Angel, I'm really sorry to hear the news about Bill and thank you so much for sharing this with the group. I'm sending as many good vibes and virtual hugs to Fort Collins as I can right now.
I read your blog post and found your spirograph analogy to be extremely moving and apt. I had a similar thing happen when a member passed away from a complication with alcohol abuse and medications last summer. Let's call him Bob. Like Bill, Bob had left the community shortly before and his passing was a shock to the entire community. Bob had actually left our community on a rather bad note and I felt conflicted on what to do when I learned about his passing. For the first day or two, I didn't share the information and everything was business as usual as no one in the community had found out. I conferred with my staff and some of our oldest members and they all suggested to not announce it and to not publicly recognize Bob's passing. This didn't sit well with me and I decided that we had to announce it and at the suggestion of someone else who knew him (not a member), I decided to host a wake in Bob's honor. The only reason I'm bringing any of this up is that you wrote there's no manual for what to do in this type of situation. I felt the exact same way. I was completely clueless on how to handle it and felt in many ways that I was responsible for handling this. Bob died penniless and donated his body to science. There would be no funeral or memorial of any kind for him if I didn't take action. And despite going against what many said to do, we held the wake. And it was the best thing we could have ever done. I'm not sure if you've opened this up to your community via announcement and then discussed it informally or whether you've had an event, but I would absolutely recommend hosting an event if you can to remember Bill. But most importantly (as I learned), it's not about remembering Bill, but giving your community (and anyone else who knew Bill) the opportunity to see the entire breadth of the spirograph. My favorite example was two members who independently said they would try to show up early enough to beat Bob into the space because they knew he was always the first one there. Even though he was the first one there because Bob was sleeping at the coworking space, it was heartwarming to know they were playing the same game and connected to each other on that basis. There were countless other examples of people who said they always felt like they could talk to Bob and how open Bob was to listening when they felt there was no one else they could talk to. We learned so many things about our fallen member and how he had touched everyone individually that it was an incredible healing process and helped many people move on. To this day, members still talk about this event and how much it meant to them in their grieving process. Venting privately is one thing, but a community therapy session was more powerful than I could have ever imagined. Again, don't know if this is possible or appropriate for Bill at Cohere, but if you're considering it, I can't recommend it enough. On Thursday, March 17, 2016 at 12:48:49 PM UTC-5, Angel Kwiatkowski wrote: > > Hello Dear Friends. Cohere had a sad and terrible loss this week. I wanted > to share what went down in case your community ever has to face it. > > > http://coherecommunity.com/blog/coworking-and-suicide-what-the-spirograph-can-teach-us-about-community > > > ps. it's the worst. > -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
