes the loss away, and the one having to live with it.
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