Workplace Nightmares·
CELEBRATION OF DEATH
A coworker overhears plans to celebrate a mother's death, sparking a tense workplace feud that tests loyalty and exposes a couple's fractured marriage.
Should he have told Mark sooner?
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Mark's mother had just died, and his wife was heading out to "celebrate her death."
That was the moment the coworker could not get out of his head. The woman at the center of it was Jenny, one of his coworkers, and the dead woman was Mark's mother, who had been sick for a while. Jenny and Mark, he said, did not get along very well with her. Still, the idea of a party after a funeral-level loss sat wrong with him from the start.
He went to the funeral and saw Mark devastated.
The next day, at work, the coworker learned Jenny and some other coworkers were planning to go to a bar to "celebrate her death." He called the whole thing disgusting and said he considered telling Mark what was happening. In the original discussion, commenters urged him to stay out of it, pointing out that he did not know the full history of the relationship and that it was not his place to вмешаться in the marriage.
Then came the update.
The coworker said he invited Mark over, intending to tell him what Jenny had been doing, but when Mark arrived, he was visibly crushed and already deep in grief. The coworker backed off from telling him directly. Instead, Mark started talking.
He said he already knew Jenny and his mother hated each other. According to Mark, Jenny had been "anything but empathetic except on a superficial level," and the two women had been fighting since his mother died. He also said he had heard from another male worker that Jenny had been "acting gleeful" at work and telling the other women about his mother's death. The coworker confirmed that part, though he said he did not pay much attention to office gossip.
The next morning, Jenny confronted him.
She wanted to know what he had talked about with her husband. He refused to get into it. Then he said plainly that he knew she had gone out to the bar to "celebrate" the death of her husband's mother. He told her he "honestly lost all respect for her."
Jenny's reaction was not recorded in detail, but the exchange made the conflict impossible to ignore. The coworker later wrote that he thought Jenny was a bad person, and that if the marriage ended, it would be because of her behavior. In his words, "It would be her fault for being such a callous bitch and celebrating the death of her husband's mother."