Chapter 10 - My Employer Offered Compassionate Leave—and I Chose the Lawsuit
Lucy did not know the worst part.
Neither did Theresa.
The biggest lie I had told was:
to myself.
During the review of my Canadian employment case, my lawyer sent me old company emails.
One was from twenty months earlier.
Lucy had just been hospitalized with an infection.
I wrote to my interim employer’s HR department:
My wife is undergoing cancer treatment in Ohio. I may need extended leave.
Their response:
You are eligible for up to eight weeks unpaid compassionate leave without loss of your current assignment. We can also discuss remote administrative duties if your return date remains uncertain.
I had:
options.
I remembered telling everyone:
I can’t leave right now.
That was not true.
I could.
It would cost:
income,
momentum,
possibly negotiating leverage in the separate dispute,
my sense of professional control.
Then an email to my attorney.
If I return to Ohio for two months, does it weaken our claim that I remain available for comparable employment here?
He answered:
Potentially on mitigation arguments, but family medical leave is explainable. Your damages case does not disappear because you care for a sick spouse.
There.
Clue one.
Not:
You must stay.
Then another.
Lucy’s second email:
Please come home. I’m scared.
I forwarded it to:
myself.
Then opened a draft to my supervisor:
I need to take the compassionate leave.
I never sent it.
Instead, later that evening, I texted Lucy:
Give me three more weeks. There’s movement on settlement.
Clue two.
The settlement did not occur for:
another fourteen months.
Then my journal.
I had started keeping notes because litigation consumed me.
One entry:
If I leave now and they settle low because they know I’m done fighting, what was all this for? Need to finish. Need to bring something home big enough to justify being gone.
Clue three.
There.
That was the ugliest truth.
At some point, I stopped staying in Canada despite the cost.
I stayed because of:
the cost.
The more I missed, the more valuable the eventual settlement needed to become.
Otherwise I would have to admit:
I had sacrificed years for:
money.
So every missed month became justification for:
another.
Sunk cost dressed as:
responsibility.
My mother helped the lie.
“You’re doing this for Lucy.”
“Finish.”
“Bring home what they owe you.”
Lucy sometimes helped it too.
Early in illness she said:
“Don’t throw your case away because of me.”
I took one frightened sentence from my wife and turned it into:
long-term permission.
Then ignored every later sentence that contradicted it.
When I finally told Lucy this during counseling months later, she stared at me.
“You could have come home?”
“Yes.”
“How early?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“Nathan.”
“More than a year before I did.”
She turned away.
I wanted to say:
I thought you were stable.
Mom lied.
The lawyers—
No.
“I chose wrong.”
Lucy cried.
Quiet.
Then:
“You sent money because it was easier than seeing me like this.”
I closed my eyes.
“Yes.”
That answer nearly ended our marriage.
Maybe it should have.
But for once, I did not ask her to make my guilt:
May you like
smaller.
---
