Editor’s note: Several weeks ago, ASJA Confidential posed the question: What would you do in event of a catastrophe, either personal or physical? Member Randi Minetor shared the following experience.
As Phillip Roth said long ago, “We writers are lucky. Nothing truly bad can happen to us—it’s all material.”
I faced a catastrophic event some years ago, when I was a VP at an advertising agency. The agency was owned by a husband and wife team, and the wife was killed in a car accident one afternoon. I talked to her by phone at 3:30, and at 5:30 she was dead. Not only did we have to deal with the sudden loss and the emotional wrenching that day and for months after, but the agency was built on a “work no matter what” culture. With Audrey’s death, we all felt that she would want us to just keep working, regardless of how we felt. That being said, her death was well covered by the media, so everyone knew.
Working as if we felt nothing turned out to be a bad idea. Some clients—who, we discovered, were also experiencing the sense of loss and grief—thought us pretty heartless for not acknowledging Audrey’s sudden passing more openly. Many did not know how to react to us, or if they should bring up the death or ask us how we were doing with it. I lost 15 pounds in two weeks, and clients commented on the fact that I did not look well, and that they did not know how they were supposed to treat me, since I was obviously not coping well but would not talk about it. We also had clients who went the other way altogether, expecting us to keep barreling through because they still needed their work done. After six weeks, one of them asked one of my coworkers, “What the hell is wrong with you, anyway?” as if he didn’t know. (He was one of our all-time worst clients.)
It would have been much more constructive for us to be upfront with our clients, and to talk openly about how we were doing. We lost a chance to bond with clients on a personal level, as well as an opportunity to get help with the healing process by hearing all the great stories about Audrey from people who had known her for decades. If we had been paying attention, we would have realized that many of our clients were reaching out to us to offer their help. Clients are human beings, after all, and if we’ve chosen our clients well, they will be people who can understand that bad things happen and that we are not superhuman.