I've been to the funeral of a co-worker myself and I've felt strange about it for a while. I mentioned this situation in another thread, that I can't seem to find at the moment, but long story short: I was told that my best friend was in an accident, then when I showed up to the hospital it turned out that it was a guy that had just joined our team. Also, due to the way things are done in Vietnam, I ended up paying for all of the treatment out of pocket, since my company wanted no part of it and there was no one else who could show up.

The funeral itself though, bothered me perhaps as much as the rest of the ordeal though in a much more subtle way. One of the things that bothered me was that a different co-worker made this long, grandiloquent speech about the character of our deceased co-worker and what he meant to everyone in the office. I suppose I could have said some words, but I'd declined since I really didn't know him that well, having only known him for three months at the most.

The other thing that bothered me was that the branch manager flagrantly misrepresented how much the company had done for the deceased to the deceased's family, which was immediately followed by a point-blank request that the family reimburse me (this of course, was my introduction to said family). So, I had to stand there and come up with a list of expenses then and there and also discuss the transfer of his personal effects to them as well as the fact that I had received them soaked in his urine.

My point is, what I really connected with in the piece, (aside from the topic) was that work-place relationships are so odd because they are contrived by circumstance and necessity in a way that makes clear our connections to each other within our roles, but rarely addresses who we are to each other as people, since during our time in the office we are not exactly people in the sense that we are people outside of the office. When a death does occur, it forces us to confront this fact and it makes most of us very uncomfortable, which of course tends to lead us back to thinking about ourselves instead of the person who has died, or their family.

I get why it happens and I understand that life (and more importantly to many companies: business) must go on, but I really feel like the ways that I've seen death handled in the workplace tends to create cracks in the social foundations of the organizations-- at least for those affected by the death. Personally, I sometimes wonder if that event contributed to my decision to get out of that line of work. Either way, it's not something I'd much care to go back to.