10 Celebrity Women Get Real About How Grief Has Impacted Their Work

“I lost my passion. My job was taken away from me. I’m often asked, “Why did you finally decide to jump?” For me, it was because they fired me after a 30-year career that I killed myself for. I decided that if I didn’t speak up, who would? But they took that away from me. I later discovered that there was a pervasive epidemic of women being pushed out of their jobs—many never work in their chosen field again. There is this immense grief of the American dream for people who have the courage to come forward about workplace sexual harassment. Julie [Roginsky] and I are out here every single day trying to change the system to make it safer for everyone. This will be way more important than any work I ever did as a journalist because these laws will make workplaces safer for millions of people I’ll never meet. I say to myself every day, “So that’s what I was intended to do.”

“I remember my dad passed and I had to go do a gig in Amsterdam to pay for his funeral. I didn’t understand that grief was happening to me until I went on stage and had to make people laugh. I was devastated. You don’t picture your parents and loved ones leaving. As a young person you feel untouchable, unstoppable. Death can really change you. But one thing I learned about death is that the world doesn’t stop. And I still laugh a lot. It comes when you don’t even expect it. But it’s a good thing because it’s your body trying to protect itself. There’s comedy in pain, and comedy is a good way to release pain.”

“I think I had a dozen years of grief conversations with myself when my father passed away. I was leaving grad school at the time, too, so there were so many ways in which I was starting to create a relationship with grief. It’s an ebb and flow. Grief has informed my life in so many ways because it’s allowed me to figure out what to hold on to and what to just throw away. There are gifts in the grief experience because it informs your life, your choices, and the relationships you form after you experience a big grief moment. Maya Angelou talks about the silver lining, and there’s a gift in realizing that I have so many options. So many opportunities to seize the time I have here on Earth and make good use of it.”

“When I think about being an athlete, I think about having to hold many things at the same time—you have to compartmentalize a lot of pieces of yourself and put some on a shelf. As an athlete, when you go on the field, you have to remove things. There are times when us athletes grieve the loss of ourselves because we can’t be all of who we are. No matter what’s going on in your personal life, you have to perform. And a lot of people don’t really see us as full humans because of that. We are seen through such a specific lens of what a female athlete should be. We wanted to create a new type of sports culture beyond "bro culture" because what existed was too narrow; it didn’t encompass the fullness of what a female athlete is. I want this next generation to not have to grieve losing parts of themselves.”

“When you come forward about sexual harassment, you expect things to get better. In my case I wasn’t fired, but I went to my bosses after Roger Ailes left and it became very obvious that they were going to be against me coming forward about sexual harassment. There was the grief of realizing everything we’ve been told—to work hard, play by the book, and people will help you—was not true. Gretchen and I did that, and yet we’re the ones who no longer work there, and the people who enabled the perpetrator are still there. I thought I was going to be crying my eyes out for the rest of my life, but other people buoyed me by reaching out and sharing their own stories. I realized that I had so much to do. A friend of mine said, 'This is what you were always intended to do.' And she was right.”

“Infertility grief is often isolated and private. There are folks going through fertility treatments that are paying tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket while physically preparing to receive an embryo, and injecting themselves daily with the hormones necessary to do that. On top of it all, emotionally, you’re preparing yourself for a possibility of getting pregnant, but knowing that it might not happen. The ripple effect of the Alabama decision was that fertility clinics aren’t feeling legally safe to provide IVF care that people have invested in, so within days, people who were mid-process had their hope and possibility of having a child ripped away from them. There’s the grief of being in the middle of a plan and having it taken away from you."

"I’m a much better executive because of the life experiences that I’ve had outside of the workplace. I know that grief doesn’t come in one form. I know our personal lives are not separate from us. My husband passed away and that’s a certain kind of grief, but people grieve relationships, pets, dreams. I’m a better leader when I show up with my grief on my sleeve, saying, 'Hey, look, I’m on one today.' It allows other people to be able to do that."

“I grew up being teased for my eye shape, sure, but when I ran for city council in 2017 and accidentally was the city's youngest and first Asian-American female political candidate—I had never experienced such vitriol and racism in my career, ever. That was several years before the Stop Asian Hate movement in 2021. It’s really sad that it took such hate and harm to have that solidarity, but I also think it brought people together from the Asian diaspora in a way that I hadn’t experienced before. Those strong emotions make us feel lonely, they make us crave connection; the heaviness of grief brought us together. That’s really powerful and validating.”

"Grief is so hard and it’s not linear. I lost my mother unexpectedly in 2020 and lost my father-in-law two weeks later. When I told my team, their response was so beautiful. They asked, “How do we move things off your plate so you can focus on family right now?” And from an inclusive lens, it’s important to make sure employees feel like they can share that they’re struggling. We need to ensure they know this isn’t going to negatively impact their prospects at the company.”

“Grief can leave you with a sense of powerlessness that you have to hold while also running businesses or getting your day-to-day done, and that can feel like mission impossible. In the nonprofit sector, I’m constantly seeing the connection between the exhaustion that comes out of all these national tragedies on top of the grief in our individual lives. We grieve as a society, as a community, and then personally—that’s why you need to gather in community and lean on others who might have a little bit more in their energy tank on any given day. People would feel so isolated otherwise.”