The veiled meaning behind 'family emergency'

Few euphemisms are as handy in a crisis, but obscuring the truth comes at a cost

In early 2019, I sat in a ICU staring at my mother, who was intubated and on life support.

She was immobilized and silent. The only sign of life—of her personality—was her toenails, chipped and painted teal blue from a pedicure weeks earlier, back when she was not exactly healthy, but not on the verge of death, either.

Another family emergency hits home

There was no denying it. Along with all the horrible and weird emotions I was feeling in the moment, I also grappled with the realization that I was in the middle of another “family emergency,” one of many in the past decade.

I grew to hate the phrase “family emergency,” simply because I had needed to use it so often.

Over and over, through each crisis, I leaned on that euphemism to let people know something awful was going on in my life without having to divulge the details. I grew to hate the phrase, simply because I had needed to use it so often.

When the truth is too painful (or shameful) to name

But it also opened my eyes to what so many of us experience. While in some cases, yes, it can mean something straightforwardly medical, “family emergency” is the term many Americans use to let those around them know they need to drop out of life and handle something stressful, often something too unspeakable for the polite environs of the office or school drop-off line—an overdose, violence, an arrest, a suicide attempt, or some other trauma. The stuff that fills the seedy underbelly of life that’s both everywhere yet nowhere, because we haven’t named it, because we’re all too worried what people will think or do when they know our life has been impacted by trauma or danger.

For me, one weird impact of enduring multiple “family emergencies” was my compartmentalized and reflexive personas that popped up. At home with my husband, I had my “real” persona where I didn’t ever have to say dumb things like “family emergency” and “challenging personal situation” when I needed to explain myself.

My other personas—work persona, friend persona, mom persona, etc—were trotted out when I had to do things like ask for time off from work after my mother fell and hit her head, or fight back tears during dinner when someone joked about shooting herself in the head (which is how my grandfather died). Suicide is a very real issue on both sides of my family. (Because I hadn’t been open with those friends about my “family emergency,” they had no idea how much the joke hurt me. And I carried that hurt a long time.)

Here’s a cute kitten photo because this is a heavy post. In my inaugural post, I promised you a return to humor, but it didn’t quite feel appropriate for this topic. Shit, is this going to be a recurring issue? Thank god for kittens.

All those personas got messy to manage, and to this day, I really don’t know who in my life knows what. Certainly my husband knows the most. And my therapist. But beyond that, everyone else has gotten a particular persona of me that was willing to say only so much, because at the time, for whatever reason, she was too scared, sad, embarrassed and exhausted to throw away her euphemisms and tell the truth.

In a way, working on my book has been an effort to merge these personas —in therapeutic circles this might be called feeling “whole” again.

How do other cultures identify “family emergencies”?

Many times I have wondered: Where did this term come from? I assume it popped up as a way to handle conversations at work, deriving from our national tendency to pretend we’re unemotional, unaffected employees, stoic and private, often to a fault, for the sake of capitalism. Emotional employees aren’t good for business. (This necessary detachment resulted in me thinking truly dumb things like “work is a healthy distraction right now” when my mother was at her most ill, and I was determined to pretend I. Was. Fine.)

Related read: Can an Employer Ask for Proof of a Family Emergency?

This, of course, is compounded by the persistent stigma around mental illness and trauma, making certain things shameful even if they shouldn’t be.

But that’s just a hunch. It could be universal. I’d be curious to know how family crisis is discussed in other cultures and countries. How do people, in say, buttoned-up Japan, ask for time off from work when something horrible has happened? How do people around the world navigate what to tell their inner and outer circles about something that may scar them for life? (Please, dear readers, do comment and share any insights on this!)

I’m guessing it’s just as chaotic and messy as it is here, where saying “family emergency” may feel like the only thing that feels safe to say, for better or worse.