My mom's death broke me. It also taught me that in our work-centric culture, even grief has a time limit.

• I've been my mother's sole caregiver for the past seven years.
• When my mom died, I got an outpouring of support from people I worked with.

Earlier this year, my mom died. I'd been her sole caregiver for seven years since she moved in with me, and her last several months were quite demanding and graphic. In the run up to and aftermath of her death, I was shattered.

As a freelance writer, I'm gifted with the opportunity to largely make my own schedule, and there's no way I would have made it had that not been the case. However, my managers and editors were also a critically important support system following Mom's death.

The pandemic has stretched everyone's capacity to cope

From my perspective as a person who's lived with bipolar disorder for decades, the social environment created by the pandemic has some benefits — no more feeling guilty about not leaving the house, and no more having stress and anxiety over forcing myself to talk to strangers when I'm in a low period. But most of all, the pandemic got the people around me talking about mental health in a way that we really hadn't been doing before, especially in the workplace.

The fact that I was able to talk openly about how I was feeling, the influence of Mom's death on my bipolar disorder, and my needs on a move-forward basis was incredibly important.

In the wake of my mom's death, I received gifts and empathy from my editors

My editors sent me flowers, and they understood when I left an unfortunate, bipolar-influenced voicemail in the middle of my grief. When compared to the millions of hourly workers and people in other less accommodating jobs across the country, I realize how lucky I am.

Altogether, I believe how I've been treated in the aftermath of my mother's death is representative of the fact that companies and managers are, on the whole, striving to open up the conversation around mental health, educating themselves on dealing with mental-health issues with empathy, and making meaningful change in their policies to accommodate workers' needs.

On the other hand, there's still a lot of room to grow.

It shouldn't take a 'tidy' reason like the death of a loved one to get support

The resources I'm able to access right now as a grieving person are far better than those I'm able to access as a person with bipolar disorder, and that's ludicrous.

For example, I don't currently have health insurance. I don't qualify for Medicaid, but having devoted so much time and unpaid labor to caring for my mom, I also haven't been able to afford insurance on the health exchange once I cover my other monthly expenses.

Right now, I'm receiving a patchwork of free therapy connected with my mother's death — some of it through a caregiver resource package from the local counsel on aging, and other counseling through aftercare grief services from the hospice company we used at the end of my mother's life (paid for, ultimately, by my mother's insurance).

If my mother hadn't died, these resources would be unavailable to me. In just a few weeks, they'll be gone, and I'll have to go back to local sliding-scale counseling or online resources — all pay-as-you-go, out-of-pocket services.

It's fantastic that workplaces have opened up to conversations about mental health

I've seen and been the beneficiary of amazing change as a result of this shift, and it's truly been a revelation, especially during the darkest days of the pandemic.

I appreciate that at least here in the US, our corporate citizens have taken on the responsibility for broadening the discussion in this critically important area. However, while I and thousands of others with diagnoses like mine are grateful that we can finally come into the light and talk about what's wrong, talk is still cheap at the end of the day.

Like many Americans with a mental-health diagnosis, my access to affordable care remains spotty at best. I have to piece together my support system even though I have bipolar disorder, a chronic illness that has the potential to be life-threatening if not properly managed.

That burden shouldn't fall on corporations for many reasons. One is that not all of us are in traditional workplaces, especially when bipolar disorder, for example, can make it difficult if not impossible to hold down a steady job to begin with.

Sometimes it seems like it would be easier to give up on the workplace when I can't access the care I need through it

But then, I think about those flowers my editors sent me. I remember how nice and understanding one of them was on the phone after I left that inappropriate, grief-addled voicemail. I think about how much I've been privileged to do. So I keep going.

Getting people to face up to the need to talk about mental health, especially in the workplace, may be the one gift the pandemic has given us. This gift came to us among the many tragedies of COVID-19 around the world — whether they be in government buildings, executive offices, or lonely hospital beds.

I've never before felt nurtured, seen, or understood by a workplace like I did after my mother's death. To be able to be vulnerable in that way, and to accept the help that was offered, has been a healing experience for me.

But the heightened mental-health awareness that the pandemic has pushed workplaces into is just the first step in a long road. Moving forward, it's time for a little less conversation and a little more action — and it's not the job of workplaces alone to foment these changes.