I’m off today, so here’s an older post from the archives. This was originally published in 2018.
A reader writes:
I have a coworker who mentions her deceased husband fairly frequently in conversation. It’s been several years since he passed away after a protracted illness. (He had lupus, and she says that they knew it was coming for seven years, so he was able to put away money to provide for her.)
Now she has a boyfriend who wants her to stop wearing her engagement ring from her deceased husband. She is adamant about continuing to wear it, albeit on her right hand.
She recently had surgery, and my officemate and I were worried and wanted to text her in the days following her surgery. We had both gotten new phones recently and didn’t have her number handy, so I looked to see whether she had an account on Facebook Messenger. She did, and I noticed that her profile picture had a man in it who was not her current boyfriend. Curious to see whether it was her deceased husband, I clicked the link to view her profile so I could see the larger version of the image.
Curiosity killed the cat, they say.
The man in the picture turned out to be some sports guy she had her picture taken with, so I scrolled down a bit to see whether she had a picture of her deceased husband. Since we’re not Facebook friends, it only took a moment to scroll down a few years. I saw a post that mentioned her husband and saw that he had responded. I clicked his image to see him, you know, to have a mental image when she speaks of him. I wasn’t trying to be intrusive.
When I went to his page, his image had been updated in January. I wondered if my coworker had been updating his image, but a number of people had commented on it — including his current wife!
I must have made a sound of dismay, because my officemate asked me what was up. Without thinking, I shared what I’d discovered. We were both in shock. We wanted desperately to un-know this, but that is impossible. My officemate was especially appalled because he had saved her job a couple of years back by sharing her sad story with our boss.
My officemate started to share the story with another coworker, but I convinced him not to. I don’t want to be responsible for outing her. Maybe she has a serious mental issue, and I don’t want to be insensitive to it.
So now, as my officemate seems about to burst, I’m wondering what I should do. Should I discuss it with her after work sometime? I wouldn’t want to upset her during working hours, and I wouldn’t want it to get out and have people treat her differently.
Ideally, we would just never mention it again and put it out of our minds. However, I don’t know how to react when she inevitably mentions her deceased husband again. I so desperately wish I hadn’t been curious!
Oooooh.
I can see why this was really shocking! But I also don’t think it requires any action from you.
Maybe she’s mentally ill. Maybe he’s “dead to her” and this is how she handles it. Maybe he faked his own death and she really thinks he’s dead. We don’t know, and because she’s a coworker — rather than a close friend or family member — we don’t need to know. (We want to know, because this is so surprising and odd, but we don’t actually need to.)
It is absolutely weird and uncomfortable that she brings him up a lot, and tells you stories about his death. And it’s not great that your manager was apparently moved not to fire her after hearing she was widowed. (Give someone space right after a death, yes, but you can’t make long-term employment decisions based on things like who has suffered losses.)
But this isn’t yours to address. You don’t need to fix the situation by making her admit she’s been lying, or by calling her out when she continues to talk about him. And you’re not complicit in her lying if you choose to let her go on talking about him without saying anything.
If this were someone who you were very close to in your personal life, it would be hard to maintain any intimacy while this was happening, and so you’d need to handle that differently. But this is a coworker, and if she wants to spin tall tales about her life and no one’s getting hurt, you get to quietly think that’s incredibly strange, but there’s no imperative for you to act.
When she mentions her deceased husband, I’d stick with neutral responses (“hmmm, that’s too bad,” etc.) and just don’t get drawn in.
The exception to this would be if she were actively trying to use the information at work to get different treatment — to get extra time off, or to get out of undesirable duties, or so forth. In that case, you’d have a harder decision in front of you (and I’d have a harder answer to write — although I think I’d still err on the side of “leave it alone”), but fortunately that doesn’t sound like the case.
The post my coworker says her husband died — but he didn’t appeared first on Ask a Manager.
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