I have worked for the same company for 6 years now and here is the tally:
A lady in another department from cancer, her son worked in mine. 2010
An older (70+) man from liver cancer. 2012
A manager (30s) from cancer. 2013
A guy from another department died two days ago in his sleep.
Last week a woman from my department was killed in a hit-in-run.
Also, coworkers family that I have met:
Lady from my department’s husband died in his sleep.
Another ladies son was killed in a hit-in-run.
Same coworker above’s husband had a heart attack.
I started working with her in late January. In early February she found a lump in her breast which hadn’t been there in December. Doctor said it was metastatic nodular melanoma which started deep and grew up and down so by the time she felt the lump it was too late. There never was any visible sign of it on her skin. When she found it, it had already spread to her lymph nodes. Tests done in early May showed no sign that it had spread to her brain. By early June her brain was involved as well.
She died in June leaving behind a husband and two young children.
Not a co-worker but a client. Paper clipping service, I picked up the paper for clipping, recognized a name, turned to the boss and said “I think we just lost a client.” (Yeah, cold).
In 50 years of work very few. I can only think of one 57 year old. I have had plenty die after I quit working with them, or plenty in companies I worked for who were not co-workers.
I worked at a library fir some thirteen years. Three from cancer, one hit by a car. One after I left of complications from diabetes.
Present employment, from 2000, two from cancer, one of unknown medical problem.
Just one that I can think of since I started with my current company in 1998. A short, very portly man with a happy disposition got some kind of cancer and withered down to a stick before going home for good. Not even the two 90+ year old owners have kicked it. We’ve had some other cancer cases, including me*, but no deaths.
*: I don’t think I’m dead, at least not since I checked last.
None. I’ve worked for over 3 dozen employers, and can’t recall any coworker deaths and only two deaths in their family, a husband of my supervisor died and I attended the funeral, and a coworker heard the news of her father’s death while she was at work. In fact, very few people that I’ve known have died. I guess knowing me is like the fountain of youth.
I only had one die in my entire working life. He was my supervisor. While unloading a snowmachine from the back of his truck one day, he collapsed. He was 53. On the plus side, I got his job.
I had a boss who died after I left the company. He died in a crash while piloting his small plane, killing himself and his son. I don’t know about his son, but the guy was a flaming asshole, so I couldn’t get too worked up about it.
At my current job 15+ years. 300+ employees there, though many of them I don’t know personally. Of those I do know, I’m aware of two who have died from cancer (one before he was 30). A third was morbidly obese when he retired, and his health went downhill rapidly after that; he was dead less than two years after retirement.
True story: I had a manager about 50 years old (me 30) who had a constant cig and constant black coffee in his hands. One day at lunch I sat down across from him, and seeing his lunch, exclaimed loudly “Jesus Christ Jim, you are gonna kill yourself!” His lunch was a big bag of Fritos and a HUGE pastrami sandwich, washed down with coffee and cigs.
Two directly, one had a heart attack at work, one was killed in a car accident on the way to work.
Also, one from a job I had just left a few months earlier. And, the person I replaced because his cancer had gotten too bad to work through, died the day I started in his old job.
Two people I worked with died in the same year, but I hadn’t worked with them in 10 years for one, 20 for the other.
About 40 years ago my dad worked with a guy for less than a week. The boss came in on Monday morning to tell them the new guy had been killed in a car accident over the weekend. Very sad.
Too many to count. I’ve been working for 25 years for a company with around 900 employees. I’m in the San Francisco office, and was working there at the height of the AIDS epidemic. I was just thinking last night about some of the people we lost at that time. We’ve also had drug overdoses, heart attacks, and various cancers.
Back in the 1980s, there was a man in the adjoining office who died in a car accident. I can’t remember his name, but I do remember what he looked like. He was a single guy in his 30s.
At the first job I had after graduating from college in the mid 1990s, there was a man who got CML, which at the time was a death sentence and is now survivable as a long term chronic illness, albeit still leaving the person disabled to varying degrees. He had a bone marrow transplant, the only treatment at the time, and the transplant itself killed him, which it still does 1/3 of the time.
Interestingly, there was a woman at the same company who had full-blown AIDS, contracted from a hemophiliac former boyfriend. Last I heard, she was still living and in relatively good health, still married to the same man, and had given birth to two healthy children, conceived through IVF and born by c-section - something none of them could have imagined at the time.
