The Syntax Chronicles: When death is part of the programming

About grief in education and work

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Let’s talk about a taboo subject that affects each of us at some point: death and mourning.

We humans grieve. That’s a fact — unless you have an emotional disorder. We mourn pets, celebrities, friends, relatives and sometimes we mourn the past.

How absurd it is that we ignore so much a topic that is so present, which even affects animals, when it can even literally make you sick when you grieve. This is something I never understood myself as a child.

But why don’t we talk specifically about death and what death does to the bereaved? Yes, it is dealt with in films, like “Bambi”, “The Lion King”, “Running” and many others, but why don’t we talk about it in our real lives? Why do we say that we have “lost” people? How banal it sounds. We have “lost” a human being. It sounds as if we can’t look after people well enough, but find a replacement on the supermarket shelf in the discount offers. No, we don’t “lose” loved ones. They die. There is a painful wound where they once were in our heart and everything that reminds us of them causes bittersweet pain.

What has death got to do with programming?

A lot. Especially when you consider that programming is a very cognitive activity.

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Grief and its physical impact

Grief has a direct effect on the brain. Some people stop eating when they are sad. What could be the cause? The brain stem and cerebellum are affected. Programming without eating is already difficult, but what directly affects the programming most likely are, among other things, memory disorders and orientation problems that can arise due to the effects on the limbic system. The neocortex is so affected by grief that we can develop impulse disorders. For example, we become unintentionally aggressive or spontaneously burst into tears. Teamwork becomes cheerful.
So you could almost think of grief as a physical injury that can affect not only the grieving person themselves, but a whole group.

Telling a grieving person to function perfectly despite their pain is as ignorant and malicious as asking a person with a broken leg to run a marathon. — My opinion

Is that still grief or is it already sick?

Grief can express itself in many ways. You may hardly see it in some people because they withdraw or cover it all up with a laugh or suppress the grief and throw themselves into work. Often the state of grief is temporary, but grief can really wreck people.

ATTENTION: THE DATA AND STORIES TOLD HERE ARE BASED ON HEARSAY AND NOT ON ANY OFFICIAL STUDY.

As I have always liked to know what was going on with the people around me, I also often talked to some homeless in my area. Quite often their transition into homelessness was triggered by one or more deaths. Wife and child(ren) died in accidents or whatever. By the time we spoke, they had not recovered from their grief even after decades. Talking to older people who were socially engaged and worked with the homeless, I found that this phenomenon had been observed by some as early as the 70s (that’s as far back as the stories I was told went). These people were professors, craftsmen, etc. There was a bit of everything. What they had in common was that grief broke them psychologically.

If we assume that the serious effects of grief have always existed, it is even more telling of how ignorant our society is about grief than the fact that prolonged grief disorder was only added to the ICD as a separate diagnosis for mental illness in 2019 and has hardly been researched at all.

Now I would like to refer you to a reportage of the programme Plan B about life, death and grief of the German TV channel ZDF, but as I have learned, you cannot access it from everywhere and unfortunately the reportage is only available in German, so please excuse that you are now at a bit of a disadvantage. By the way, you can learn German for free with Duolingo. 😉

Mourners at work/training — what to do?

I am not joking when I write that I have repeatedly observed in my environment that grieving employees, instead of getting help, were simply fired after a while (or thrown out of the training position). Of course, the company can do that, but the signal to the other employees is that (and now excuse my choice of words):

YOU HAVE NO WORTH.

And then companies wonder about a high willingness to change employers and work according to contract (also called quiet quitting). Why should a worker be loyal to an unsolidary employer? That is absurd. But the good thing is that not all companies are like this and we employees can give this back to them with our loyalty and performance.

Can psychotherapy help?

It would be nice. But this help often fails because of two things:

1. Lack of therapy places — especially if you are an SHI patient in Germany, you sometimes can’t find a therapy place even after years (I’m always surprised when I hear that someone has a place after a few months) and you can hardly manage the paperwork to get therapy hours paid for by a private psychotherapist (at least I can’t).

💡 A super solution here can come from the employer/training centre: Depending on the budget, the company/school/whatever can have a psychotherapist under contract. The Syntax Institut has this and if the house burns down, you can have 3 appointments free of charge. Simply a great offer.

2. Psychotherapists are often not able to treat “grief” at all. No kidding. They are simply not trained to do so. How could they, if pathological grief “did not exist” until 2019? And now I would once again refer to the report, which you unfortunately cannot see.

💡 Until perhaps the training of psychotherapists in Germany has been adapted (so that you get an idea of the period of time we are talking about: a snail moves at supersonic speed compared to German bureaucracy 😂), grief counsellors/guides are the alternative if therapists do not trust themselves to treat grief. But you can still give psychotherapy a try because some psychotherapists did a further education.

Help outside of psychotherapy

It may sound so banal now, but it already helps if you are simply humanely towards grieving colleagues/colleagues. Since everyone grieves differently, this is not easy and it is difficult for outsiders to discern what is going on. Maybe the grieving person doesn’t even say what’s going on, but withdraws, works doggedly and suddenly snaps at you. One of the things that helps here is my mantra from “The Syntax Chronicles: Every day is the groundhog’s day?”

We do not know what we do not know.

If the person’s behaviour deviates from their usual behaviour, it may make sense to either leave that person alone or carefully ask what is going on. Of course, there are always people who take advantage of an emphatic approach, but they are usually in the minority and why should the majority suffer?

What if we know what’s going on?

Then it remains difficult, because it is not easy to deal with the extreme feelings of others. In addition, it can of course trigger something in oneself, but even that does not completely remove one’s responsibility to move carefully on this minefield and at least try to help when necessary. We are not talking about empty words here, but about real support either at work or — if you are known privately — perhaps privately. Perhaps shopping for the grieving person, if they wish, or simply listening.

Sometimes it makes sense to restructure the distribution of tasks if necessary, for example allowing the grieving person to stay out of larger meetings and group work for a while if they want to, at least in the beginning.

Special leave would be a possibility in the case of severe bereavement, but especially if one has been hit extremely hard, I find the current regulations that I have found at Ergo ridiculous (although special leave must also be defined in a compatible way). Especially because friends are not listed. I don’t know about you, but I am closer to many friends than to my blood relatives. Due to the current regulations in Germany, I have not been able to attend a single funeral except for my grandmother’s, which honestly bothers me.

The list by Ergo:

Usual duration of special leave in case of bereavement:

• Death of parents or parents-in-law: 2 days
• Death of siblings: 2 days
• Death of own children, stepchildren and foster children in own household: 2 days
• Death of spouse or partner: 3 days
• Death of grandparents: one day
• Death of other relatives who did not live in the same household: one day

Maximum 3 days for a partner and only 2 days if parents die? I didn’t know that grief was a flu-like infection (and yes, there is a good pinch of sarcasm in this article 😉 ).

But how then?

There is no patent remedy for how best to deal with grieving people, because they are just that: humans. Humans in all their beauty and diversity with their strengths and weaknesses. After all, that is what makes us so unique and wonderful. So for ourselves and for our people, we should learn to treat each other humanely and sensitively. What goes around comes around.

What definitely helps is to take the pressure off. And even though there is no real research on this yet, I am convinced that dealing with grief in a conscious and courteous way reduces the likelihood of a prolonged grief disorder, which in times of the much lamented shortage of skilled workers can lead to less affected skilled workers being permanently lost to the German labour market.

Why this article?

Actually, the Syntax Chronicles series of articles is mainly about my further education at the Syntax Institut and my way of code, why am I writing about a mainly psychological topic here?

Everything is connected

I am firmly convinced of that. Everything influences everything. You can only really work and learn effectively and optimally if you take this into account. No matter what kind of project you are working on, you should always keep this in mind when you are working with several people and you should take this into account to ensure a successful and smooth workflow. Death visits us unexpectedly. But precisely because we are human beings and not machines, we have the ability to adapt to a certain extent and we should do so.

Unwanted guest

Death visited me in my training during the first 5 months. I had several friends die in quick succession. I received the last death notice last Wednesday almost at the same time as the information that another friend might also die soon.

When things are really unfortunate, 4 very loved ones in my circle died within 2 months and of course that leads to challenges.

We are all currently working on our final project for the Kotlin Fundamentals module and last Friday we had a workshop on group dynamics (a bit weird to write about this in the past tense, as I am writing this article on Thursday). Although I can now look at a gigantic imaginary graveyard of people I love who died — some expected, some unexpected, some old, some young, some healthy, some sick — I still can’t get used to death. It just blows my mind.
I don’t want to show this to the outside world, which is why I laugh a lot or pretend not to care about things, but I also realise that I have diminished impulse control and am built very close to the water. As a result, I couldn’t speak in the group for a few days. If I spontaneously bursted into tears, it would have been too embarrassing for me and unfortunately I am the perfect solution for water shortages. That’s why I’m really grateful that the team at the Syntax Institut is so understanding and took the pressure off me, while my buddy Francesco once again cushioned me emotionally. As a result, I’m already very far along with my final project and writing this article, despite my battered condition. I am still not satisfied, but that brings us to an important point of the article:

What grievers can do themselves

• Don’t be too hard on yourself. Clearly. Yes, you have demands on yourself, but if your life doesn’t depend on it, it helps if you accept when something doesn’t turn out as perfectly as you’d like. Yes, it’s hard. Especially in an exceptional emotional situation, it can lead to fixating on a project to numb the grief, but that doesn’t help.
• Analyse one’s own condition, because even if one is in mourning, I personally think it is better to do this properly in order to reduce the burden on the environment and oneself. Through the condition analysis, you can assess much better how to still be as effective and efficient as possible at work or in education, but not overload yourself or maybe even cause greater harm, and you might also be able to assess what could help you cope with grief in order to shorten the grieving period.
• Do not suppress. In my opinion, this is most likely one of the worst mistakes you can make. You might be able to say in the short term that you’re pulling yourself together a bit so that you don’t break down screaming in the street, but only when you’ve pulled the flat door shut behind you (at least when you need to), but repressing grief is akin to a smouldering fire and should be avoided at all costs.
• Don’t get carried away. A little bit you might think it’s the opposite of the previous point and yes, that’s true in a way. But as with all things in the world, you have to find the right balance so you don’t get sick. Whatever it is, never too much of a good thing.
• Letting go of feelings of guilt. Guilt is a very common accompaniment to grief, at least for me, and in some cases rightly so. But mistakes are human (goodness — an article full of calendar sayings, but they’re just true) and quite often we do things that we later feel were wrong because we saw them as the right thing (for us) at the time and sometimes certain things are just bad luck. We are not the navel of the world and in the rarest of cases it would have made a difference whether we made the mistake or not and in many cases we don’t even have the power to avoid things because some things have a bigger impact than we do. Similarly, there are a lot of factors that influence our decisions. What has happened, has happened. Let’s try to do better in the future.
• Do not make the deceased person better/worse than they really were. “One does not speak ill of the dead” is still common, but the opposite is also sometimes done. In both cases this is — in my opinion — wrong. Transfiguration of facts complicates everything. From politics to mourning, so both glorification and condemnation should be avoided.
• Seek help. If you realise that it’s really not working, get help. Friends, family, professional help — it doesn’t matter. Get help.

Optional:

• Talking to people about it. Some it helps, some it doesn’t. Personally, I sometimes talk about my grief more, but usually less, but when I do, it’s relentlessly open (it’s your own fault for asking 🤪).
• Looking at old photos, reminiscing, crying and eating too much junk food. Past love? Deceased person? In both cases, we’re mourning someone/something that’s no longer there, so here we go. 🖼️🥞🍕🍿🍟🍫😭
• Hold a ritual. Admittedly not necessarily my cup of tea, but I know it helps some, which is why I list it here.
• Watch appropriate films and series (or read books), such as the series “Firefly Lane”, the films “Death at a Funeral”, “My Sister’s Keeper”, “The Bucket List”, “A man called Ove” (please the original version from Sweden from 2015, it is also available in German and English) etc. (Or if you didn’t like the person who died: The series “Clan” — really only recommended).
• Creative work helps me a lot. Be it the scratching of a pencil, mixing the right colours, the loud clacking of my analogue cameras or the rattling of my typewriter. While I’m doing this, I almost unconsciously let the process of grief run.
• Sleep. From the almost unconscious directly to the subconscious. “Sleep on it” really helps (but don’t oversleep commitments 😉).
• Laughter. Laughter helps so much. It can be a very good channel for stress reduction and causes less headaches than crying, which for me means consuming satire en masse (I hereby thank Browser Ballet, among others).
• Walks in the forest or by the sea. Nature soothes the soul so much and you can just take a breath.

Time heals all wounds?

I honestly don’t think so. I think that we learn to live with it and that life itself (with time again) has priority, but it can still be years later that the fact that you can no longer hold a loved one in your arms or eat their cooked food can still be extremely painful. No one cooks soup as good as grandma (are we mourning grandma or the soup here? Probably both 😂).

Death is mainly a painful affair for those who are left behind, as the children’s song “Brother Jacob” (in case you didn’t know: Jacob is dead) also proves, but it also shows us how precious life is. He asks us to enjoy life and celebrate it, and then rest with him at the end. Memento mori. Carpe diem. Everything is connected. And now I could go on about worms and the cycle of life, but I’ll spare you that.

It becomes problematic when we can’t find our way back to life and death takes our lives in terrible directions, as for example in Agatha Christie’s detective novel “Murder on the Orient Express”, where mourners take (an understandable) revenge.

I wish you that despite all the challenges that life brings, you can still laugh and enjoy the moment.

Research

O’Connor, M. F. (2019). Grief: A Brief History of Research on How Body, Mind, and Brain Adapt. Psychosomatic Medicine, 81(8), 731–738. https://doi.org/10.1097/PSY.0000000000000717

Bergman, E. J., Haley, W. E., & Small, B. J. (2010). The role of grief, anxiety, and depressive symptoms in the use of bereavement services. Death Studies, 34(5), 441–458. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481181003697746

Moeller, S. (2017, July 7). Grief in the Workplace. Grief Recovery Method. https://www.griefrecoverymethod.com/blog/2017/07/grief-workplace

Wikipedia. (n.d.). Persistent grief disorder. Retrieved May 3, 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolonged_grief_disorder (Note: This is the English equivalent page for “Anhaltende Trauerstörung” on Wikipedia)

Wikipedia. (n.d.). International Classification of Diseases. Retrieved May 3, 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Classification_of_Diseases (Note: This is the English equivalent page for “Internationale statistische Klassifikation der Krankheiten und verwandter Gesundheitsprobleme” on Wikipedia)

Jakob, J. (2022, November 22). Quiet Quitting — What does it actually mean? NDR. https://www.ndr.de/kultur/kulturdebatte/Quiet-Quitting-Was-bedeutet-das-eigentlich,quietquitting100.html (Note: The article title has been translated to English)

Könemann, S. (2022, April 14). Living with the end: A different way of dealing with grief. ZDF. https://www.zdf.de/gesellschaft/plan-b/plan-b-leben-mit-dem-ende-100.html (Note: The article title has been translated to English)

Ergo. (n.d.). Special leave in case of death: How much am I entitled to? Retrieved May 3, 2023, from https://www.ergo.de/de/Ratgeber/todesfall/sonderurlaub-bei-todesfall (Note: The article title has been translated to English)

Alps, N. (2020, April 22). From brain research: Living with grief. Retrieved May 3, 2023, from https://zeitzuleben.de/gehirnforschung-trauer/
(Note: The article title has been translated to English)

Another article besides my already linked sources:

https://www.humanresourcesmanager.de/leadership/privatsache-trauer-am-arbeitsplatz/