I received an e-mail message not long ago from a young woman who asked me not to use her name. She wasn’t looking for attention. She just wanted to share.

“At the end of November,” she wrote, “my roommate committed suicide. I found my whole being just shattered and really struggled (and still do struggle) with ‘getting back to normal’. I work at a small company with only three full-time employees. We are a very tightly knit group and I have grown comfortable sharing my personal life with my boss and my co-workers.”

The weeks that followed, though, were an emotional tug of war between the worker and her boss, who, the young woman said, allowed her no time off to grieve, and responded to a request for a personal day by assigning extra work. The boss, the employee said, “made me feel guilty for not being my usual optimistic and outgoing self”.

She wrote: “I understand that the person she hired is not a person who is grieving. However, I do not understand how it seems that I have ceased to be a person in her eyes and my grief is nothing more to her than an inconvenience.”

I clearly remember my first day back at work after my father died two years ago. I drove several hours for an interview, and I spent the entire ride listening to sad songs and sobbing. I did manage to pull myself together for the actual meeting, but barely, and I asked my questions in a fog.

I got stronger as the weeks went by, but I wasn’t fully myself for far longer than I would have predicted. It is, I have learned, a common tale. Going back to work while grieving can bring structure and distraction and comfort. But you are not the same worker they hired.

It should be said that for many of us, the response of the workplace is all that we would hope it could be. “I have never experienced such compassion as I did from my employer,” said Lisa Maggart, of the death of her father in December, when she had been employed by her marketing company in Atlanta, Arketi Group, for only five months.

As it happened, she was about to board a plane when she suffered a stroke herself, and could not fly to the funeral. Her company allowed her to stay home and grieve, without any loss of pay. “Work was reallocated,” she said, “so that I wouldn’t have to worry about overload when I returned,” and bosses and co-workers checked in on her regularly.

It is startling, however, how often the opposite is true. One employee wrote to me of watching a colleague struggle with the death of his father while the partners in the public relations firm showed little sympathy. “They told him to leave early — 5 pm or so — then would dock him for a personal day,” his co-worker wrote. “During his father’s last days they told him to stay with him, but then told us that they couldn’t understand why he wasn’t coming in. A week after his father’s passing they picked at him for seeming ‘out of it’. After he left the company, they write him a note saying he was a disgrace to his father.”

One would think that even in the absence of a legal requirement, human decency would demand simple kindness toward employees mourning a loss. But should that not be enough, perhaps employers should consider it through a more practical lens — as an investment in retention and morale.

Bob Hallman, a senior vice-president and partner at Fleishman-Hillard International Communications, learned this firsthand when his wife died of ovarian cancer. “The unspoken rule,” he said, “became ‘work when you need to based on your own need to feel connected to something other than the tragedy you’re living through.’ There was never an insistence by anyone that I ‘had to’ do anything; there was tacit, unspoken acknowledgment that I was responsible and professional enough to ensure I handled my workplace responsibilities.”

That was nearly three years ago, and “to this day,” Hallman said, “when I have tough days at work, I remind myself of how my company supported me. My loyalty to the company deepened immeasurably.”

I don’t imagine the young woman who lost her roommate will be saying that.