I’ve been in the workforce since 1997, and I have one co-worker who died while a co-worker, and another who died after being laid off and moving to a different job.
The first was a guy in his late 30s-early 40s who died literally on the 3rd week of my first real job out of college. He was hit head-on by a car that jumped the median on I-10 in Houston, and he died in the ambulance from what I understand. I didn’t know him well, although he seemed like a really good guy.
The second was a young girl (22 or so) who’d worked in my group, been laid off, moved cities, and then died of a drug overdose a couple of years ago. Kind of a surreal thing really; I was always nice to her, but never really got to know her well.
I’ve only briefly worked for companies, but when I was working on a small newspaper, with a young staff (I doubt anyone was much over 40), one of my colleagues, early 30s, died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Came out of nowhere. One day, we’re sharing drinks. Next year, I’m going to his funeral. Left behind a wife and child, too.
I’ve worked at the same Federal agency for nearly 20 years, and at least 4 people have died of some form of cancer.
When I first started, a co-worker who had an office just down the hall from me had just been diagnosed. He left about a year later and died shortly afterwards.
Our former director also died of a malignant brain tumor about 10 years ago.
An office sub-director died about 6-7 years ago; I didn’t know him well, but that was disturbing when I realized he was only my age. And another co-worker I was closer to had a spinal tumor; I didn’t realize how ill she was until after she had left us and I heard she had died.
At my last job, we had a guy that swan dived from the top floor of the 5 story building into the slate floor of the atrium at 2 in the afternoon. Scuttlebutt is that he found out his wife was cheating on him.
A bunch and most were unexpected and sudden. The most recent was a guy I worked with closely in his mid-40’s. He was super-close to his family and had a perfect habit of talking to his family at the same time every evening. They couldn’t reach him so they went to his house and found him dead at home. They never announced the cause of death publically but I don’t think it was suicide, drugs or chronic health issues. I worked with him directly just a few hours before he died and everything seemed fine. He was just a fairly quiet, low-key and hardworking guy with no noticeable risk factors. A similar thing happened to a coworker in her late 30’s years ago.
The saddest wasn’t a coworker but the wife of a cubicle neighbor. My coworker got a phone call mid-morning one routine day telling him that his wife had driven off the road during her commute and was killed instantly. They had three small children at the time.
None ever in my specific work groups but various from different departments in the same organization.
When I was working as a mechanical engineer, one of our tool and die makers had pancreatic cancer and withered away in a few months.
When I had an aero engineering billet, 3 people in an associated branch (worked the same aircraft, but doing different projects) died within a month - all unrelated, just a sad coincidence.
Saddest of all, the man who hired me for my first engineering job died within 2 years of retiring. He was only 62. How sad to work all those years and not be able to enjoy leisure and grandkids and all that…
When I worked at the utility taking calls from the public, there was an ambulance hauling people away every other week. We’d see notices on the employee-allowed board showing who had died & where flowers could be sent.
High blood pressure, hypertension, and stroke went through the staff like a NAZI with a schmeisser…
At a former teaching gig, my first since getting out and about on my own (divorced), one of the first people I met was a frail man in his 60s, a maths adjunct. Sweet and kind, very funny, he helped me quite a bit to learn the policy and procedures in the dept.
Adjuncts at that uni (in the US) have no healthcare, benefits, or pension plan. His wife went back to work when he was diagnosed with a return of an earlier cancer, but he had to keep teaching so they could make ends meet. He died about two years later, just barely finishing the semester – by then he was in a wheelchair with a portable oxygen machine, and so fragile his wife (who’d been a schoolteacher herself) came to class with him to write the students’ problems on the chalkboard for him.
Another adjunct member of staff had a heart attack over one summer, as a result of a longer-term condition and while he was in hospital, had to be placed in an induced coma briefly – unfortunately, he was one of the people who survived the use of a then-controversial drug imported from China I think; only about 100 people in the country had suffered the consequences of this drug – those who didn’t die in the coma woke up to find their hands and feet had been amputated as the drug shut down the smaller blood vessels in their extremities and a ferocious galloping rot set in within hours. He woke up to part of one hand left and nothing below his knees. He went back to teaching as well, as much as he could, and another heart attack from stress killed him about a year later.
Both of them had postponed getting care earlier because of their insurance (lack of) situation, and both were teaching well close to retirement age because of the pension (lack of) situation.
Goddamned right I went into high gear at that point and started applying for full time jobs right left and center after that (which is how I ended up in another country – so far everyone among my colleagues here seems to be ok healthwise outside of some general batshittery on the part of a new colleague, but in her case, being an arsehole is a personality rather than genetic issue.)
In the last three years four people that I was pretty close to have passed, all right within about a month of retirement.
Accidental gunshot
Organ cancer
Lung cancer (non-smoker)
Tripped walking the dog, injured rib, developed acute respiratory distress, coma. Taken off life support.
I’m not sure what to think, it’s a lot awfully quick.
One, IIRC. I only knew her casually. She uncharacteristically didn’t come to work one week. The cops sent to check on her found her murdered. She had young kids, and an ex husband fighting for custody. His trial is next year.
People that I formerly worked with, quite a few. But by the time it happens, and for as long as we’ve been separated, I don’t have too much of a reaction. I usually see it in the paper, and who knows how many don’t make any of the papers I read?
I find the drug overdoses, car accidents and suicides that have struck my high school class over the past 15 years to be more noticeable. My class seems to have a large number of younger siblings that cash out in car wrecks due to reckless driving, as well.
There was the 60-something manager in the shipping department that had high blood pressure, stroke, etc, but that really doesn’t make me take notice. The forty year old from human resources that goes down in a private plane…doesn’t shock me too much. But when people my own age that have all been under 32 check out due to an overdose or suicide, that makes you think.
Two that really stick out is the overdose by the 28 year old that knew he was looking at three years in prison, and the other was a 25 year old gunshot suicide that I assume was tired of his legal problems, addictions, poverty and god only knows what else… The rest are rounded out by seemingly accidental car crashes and presumably unintentional overdoses.
