How ‘Succesion’ deals with grief in the workplace.
In the latest episode of Succession’s fourth and final season, Tom walks in on his separated wife, Shiv, having a private moment; an “appointment that I can’t reschedule” as she tells her brothers, Roman and Kendall, to escape a meeting with them.
When Tom interrupts Shiv’s 20 minute ‘appointment’, he finds her crying, alone, in one of Waystar Royco’s plush meeting rooms. Asking whether she’s OK, Shiv deflects at first, with an evasive, “I’m fine”, but eventually gives in, unable to hide her emotions from the man who knows her too well; better than she would like to admit. She explains:
“I’m just very busy, and I have found I am too busy, what with my dad, and so Sarah has sometimes found me somewhere so that I can have a moment to cry.”
Delivered in Sarah Snook’s signature matter-of-fact, business tone, we’d be forgiven for forgetting that Shiv is talking about the recent, sudden death of her father, Logan Roy, on an aeroplane miles away from his only daughter who never had the chance to say goodbye.
“You’re scheduling your grief?” is Tom’s slightly incredulous reply, before moving to comfort his soon-to-be ex-wife, leading to a tender moment between the couple who reunite after a long period of hostility.
Sitting alone in a dark boardroom to grieve the death of your father, in pre-booked, 20 minute slots may seem like a fairly corporate approach to loss. The death of Logan Roy, much like the death of a King, is not simply the sad closing of a chapter of life, but the chaotic opening of a succession battle played out with brutal urgency.
Logan’s funeral hasn’t even taken place yet, and already his three bereaved children are engaged in investment meeting presentations, abrasive sales negotiations with the irascible potential buyer Lukas Matsson, and general pissing contests over who will take over the reigns of their father’s media empire.
The succession question, which three and a half seasons of the eponymous show has been building towards, is only now being asked with concrete seriousness for the first time. And everyone’s hat is in the ring.
It’s understandable, therefore, that Shiv would need a moment away from the circus to process the loss of Logan Roy; a man who played the role of not only the towering, bullying CEO of Waystar Royco, but also that of her father, the man who raised her. Shiv was his ‘pinky’, his only daughter, and she seems to be the only Roy child, if not the sole character in the whole show, who is capable of recognising the emotional, as well as the commercial loss that Logan’s death signifies.
Like many of us who suffer a sudden loss, Shiv is discovering that the world does not stop turning when our own private worlds fall apart. Time will not stop ticking, and the telephone will not stop ringing. There is no bereavement leave in sight for Shiv and her siblings; the show must go on, and Shiv is learning how to package her grief into convenient slots to prevent it from bleeding out into her professional life.
Even for those of us who are lucky enough to get leave from work, there is still the mountain of death admin to take care of; closing bank accounts, paying off bills, informing relevant authorities, planning a funeral, and in the more traumatic cases, liaising with police and investigative bodies.
The cold, mechanical process of these duties contrasts almost comically with the despairing truth of death; the “I’m sorry for your loss” from the British Gas operative after waiting on hold for an hour offers no real consolation, and induces more rage than actual comfort.
Even if you might want to, dissolving into a blubbering mess of inconsolable grief for more than an hour or so at a time serves only to exacerbate the depths of despair a grieving person is already encapsulated in, sucking you into a vortex of misery which can easily cement and entrap you, making it almost impossible to perform basic daily tasks like eating and showering.
Despite how incongruous it is with grief’s emotional reality, death admin can provide a sense of purpose and shape to each day in early bereavement. I found the process of saying, repeatedly, that my sister had died, to each company or person I spoke to, to be strangely cathartic, helping to ground me in my new surreal reality. After my sister’s funeral I craved the normality and mundanity of my office job routine, and depended on it to keep me from sinking into that abyss of unstructured grief.
But if death admin and work can help to keep us afloat, when the ground beneath us seems to be vanishing at breakneck speed, it can be tempting, even alluring, to use work as an escape from the pain of our grief. A busy mind and exhausted body has little energy left to focus on our loss, which can help to keep us ticking over, but all too easily morphs into a toxic tactic for avoiding our feelings.
In Nick Frye’s essay on “The Myth of Keeping Busy”, he outlines the pitfalls of continuing to plough through our pain in grief:
“When experiencing grief, keeping busy only serves as a distraction that buries the pain underneath every activity you can pile on top of it. It only helps to make one more day go by which in itself connects to the myth that time heals all wounds.”
Oftentimes we cannot escape being busy in our grief. After my employer’s generous bereavement leave ran out, I had no choice but to return to work to pay my rent, with the burden of my sister’s sudden loss still hanging over me. Whilst the routine and return to society were good for me, I soon got wrapped up in the busy-ness of my job and the rapid pace of London life. I quickly realised that keeping busy was hindering rather than helping to heal my grieving process.
I too began scheduling my grief. At first I kept a small notebook with me at my desk, and whenever a grief thought, or feeling, arose at an inopportune moment, I jotted it down short-hand in the book; bullet-pointing my grief. Collecting several of these thoughts per day, I would open the notebook at home, alone in the evening, and allow myself to fully feel the depth of the pain I had put on pause earlier in the day.
I became skilled at holding myself back from tears in the middle of a meeting, or working on a project, but made sure I found time shortly afterwards to release those emotions, usually in a toilet cubicle or alone in the office when everyone had gone to lunch.
Some might call this “bottling up” my feelings, a tactic which generally has negative connotations. But I learned that bottling up a feeling which it isn’t useful to express in the moment is perfectly fine, as long as I allowed myself to release the bottle cap in a more appropriate setting, preventing too many feelings from piling in on top and building the pressure.
After the first month or two of settling into work, and my new reality, I found myself depending on these tactics less and less. Although my grief was less immediate throughout the day, I recognised that I was far from fully processing it, and that I had perhaps learned to mask it in order to keep up my performance of being a non-grieving, full-time employed twenty-something. Was I getting better at handling my grief, or simply better at hiding it?
I read somewhere that deep breathing exercises could help to release buried emotions, and thought I would give breathwork a try. Ten minutes into my first session, one evening after work, I unexpectedly found myself crying harder than I had in weeks; releasing feelings that I wasn’t even aware I had bottled up. My new way of scheduling grief became to lie down and go through this exercise every few days, releasing the bottle cap of pent-up emotion and feeling exhausted, yet relieved, at the end of it.
My counsellor later told me that in Chinese medicine, it is believed that grief is an emotion which is stored in the lungs; a fact that I’d unknowingly discovered for myself with my new container for grief. I still use this technique when I notice myself running away from my emotions.
There is perhaps an argument that we shouldn’t need to find ways of scheduling our grief; that our culture and workplaces should do better at providing a welcoming space for open displays of emotion, and that we shouldn’t have to depend on techniques for separating our pain from our professional lives. Grief is an emotion we will all, sadly, have to experience at some point in our lives, yet it is one that society is still totally inept at dealing with.
But grieving people don’t have the energy to campaign for a change of culture in the midst of their pain, and are simply looking for ways of relief and management in the moment. And despite common consensus, I don’t believe that it’s necessary, or healthy, to bring ‘all of ourselves’ to work. Some things, especially grief, are best processed in private. Sometimes, as Shiv does, we just want to tell the world to ‘fuck off’ and deal with our grief in our own way.
Shiv’s method of scheduling her grief is one to be applauded. It allows her to face her loss in manageable chunks, without needing to remove herself entirely from everyday life, or use anger and avoidance to cope, as her brothers Kendall and Roman appear to be doing. It allows her to safely dip into the abyss of despair that is bereavement, without needing to set up camp there. It is a quietly realistic representation of grief on screen, and one of many reasons why Shiv has my vote to take over as CEO of Waystar Royco.
Succession Season 4 is streaming now on HBO / NowTV.
This article was posted on my Substack in May 2023.
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