I feel like a part of us has died this morning.
Yesterday morning, Brian went to work as usual, dressed in his Pepsi uniform, ready for the day with his coffee in a Pepsi mug. He adjusted his Sunkist hat to block out the eastern sun, and he wore his Pepsi winter squall jacket. He was ready for his day.
After a short training video on, of all things, fire extinguishers, Brian was called into a meeting. He was told that as of that minute, his services were no longer needed at Pepsi. He was the turn in his keys, his cell phone and bring back the hats, the jackets, the clothes at his earliest convenience. He was given a sheet of paper outlining the termination of his benefits immediately, as this was the end of the month. They nodded their heads as men do, said they wished him the best and let him go.
After 8 years of never missing a day – EVER – never calling in sick, never taking an afternoon for a doctor’s appointment, they just let him go.
When he told me, I was so stunned I burst into tears. But the small voice on the other end of the line was trying so hard to be brave that I held in my sobs until we hung up. I wanted to be sure that I was here with him when he first came home, so I didn’t leave for work until hours later. My boss understood.
As anyone who has ever lost a job knows, it feels like a continuous kick in the gut. It just keeps happening, over and over. When you are finally able to fall asleep at night, it’s just an illusion of peace. The next morning you are reminded that yes, the death really did happen. It wasn’t a bad dream.
Our first thoughts were of money, of how we can tighten the belt and adjust. Adding up what very little savings we have and subtracting the many bills we have. Regret for buying this and fixing that before it needed repair. Wishing we had made different decisions in the past financially. Being glad – for him, for the first time – we don’t have children to feed.
I’m not sure Brian can see this far yet, but I think of the days and weeks to come, when I will continue to go to work and he will not. His body is conditioned to wake up at 5am every morning and go hard all day long. He’s thinking of what we’ll do this Monday when offices and HR people are back in place. Lists of places to call, people to send his resume to, emails to be sent.
We’re trying very hard to be proactive about this, as much as we can. By dinnertime last night, we’d already purchased new health insurance at about 75% cheaper than what it would have been to add him to mine. We created a Facebook and LinkedIn profile for him, logged him onto websites for companies doing any kind of work related to his.
Everything we could to forget the death that just rocked our family.
Even now, the next morning, we are awake in our den, and he is rattling on about routes, sales, numbers, who’s up and who’s down. Something – anything – to make sense of it all. He is sick from throwing up all night, probably nerves.
We are nervous, we are scared, we are shocked and we are confused.
We are now part of the national unemployment numbers and we are now standing in line with millions of other people, far worse off than we are, fighting for benefits and jobs and the ability to provide income to our family.
We are Americans, and our dream just died.
