Woman gets fired for skipping office work to attend husband’s fyneral without approval

“I walked into that place still numb, still hollow from burying my husband, and the first thing I was hit with wasn’t sympathy or concern, but termination.

I couldn’t even process it at first. I had just come from his funeral, the ground hadn’t even settled, and yet I was being told my job was gone. Just like that. One day. One absence. As if my whole world hadn’t collapsed. As if grief could be scheduled, approved, or postponed.

What hurt even more was that they knew. I had been at work days earlier when everything became too much for me. I broke down right there, overwhelmed by the reality of losing the man I shared my life with. Instead of support, I was told to go home. I did what any grieving widow would do, I went to bury my husband. Then the next thing I knew, I got a call saying that absence was the reason I was fired. Not performance. Not misconduct. One day, after the day I laid my husband to rest.

I tried to explain. I begged them to understand that this wasn’t a casual excuse, that this was death, loss. I told them plainly, “My husband just died. I had to bury him.” But the response was cold and rehearsed. Policy is policy. Because I was a contract worker, they said they could let me go at any time. No compassion. No exception. Just rules, spoken like my pain was irrelevant”