Recent high-profile deaths, like Charlie Kirk, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti, have sent waves of grief through communities nationwide. As vigils, prayer gatherings, and community care spaces emerge for residents trying to process what has happened, city/county employees continue to work, staff local government services, and support their communities amid their own grief and loss.

This moment underscores the fact that city/county managers and other public leaders are not only administrators of bereavement-related policies but also stewards of community grief and healing.

Each year, approximately 2.8 million people die in the United States, leaving behind parents, partners, siblings, friends, and coworkers to navigate both personal heartbreak and ongoing responsibilities, including work. In the public sector, where employees serve on the front lines of public safety, infrastructure, and administration, grief cannot be left at the door. Grief walks in with them. It shapes their focus, alters their decision-making, and influences how they lead, serve, and interact with others.

The Core Challenge for Public Employees

City and county governments know their public safety teams respond daily to grief events—sometimes highly visible, sometimes quietly personal—while colleagues across city hall, public works, public health, and community services bring their own private losses into work. For many public employees, exposure to death, trauma, and community crisis is a recurring feature of the job, made harder by lean staffing, vacancies, budget constraints, and “do more with less” expectations that leave little slack when someone is grieving.

We often tell ourselves to grit our teeth, compartmentalize our feelings, and get our work done. Across the United States, public‑sector employees—including city hall staff, transit and maintenance workers, public health teams, and first responders—often support a grieving community while grieving themselves, with few acceptable ways to slow down, speak up, or ask for support.

Doing Grief Well: Glenview, Illinois

An example comes from the village of Glenview, where the police department abruptly lost Officer Robert Fryc, a respected patrol officer, to a fatal motor vehicle accident as he headed into work early one morning. The sudden, tragic death cast a wave of shock and sorrow across the department. In response, Police Chief Bill Fitzpatrick and City Manager Matt Formica moved quickly and thoughtfully, prioritizing both the city’s operational needs and the well-being of their staff.

They sent many officers from Officer Fryc’s shift home to grieve and recover while nearby agencies assisted in maintaining public safety coverage during the initial shock period. These actions recognized that such a loss has both personal and professional ramifications and will have a sustained impact on the department.

Understanding Bereavement, Mourning, and Grief

While public sector leaders may be moved to act in moments of loss, the impact of grief remains one of the least understood and most under-addressed challenges in the workplace. One reason is that we often treat bereavement, mourning, and grief as interchangeable, when they differ in important and practical ways:

Bereavement is the state of having lost someone—an objective fact that marks the event of death.
Mourning is the outward expression of that loss—our rituals, traditions, and cultural practices.
Grief is the emotional, cognitive, and physical reaction to that loss—a complex, often nonlinear internal process that unfolds over time.

Why Definitions Matter

These distinctions matter for policy and practice. Bereavement leave policies, even when administered with sensitivity, typically cover only the immediate aftermath of a loss, the days required for funerals, travel, or initial family arrangements.

As in Glenview, the loss itself may be sudden, but the impact lingers in quiet ways that influence attention, energy, teamwork, and decision-making for weeks or months. When public employees affected by sudden or traumatic deaths return to front desks, patrol cars, snowplows, and field operations, they need more than a short bereavement window or a single informal check‑in. Leaders who rely only on minimal leave miss the “long tail” of grief, the extended period when focus, sleep, trust, and a sense of safety are still fragile while work demands remain high.

SOPs and SOSs

Immediately after a loss, the practical aspects of bereavement, including funeral planning, notifying relatives, and navigating estates, consume attention. These steps drive the familiar “standard operating procedures” of workplace response: coordinate coverage, grant a few days of leave, issue condolences. These actions address logistics and provide short-term relief.

At the same time, a grieving employee is also sending an unspoken distress signal, a kind of “SOS.” They may be distracted, withdrawn, irritable, or quietly disconnected for weeks or months after the official bereavement period ends. That ongoing distress often goes unrecognized or unsupported at work.

Our research with more than 5,300 employees across sectors and geographies shows that the psychological burden of grief does not end when employees return to work. In the public sector, the way a city manager’s office responds often mirrors the personal comfort level of its leaders. The profession lacks a shared, evidence-informed understanding of how people grieve.

Grievers commonly experience:

• Declines in cognitive capacity: trouble focusing, confusion, and memory lapses.
• Heightened physical symptoms: fatigue, sleep disruption, and stress‑related illness.
• Changes in communication: withdrawal, irritability, or intense emotional reactions.
• Long‑term disengagement when they feel unsafe, unseen, or unsupported.

The Risks of Unmet Grieving Needs

Unchecked or unsupported grief carries real organizational risk. It can lead to significant productivity losses, mental health struggles, absenteeism, premature departures, and safety concerns. Grief‑related losses are estimated to cost U.S. businesses tens of billions of dollars each year.

Turnover

For city managers and county administrators, this is not an abstract concern. When employees feel that their grief is invisible or inconvenient to their employer, they are more likely to leave. Turnover in public agencies is costly, draining institutional knowledge and increasing the pressure on already thinly stretched teams.

Productivity and Safety

Many teams are navigating community tensions, public scrutiny, and personal loss simultaneously. When staff are both caring for a productivity understandably declines. Cognitive capacity, focus, and energy are compromised, which can contribute to errors, slower service, and heightened safety risks in public-facing work.

Trust in Public Institutions

When the default stance is “business as usual” in the face of loss, the costs include higher turnover, more mistakes, and erosion of trust in public institutions. Employees who do not feel supported in grief have less capacity to extend empathy and patience to community members. Over time, both staff and residents may come to see their institutions as indifferent to suffering.

The Solution: Grief-Responsive Training, Culture, and Policies

For local governments, the call to action is clear: bereavement policies may be a necessary first step, but they are often not sufficient. Leadership must begin to see grief not as a private matter that occasionally interrupts work, but as a predictable, recurring, deeply human experience that affects individual performance, team dynamics, and organizational health.

To support grieving employees, especially those in high-stress, public-serving roles, cities and counties should:

Educate leaders and managers.

Training on the differences between bereavement, mourning, and grief—and how each appears in the workplace—can make conversations more validating and effective.

Normalize differences in grieving. 

Mourning rituals and expressions of grief vary across cultures and individuals. Some losses may go unrecognized yet remain profound. Public sector organizations need ways to acknowledge these “invisible” losses.

Develop grief-responsive policies. 

Written policies should do more than count days. They should signal leadership’s values, clarify access to counseling and peer resources, and empower managers to adapt expectations based on real-time needs.

At-Need and Pre-Need Grief Responses

In practice, leaders must do more than offer generic support. They need clear, grief‑responsive standard operating procedures; templates for internal messages after a death; resource guides to vetted local support; and managers prepared to hold brief, empathic conversations rather than avoid the topic. At‑need responses focus on the immediate aftermath of a specific loss affecting individuals or departments, providing short‑term stabilization through time and space to grieve, coverage adjustments, and visible signals that leadership understands the emotional impact. Pre‑need work happens before the next crisis and includes education, policy development, and culture change so that, when future losses occur, the response is not ad hoc but consistent and values‑aligned for both employees and the community.

Conclusion: A Necessary Culture Shift

When it comes to grief, city/county managers must move from a mindset of containment and closure to one of compassion and adaptation. Grief is not something to be fixed within a set number of days. It is a life‑altering process that many colleagues learn to carry forward while continuing to serve their teams and communities.

The Glenview example illustrates what becomes possible when leaders leverage the right resources to become grief‑responsive. Responding with both structure and presence, through communication, coverage, ceremonial acknowledgment, and ongoing support, helps lay the groundwork for healing well beyond the first week. In the case of Glenview, a deeper, stronger tie between the police service and the city manager’s office was forged.

In communities grappling with high‑profile deaths, the way public sector leaders and governing body members respond will shape how safe and seen employees feel for years to come. Their actions signal whether public institutions take seriously both the well‑being of their staff and the pain their communities carry.

By recognizing the full scope of grief and moving beyond minimal bereavement protocols, cities and counties can foster cultures of resilience, dignity, and psychological trust. This is not only the right thing to do; it is a strategic, human‑centered approach that keeps public institutions strong, grounded, and ready to serve.

GINA PINGITORE, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist, brings a deep understanding of human behavior to executive decision‑making, helping leaders see beyond short‑term metrics to the “long tail” of employee experience, including how people adapt to stress, change, and loss over time.

DAVEN MORRISON, MD, CEO of Morrison Associates, Ltd., develops programs to support leaders and teams, conflict management, and performance conversations. His work with municipal leaders addresses emerging problems, such as finding common ground in a polarized climate.