I read an article recently entitled “’Big Law Killed My Husband’: An Open Letter From a Sidley Partner’s Widow” (https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/2018/11/12/big-law-killed-my-husband-an-open-letter-from-a-sidley-partners-widow/?slreturn=20181014132201&fbclid=IwAR2ugcMH1Gs8UOzMBfthoUxNTUYiu-XOx7H6p4FZF5ihpvn3Z0-SW38hV5Q). The author’s husband committed suicide in the parking garage of his law firm after his stressful job sucked the life out of him.  His wife acknowledged that “he had a deep, hereditary mental health disorder and lacked essential coping mechanisms. But these influences, coupled with a high-pressure job” made for a fatal combination that ultimately led him to take his own life rather than to take a sabbatical, quit his job, or attempt a variety of other options that could have resulted in a happier outcome.

I am a paralegal. I recognized parts of myself and others in this industry in the decedent, Gabe:

• Self-medicating because we are wound so tightly we can’t leave it behind when we leave the office. This is something I especially have to be careful about because I am a child of two recovered alcoholics. I have been struggling with insomnia and sometimes I just can’t stop my mind from processing things that need to be done. Thank God the firm administrator told me when I started my job not to put work email on my phone, but I send myself to-do emails at work and I check the upcoming calendar somewhat obsessively.
• Turnover at the office, which is blow after blow to your soul when the people who matter to you disappear and leave you behind, leaving you with more work to do and a less pleasant environment because they aren’t there anymore to share your day. It also becomes something you don’t want to do to anyone else, so you find yourself staying at a job longer because you don’t want to be one more person who leaves. I remember writing a resignation letter to a former employer, saying I hoped he would remember me as one who had stayed. I think even as I wrote it, I realized how empty those words were when I was in the process of leaving.
• The work that comes to you that you say you can and will do because you are that person, the one who gets it done, and you won’t share it because giving any of it to someone else seems weak or lazy. Letting go seems like you have failed, like you have let others down. Gabe’s wife spoke of “maladaptive perfectionism, that combines unrealistic standards of achievement with hypercriticism of failing to meet them”. At my office, we all talk about sharing work, and we encourage it in theory, but most of us don’t actually do it. There seem to always be people drowning in work and people who aren’t working all that hard. I have been both of those people. I have asked to share the load and been denied it; I have been asked to share the load and said, “No thanks, I must do this myself,” because I don’t know how to share it and therefore I worked late into the night, and/or the weekend, and/or the holiday. I think the latest I heard of anyone working was something like 3:00 a.m., which beat my latest night by a couple or few hours. There was a weekend where I went to work before my husband awoke and got home after he went to bed – my husband who works out of town, whom I only see on weekends.

Gabe’s widow said, “He said he couldn’t quit in the middle of a case. The irony is not lost on me that he found it easier to kill himself.” I know that feeling.  To be clear, I am not suicidal.  But I have been at my current job for over 11 years and I take great pride and responsibility in the tasks assigned to me, in the work that I do.  When a client calls me to just ask for a copy of something a decade later, I am pleased to still be the one available to help.  I want to close out the files to make sure it’s done right.  I want to see the cases resolved.  I care about these people.  I care about my firm.  And every time I think it is eating me alive, that I need to leave it behind and move onto something easier, I feel a tremendous amount of guilt about all of the people I will not be helping in doing so: my boss, my coworkers, “my” clients.  (Quotation marks on the last one because I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know if I really have clients.  But I sure do have relationships with them.)  You know the joke, “I can’t die because I have too much to do”?  That’s me leaving this job.  I have a long list of excuses why I am the most important person here who can never leave.  If only every case magically concluded at the exact time my boss retires before I die of exhaustion or misery…

I have worked in the legal industry since 1998. I don’t know if it is this kind of profession or certain personalities that inspire the kind of loyalty where we sometimes think the only honorable way to exit is by death, or to wait for a magic setting in which the person who tries to do a damn near perfect job will inexplicably be asked to leave.  (“Christy, I’ve decided we can do this without you.  Why don’t you take a break and go rest up a while and be with Pete?”  Enter Snow White and the 7 dwarfs for full fantasy effect…)

Perhaps it’s certain personalities that are drawn to and thrive in certain professions – at least, for a while. But at some point, we snap.  We burn out.  We find that we have given again and again and there is always more asked of us.  There is another family vacation to miss because of another trial or discovery or deadline.  It’s good that the work keeps coming, because if it didn’t, the law firm would go out of business.  The trick is realizing when it’s time for someone else to do your job.  Knowing that you aren’t invincible or irreplaceable and that you may be doing more harm than good when you find yourself dreading the work instead of embracing it.  I wish Gabe had known that.  We have big shoes to fill, but they can be filled.  If I disappear, someone else will come right in and struggle a bit and sit in my seat and do my job – just like I did when I got here in 2007.  I bet someone replaced Gabe.  Our replacements aren’t the same as us, and frankly, I hope they care a little bit less, for their own sanity.  I took the place of someone who is rumored to have left every day at 5:30.  I still don’t know how she did it.  But I didn’t get her job because she got fired, so apparently, she was doing OK.

I agree with Gabe’s widow: “I don’t have any immediate solutions, but for the sake of retaining people like Gabe in these important professions, something needs to change. We need people like him walking this earth; they make it a better place. My husband was impeccable with his word, and actually cared so immensely about the job he did and how people viewed him. He wasn’t focused on the bottom line or lining his pockets with more money. He cared about his clients and the hundreds and thousands of people impacted by a corporation filing bankruptcy. Not to mention, he was really good at what he did.” I have been told so many times that I am good at this job, but it exhausts me and it scares me (it’s so important not to get it wrong, not to miss a deadline, not to miss a document).  I’ve also tried discussing the things that bother me with superiors, and mostly what I find is that unless you are stating that you are leaving, nobody is willing to make a change.

I didn’t know Gabe. I don’t know what tools he had available to help him when he was struggling.  His wife says, “He saw someone professionally a few times, but that was it,” and I know she tried to help him as best she could. I see a therapist and I give special thanks to my husband who has talked to me almost daily for many years now about what was bothering me.  And when my husband couldn’t come up with the right words, I had a sister, and friends.  I believe that suicide is not a choice, really, any more than are the depression and despair leading to it.  Once Gabe reached a point where he found what he thought was his only viable solution, I am not sure there was a way out unless someone happened to decipher what he had secretly selected in his mind and stop it.  Please, please, don’t be Gabe.  It’s just a job.  Someone else’s problems are not your burden.  Choose yourself.  Save yourself.  I’m working on it, too.