Telling Employees to Stop Talking About Their Dead Kids Is OK, Says Court

[The Straight Story]

Telling Employees to Stop Talking About Their Dead Kids Is OK, Says Court

A New Jersey woman sued her employer after being told to remove her deceased daughter's ballet slippers and photo from her cubicle and to also pretend like the girl "did not exist." Whoah, harsh! But perfectly legal, said the court presiding over her case.

Back in 2006, Cecelia Ingraham—an administrative assistant at Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical's Raritan, NJ facility—had a conversation with her boss, Carl DeStefanis, during which DeStefanis allegedly informed her that her coworkers were made "uncomfortable" by her "tendency to talk about her daughter's death":

The co-workers said they sympathized with plaintiff, but they felt uncomfortable and at a loss for "what else that we can say that we have not said already." The co-workers said they tended to avoid contact with plaintiff and to take work or questions elsewhere.

The year before, Ingraham's teenage daughter—a ballet dancer who'd been accepted to Cornell—had died of an incurable infection related to acute lymphocytic leukemia. Ingraham had hung her daughter's toe shoes in her cubicle as a little tribute of sorts, but DeStefanis told her she had to take them down. She also had to remove her daughter's pictures because they constituted a workplace "disruption" and stop talking about her daughter altogether "because she is dead."

http://gawker.com/5837231/telling-employees-to-stop-talking-about-their-dead-kids-is-ok-says-court

[Broderick]

1. ouch

[Octafish]

2. Cruelty heaped upon incomprehensible grief.

So, take away her photos and memories. We're too busy talking about American Idyll to be colleagues, let alone friends.

[trueblue2007]

33. that is horrible. poor woman

[LWolf]

36. Yes.

:cry:

[TBF]

3. Horrible. Did they even offer her mental health counseling -

rhetorical question, I'm sure it was cut years ago.

[lunatica]

4. Reminds me of a time

when I had a co-worker who talked about her dead daughter and someone complained to me about it. That someone said the mother should 'let go' of her daughter because she was dead. I got a little angry and asked this woman if she actually thought the mother wasn't aware that her daughter was dead. And what exactly did she mean when she said the mother should 'let go' of her daughter.

Fucking people pretending to be so sensitive when in reality they're clueless, ignorant and cruel.

[Odin2005]

5. Corporate cruelty strikes again!

We are HUMAN BEINGS, but they treat us like cogs in a machine. :grr:

[slackmaster]

15. I was told to take down a "John-Paul, George, and Ringo" poster because it offended a Catholic woman

Be it noted for history that I did not seek retribution by complaining about her prominently displayed Papal blessings.

I can understand how someone dwelling on a deceased child could become a real Debbie Downer in the office after several months.

[JVS]

6. I can see both sides here. Banning pictures seems a bit much, but on the other hand...

the office does not exist to serve as a collection of grief counselors and it isn't fair for her to use her co-workers as outlets for her need to talk about her daughter.

[Fumesucker]

7. I wonder if people discuss things other than work in that workplace?

The office also does not serve as a collection of Monday morning quarterbacks but I'd be surprised if the big football game wasn't ever discussed.

[xchrom]

11. spot. on. nt

[JVS]

12. Yeah, but it's pretty hard to get yourself in hot water telling someone to STFU about the game and..

get back to work.

I understand that personal feelings of grief can and do appear in the workplace. I've even had experiences where co-workers have died under terrible circumstances and it greatly disturbed people from the top to the bottom of the office. And we did talk about it, but we were also advised to seek grief counseling and given contact information for that rather than making it a constant issue among the coworkers (as we are not trained to help people deal with their loss and a constant rehashing of events could potentially cause offense due to different peoples' levels of closeness to the deceased and different stages in the grieving process).

[TheMadMonk]

13. Certainly. I suspect the problem was, that ANY TIME anyone came...

...near Ms Ingraham, the subject of her daughter was raised.

[Fumesucker]

25. I've had multiple co-workers who are like that about their religion..

It's impossible to find a subject into which they can't and/or won't drag their church/god/prayer/etc..

One of them had his tape player smashed flat by a forklift because he played obnoxious religious tapes that sounded like Uncle Adolph warming up the rally at Nuremberg.

And no, it wasn't me that did it, I'd have been more subtle and wired the receptacle he was plugged into to 480V. :evilgrin:

[elehhhhna]

8. a well reasoned response. i concur.

[customerserviceguy]

9. I'm with you

Sometimes people become obsessed by things, and it can affect their productivity, and that of people around them. I keep some beer-oriented stuff in a corner of my cubicle, and if I ever caused any co-workers to miss work because we went out on a drunk spree, I'd expect to be asked to remove them.

[Lizzie Poppet]

26. I agree completely.

Sympathy and compassion are fine things, but there comes a time when it's simply unfair for someone who can't get past their grief to continue inflicting it on the people around them.

[LWolf]

37. My colleagues talk about their personal lives all of the time. nt

[TwilightGardener]

10. I would have tolerated it, and instructed the other employees to tolerate it.

This woman underwent possibly the most painful thing there is in life, and possibly had no one else to talk to about her feelings. There's ways of politely and smoothly redirecting someone from talking too much when work has to get done or someone is uncomfortable. Sympathy alone should have kept everyone's mouths shut. Edit to add: the lawsuit is silly.

[uncle ray]

14. how long should they tolerate it?

the article states it had been about a year since the death.

[TwilightGardener]

16. I don't know--maybe it's because I used to be a nurse. Telling someone

they've grieved long enough and to take it somewhere else because I don't want to hear it anymore is anathema to me. I don't mind people talking--tons of endless prattle everywhere I've worked, mostly tuned out or forgotten. This woman is hurting, so at least her talk serves a purpose.

[coalition_unwilling]

24. Thank you. Your post brought tears to my eyes - n/t

[TwilightGardener]

28. Aww...you're welcome--

:hug:

[gkhouston]

38. I'd prefer that to backbiting gossip about co-workers. n/t

[bahrbearian]

18. 5 Years, She deservers it , We are still having Memorials for 9-11

[JVS]

21. Oh yeah, the unending national discourse about 9-11 is a model of coping in a healthy manner

:eyes:

[Gormy Cuss]

23. Forever, if the grieving mother was doing her job capably.

The coworkers and management sound like a bunch of immature people. A better strategy would have been to invite in a grief counselor to help them understand and manage their interactions with her.

[michaz]

31. A year is like yesterday in a circumstance like this. n/t

[michaz]

17. After loosing our 16 year old son, I can tell you that you never let it go.

That is part of the healing process to be able to talk about your deceased child. If one thinks that it is better after a couple of years and that they should be over it by then is completely nuts at best! Time helps and it gets easier over time but it is never gone from your mind. Most likely if these co-workers had just let her speak his name and say what little bit she needed to say and try to understand where this person was coming from, they would have noticed that she was healing. Instead they opted to complain about it. No one knows if they haven't been there.

[TwilightGardener]

19. I am sorry about your son--I can't imagine that kind of loss. Which is precisely why

people should show understanding, and let someone do what he or she needs to do or say to get through another painful day.

[baldguy]

20. But corporations are people...

...inconsiderate, cruel & evil people, to be sure. But people all the same.

[EC]

22. I work in a two woman office.

A couple years ago the other woman I work with lost her daughter in an auto accident. She too, put up stuff of her daughters' and is having a hard time reconcilling her death. The technicians that come and go all day complained to the boss. He asked me about it and I told him that I'm the only one in the office all day with her and it doesn't bother me at all and that they should stop and think about how losing one of their daughters would affect them.

[krabigirl]

27. Corporate people suck.

[XanaDUer]

29. People don't have freedom of speech at work

Lots of people think they do, and they don't. Try unionizing sometime.

Also, according to the article, her boss said that, anytime she wanted or needed to talk, she could come in his office and talk to him. That doesn't sound like he's a monster. Compared to some real pieces of work I've worked for, while grieving, he sounds pretty okay, actually. I knew bosses that tried denying long-time employees time (they had, btw) off for cancer treatments, for chrissakes, and only when a group of us went over her bitch head to her boss and shamed her into backing off, did she back off.

Also - SIGH - I have worked with people who spent all of work time talking about their religion. Or kids. Nothing, thank goodness, bad had happened to their kids, but they bragged about them and talked about them so much, it was hard to get work done. It is bizarre when any work-related interaction leads to, Oh, did I tell you what XYZ did, etc. Making you look at pictures, listen to stories, then practically demand you vote for grandchildren in some kind of online cutest-Baby contest. Yeah, for real.

Didn't the office have an EAP program? I didn't see anything about it in the article.

I would not have made her take down pictures or mementos, though. That's not hurting anyone.

[moondust]

30. Surrender all rights and freedoms ye who enter here!

[Initech]

32. WTF!!! Some people can just be fucking cruel!

[Poll_Blind]

34. This artcle, I think, is more than a bit misleading. Here's a link to the judgement:

HERE

At the bottom of Page 6 of that document they talk about the law she's trying to invoke and the thing is that that particular law/rules is basically to prevent outrageous and malicious harassment on her boss's part. This is why I think the suit failed. I'll bet if this were approached differently there is actually much more wiggle room for her grieving.

Anyway, I posted the link so folks who want to can read the actual judgement. I cannot imagine the loss of a child and hope I leave this Earth never knowing what that feels like.

Anyway, lots of times when we see articles like this what we're not being shown (clearly) is exactly what the defendant was being charged with- so when they get off the hook it's an outrage. But sometimes if you dig a bit deeper into what law they were accused of breaking you see that there's slim or no chance they would have been convicted under that specific law, anyway.

PB

[Lucian]

35. I wish my coworkers would shut the hell up about their living kids.

But telling a woman to shut up about her dead kid is sickening and unsympathetic.

[mbee]

39. Take note of the name of the company and try to never

purchase anything associated with it. The only way to boycott unacceptable behavior is hit them in the old pocketbook!