Last week, my daughter lost her horse, Weston, without any notice. I have rewritten that sentence about 10 times because there really isn’t a way to capture what happened. Weston wasn’t just a horse E. rode. He was her partner.

They had been together for six years. They trained together, traveled together, competed together, and won together. They were two-time champions at the Pinto Worlds in Tulsa. But the championships aren’t the point. They knew each other. They trusted each other. They had that kind of relationship you sometimes see between a rider and a horse where it becomes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. E. loved him completely, and suddenly he was gone.

As her mother, there was very little I could do about the one thing that actually mattered. I couldn’t fix it or make her feel better, and I certainly couldn’t give her Weston back. So, I did what most of us do when something terrible happens: I tried to deal with everything else. And, of course, everything else was still there. There were client emails, meetings, deadlines, and people who needed answers from me. Life does not clear your calendar when something awful happens.

What struck me over the last week was how many people simply understood. Clients were patient when I was slower to respond. People moved meetings. Colleagues took things off my plate without making me explain every detail first. Friends checked on E., and people from the horse world who understood exactly what Weston meant to her reached out. There were so many messages that essentially said the same thing: “Don’t worry about us. Take care of E.” Nobody asked me to justify why the death of a horse had turned our lives upside down or suggested that, because Weston was an animal, this loss should somehow be easier. They just understood E. was grieving, and I was incredibly grateful for that.

It also made me think about the workplace in a way I probably wouldn’t have a week ago. We spend a lot of time advising employers about rules. How much leave is someone entitled to? What does the policy say? Does the law require an accommodation? Can we make an exception? Those are legitimate questions, and they are questions I answer for a living.

But sometimes there is another question worth asking first: What does this person need from us right now?

Not every difficult moment has a statutory leave attached to it, and not every family crisis fits neatly into a policy. What feels devastating to one person may not seem nearly as significant to someone else, but I’m not sure that should matter as much as we sometimes think it does. A parent dies. A marriage ends. A child is struggling. Someone gets frightening medical news. An elderly parent suddenly needs care. Or a 16-year-old girl loses the horse who had been part of nearly every important moment in her life.

Sometimes people just need a little room. That doesn’t mean abandoning standards, eliminating deadlines, or granting every request. It means recognizing that there are moments when being a decent human being matters more than proving that a rule could be enforced.

There is sometimes a fear in workplaces that if we give people too much grace, they will take advantage of it. Maybe sometimes they will. But my experience last week was exactly the opposite. Every person who told me not to worry about something right now made me want to get back to them faster. Every client who said, “Take care of your daughter,” made me even more appreciative of my relationship with that client. Grace doesn’t necessarily make people care less about their work. Sometimes it makes them care more.

And people remember it. They may not remember the precise language in a bereavement policy or how many days off the handbook technically allowed, but they will remember the person who said, “Go. We’ve got this.” They will remember who made a terrible week harder, and they will absolutely remember who made it a little easier.

I wish I hadn’t had a reason to think about any of this last week. I would much rather be writing about E. and Weston heading to their next show or watching the two of them walk into another arena together.

But I am deeply grateful for the people who have surrounded us since we lost him. Nothing anyone can say is going to make E. okay right now. That isn’t how grief works. But people can make a terrible time less lonely, and that matters more than I realized before last week.

We talk a lot in my world about what employers are legally required to do. Sometimes the most important thing we can do for another person has nothing to do with what the law requires. Sometimes somebody’s life falls apart in the middle of the workweek. And sometimes the kindest thing we can say is simply, “This can wait.”