Her funeral was today at a 11:00 a.m. I didn’t go.

Secret Thirty-Six, Revealed. I was slagging her off to another co-worker only a few hours before she died. Her death was sudden, and the guilt has grated on my psyche ever since the morning I heard about her passing.

She was a sweet woman who didn’t particularly like to work. She’d go out of her way to offer someone a cough drop and put the same effort into ensuring big projects landed on other people’s desks instead of hers, despite her higher ranking job title.

She made personal calls in her cubical since the day she was hired, begging landlords to accept her family’s application despite their bad credit. She’d talk about how bad her sitter was and yell at customer service people at her bank. She’d tell you anything you wanted to know about her personal life but wouldn’t respond to a work inquiry until multiple managers were cced on the follow-ups.

She’d come to work an hour and a half late and leave a half hour early, long before she got sick. But she did get sick, and everyone heard it, the large rattling cough that sputtered through each day and meeting. It started last November. Around February they finally discovered the cause, she said. Post-nasal drip. Three weeks later she checked into a hospital where they diagnosed her with walking pneumonia.

She was out of the office for the full three months and no one was surprised. (This is where my slagging started). She had been blogging regularly for two months of the leave and having lunch with co-workers and friends. At the end of her maximum disability leave, she came back with no cough, seeming good as new as everyone suspected she would. I hugged her and told her that I was glad she was back, which was not a lie. I like nice people; I just don’t like to do their work.

A week later she was dead.

My manager asked if I was going to the funeral. I couldn’t. It would be wrong. It would be false. I am certainly shook by her death but I’d actually said—while she must have lain dying—that if she could blog and play Farmville then she should have been working from home. I’m afraid my work life has made me a monster, and I can’t look into her young children’s faces in good conscious knowing that one week back at work killed their mother.

Instead, I’ve decided to donate to their trust, a fund that their grandparents arranged. Their mom was a good-hearted woman, loving and jovial. She’d have been devastated to know that she would not live to raise her children. She may not have been the best co-worker, but in the hundreds of conversations I overheard from her cubical, she certainly took seriously her job as a mother. Their breadwinner. Their parent that begged landlords, banks, and managers to give them a second shot.

I can’t give out of guilt, which is hard in deciding the amount. I have to give out of a pure love for the well-being of two children whose mother I knew, although briefly, whom they will never know. And afterward I need to think about getting out of a place that makes me favor work over people, deadlines over health. I feel like a toxic person, battling guilt and misplaced indignation, but I’m not that person in my soul. I just hope that I live long enough to prove it.