Three days before Christmas in 2012, Tamika Howard’s brother, Tyler Randolph, was shot outside their home. After he died, the sanitation company where she worked as a sales and administrative representative gave her three days off for bereavement.
Less than a week after losing her brother — her second sibling to die from gun violence — she went back to work. “I can’t afford not to,” Howard said. “I have a family to take care of.”
The following year was a whirlwind. Howard frequently had to step away from work to handle issues that arose because her brother’s case was left unsolved. She got calls from her young children’s school when they had anxiety attacks. Some days, they feared going to school, so she had to stay home. There were also calls from neighbors about threats from people connected to the case.
After nearly three years of disruptions, her job gave her an ultimatum: Work without interruption, or take care of her family. “When they let me go, I was, to an extent, relieved, because now I could be at home watching my family,” Howard said of the Fortune 500 company.
She would have preferred a flexible schedule that allowed her to handle urgent matters while completing her tasks. The college she attended at the time, she said, also did not offer any accommodations.
The immediate and painful aftermath of a sudden loss can seep into every crevice of life, making it harder to function through normal activities like work and school, but many survivors are expected to snap back not long after weathering their crises. Survivors like Howard said the institutions they relied on failed them when they needed empathy most. Although Illinois now offers workers a few days of unpaid bereavement leave, survivors from The Trace’s Chicago Survivor Storytelling Workshop said the state needs to expand eligibility and the amount of time offered. They also want workplaces and universities to better accommodate survivors.
“I look back now and I don’t know how I functioned or how I made it,” Howard said. “But thank God that I did.”
Survivors need time off to grieve
After a death, families and friends have few options. Workplace bereavement leave policies vary in terms of how much time is granted, whether it’s paid, and which family members qualify.
In the U.S., employers don’t have a federal bereavement leave requirement. Only California, Illinois, and Oregon mandate employers to offer bereavement leave. The Illinois law went into effect this year and requires employers to give two weeks of unpaid time off for the loss of an eligible family member, including a child, sibling, or parent. Families can request up to six weeks if they lose more than one person within a year.
Survivors said two weeks is still not enough time — and not getting paid is what sends many people back to work while they’re still reeling from trauma.
While the Family and Medical Leave Act gives eligible employees unpaid, job-protected leave for specific family and medical reasons, it does not cover bereavement. Howard was able to qualify because of a mental health diagnosis she received after her brother’s shooting. This allowed her some flexibility to mourn her brother, as well as her stepfather and grandmother who died that same year.
But even the time FMLA gave Howard was not enough to save her job. “I needed an at-home position, or a tailored position, for me to stay at work and to function,” she said. Howard asked if she could work from home, but was denied. During the pandemic, after she’d left, the company went fully remote.
Corniki Bornds, a storytelling workshop participant, suggested that the state or city should create a safety net program that subsidizes survivors’ work leave, something like Social Security Disability Insurance.
Survivors can apply for up to $2,400 in wage loss funds through the Illinois Crime Victim Compensation Program, but reporting from The Trace has shown that it takes too long for survivors to receive reimbursements. Most people apply for coverage for funeral expenses and don’t know about the wage loss provision. Chicagoans could also apply for the city’s Emergency Supplemental Victims Fund for $1,000 to cover basic needs, like rent, groceries, and medical expenses. Even then, this help is only a fraction of the income needed to survive in Chicago, where the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is about $2,000 a month.
‘You don’t plan for people to die’
Two workshop participants were in college when they lost their siblings to gun violence. They felt like their universities failed them. In 2019, only 44 higher-education institutions offered student-specific bereavement. Illinois does not have a student bereavement law. But most schools here provide some time off, typically five days for immediate family.
Jessica Brown was two months away from finishing her sophomore year when both her siblings were killed. A good student, she didn’t consider taking time off, and no one offered it to her. After the funeral, she took the Amtrak back to campus.
An English professor and advisor encouraged Brown to reflect on her siblings’ death in her final project. She asked: “Why was I in class? Why was I asked to finish my schoolwork? Could I have been offered whatever grade I had when it happened?”
Howard said her brother’s loss made school harder, and she began to fail her classes. While she wanted to withdraw from some courses, the university told her that doing so would affect her academic record. So she continued.
Howard said, “You don’t plan for people to die.”
