• Beth Graham and her brothers cared for their mother for four years after she had a stroke.
• After their mom died, the siblings decided to spend the $75,000 inheritance on a trip to South Africa.
• Spending quality time with her brothers helped her deal with the loss.

I grew up in one of those weirdly close families where we all genuinely enjoyed spending time together.

My dad died young, at 56, leaving my adventurous, spirited mother a widow. I'm the youngest of three kids, with two older brothers, and we all share a love of travel.

Five years ago, during a visit back home to Florida to see my mom, she came into my room early in the morning complaining about "the worst headache of her life." It was confirmed later, at the hospital, that she had a stroke.

For the next four years, we were her caregivers. Thankfully, her long-term insurance covered most of the expenses, but my brothers and I chipped in to cover things like round-the-clock caretakers and a new stereo so she could listen to soothing music.

As a wealth manager, my middle brother managed her larger assets and took care of things like selling her home, paying off her mortgage, and settling her estate. After she died and all of her outstanding expenses were covered, we were left with about $75,000 of inheritance.

Our initial thought was to split that among her three grandchildren to help jump-start their young adult lives. But one of my brothers doesn't have children, so it didn't seem fair. We began talking about how best to honor her with those remaining funds.

While it may sound selfish to some, we determined that she would have wanted to treat us with something — she was the kind of mom who always put our needs ahead of her own.

Caregiving is hard, and we all experienced burnout at different times, both emotionally and physically, so we wanted to find a way to unwind from the past few years.

Including grandkids was too complicated

As my brothers and I all enjoy traveling I suggested we take a trip in her memory. Getting everyone to agree to that was actually the easy part. Deciding where to go proved more difficult.

The original plan was to include everyone on the trip: my husband, my sister-in-law, and the three grandkids. I suggested we rent a chateau in the south of France or a villa in Italy since my mom was such a foodie. But because of our range of interests — some like museums, others like organized tours, and others crave adventure — we concluded that a relaxing vacation in a home wouldn't work.

We settled on a trip to South Africa that would include a one-week safari and another week in Stellenbosch wine country — paying tribute to my mom's love for great wine.

We soon realized that including our kids, some still in college and others just starting new careers, would not work. They wouldn't be able to take two weeks off. So, as disappointing as it was, we decided to leave them behind. We were also very aware that this would give us the extra money to plan a more luxurious trip.

A trip to honor our mom

We flew business class from New York to Cape Town and spent two days exploring the region with a local guide. Then we traveled to Kruger National Park to our luxury resort in the private Sabi Sands Game Reserve and spent five days tracking the Big 5. We saw all five almost every day.

I ordered three small memorial key chains. Each sibling was to bring along some of my mother's ashes so that she could join us on the trip. One evening, we gathered at the resort's bar, poured a glass of wine for her, surrounded by our keychains, and toasted her for our amazing lives and sibling relationships.

After a memorable — and emotional — week, we journeyed on to our luxury Airbnb in Stellenbosch to toast her some more as we sampled the wines of the region. The end of our trip was bittersweet because we knew our time together honoring her with this trip was coming to an end.

We spent all of that money and then some, but none of us had any doubt that she was looking down on us and smiling. As an adult, it's rare that I get time to properly catch up with my own siblings. That quality time together was special and, hopefully, exactly what our mom would have wanted.

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• Some high-profile CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk have multimillion-dollar security details.
• Health insurance companies, by contrast, don't appear to spend as much on executive protection.
• The amount public companies allocate toward executive security and private travel varies widely.

The death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week has brought a new level of attention to the question of executive protection.

Thompson's shooting outside a hotel in New York also highlights that executives who aren't as high-profile as someone like Elon Musk may not always have bodyguards with them.

That level of monitoring can be expensive, and the amount companies pay for executive security varies widely.

On the high end, Musk and other CEOs including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, and Salesforce's Marc Benioff are known for having multimillion-dollar security packages.

Others, including JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon, Amazon's Andy Jassy, and Apple's Tim Cook, have more modest protection services worth hundreds of thousands of dollars — amounts that can further increase when factoring in costs associated with the use of private planes, a common CEO perk tied to security considerations.

Health insurance companies, including UnitedHealth Group, don't appear to spend as much on executive protection as some of the Big Tech giants.

However, the health insurance industry isn't an outlier. Companies in other fields, like retail, also have relatively modest security-specific compensation.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon and McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski, for example, appear to have individual security expenses of less than $25,000 for 2023, according to company filings. When including the use of private aircraft, Walmart paid $192,848 for McMillon's personal use of the company jet, while McDonald's paid $319,301 for Kempczinski's usage in 2023.

Company-paid security costs are typically disclosed in annual corporate filings known as proxy statements. The documents include a breakdown of the salary, benefits, bonuses, and other perks to provide a dollar value of top executives' total compensation package, which must be approved by the board and shareholders.

Security services paid for by the company for the benefit of an individual executive are typically included in a category called "Other Compensation" along with perks like personal corporate jet usage, 401(k) matching, or tax preparation services. It's possible that some security costs may not be reported in proxy statements, particularly if they were paid for by the executives themselves and not reimbursed.

UnitedHealth Group's filings don't specify any personal security costs for Thompson last year

It's not clear if Thompson had a security detail with him on the day of his death. Video footage obtained by the New York City Police Department appears to show him walking alone on his way into an "investor day" event in Manhattan.

Although he was CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Thompson was also an executive vice president of UnitedHealth Group, for which he received $21,187 in other compensation in 2023. That amount represented $14,850 in 401(k) matching and $6,337 in health insurance premiums, with no amount indicated for personal security.

The company has yet to release its annual proxy statement outlining 2024 expenses.

Looking further up the corporate ladder, Thompson's boss, UHG CEO Andrew Witty, also did not receive payment for personal security as part of his 2023 compensation package. However, the company did make corporate aircraft available for his use.

"Witty is required for personal security reasons to use corporate aircraft for all business travel and is encouraged to use corporate aircraft for all personal travel," the proxy statement says, adding that Witty did not make personal use of the company plane in 2023.

A UHG spokesperson told BI the company is "partnering with local law enforcement to ensure a safe work environment and reinforce security guidelines and building access policies."

CVS, which owns Aetna, does not disclose the compensation of Aetna's president. However, CVS did provide its former CEO Karen Lynch with $44,148 for "personal protection" in 2023, as well as $243,281 for personal use of the company jet and $106,086 for personal use of a company car. A CVS spokesperson declined to comment.

Cigna CEO David Cordani received $310,437 in "other compensation" in 2023, largely constituted of $178,704 in personal travel on the company aircraft. Roughly $95,000 in other costs were provided for residential security system monitoring and maintenance, as well as expanded personal liability coverage.

Proxy statements for Humana and Elevance (owner of Anthem) did not specify personal security costs, while Kaiser Permanente is a nonprofit and not subject to the same reporting requirements.

Musk-level security can cost millions

Former Secret Service agent Joseph LaSorsa, who now runs the private security firm LaSorsa & Associates, previously told BI that an around-the-clock detail can cost $100,000 a month and isn't always enough to stop a motivated attacker.

At those rates, the annual cost of protection could balloon to $1.2 million — comparable to the base salaries of UnitedHealth's executive officers.

In other words, company-provided personal security can be an expensive proposition, and typically reserved only for a small number of top leaders. Different executives may also have their own personal preference for the level of security they travel with.

"Protection is very much driven on what a executive really wants," said John Orloff, a former US Secret Service agent who now leads security risk consulting at Jensen Hughes.

Orloff told Business Insider that his firm typically works with corporate security departments to develop their executive protection strategies in response to relevant threats.

Musk, the world's wealthiest person, has spoken out about personal security concerns in recent years. He told Tesla shareholders at the annual shareholder meeting that "two homicidal maniacs" had threatened to kill him and things were "getting a little crazy these days."

Filings show Tesla paid a Musk-owned personal security company $2.4 million to protect him in 2023. However, the agreement is not structured as compensation for his services as CEO and is unusual among public companies (Tesla is fighting to reinstate Musk's 2018 compensation package after a Delaware judge ruled against it for the second time).

Musk travels with multiple bodyguards — sometimes as many as 20, according to a recent report. Employees at X, formerly Twitter, reported seeing his security follow him into the bathrooms at the company's headquarters.

While executives at health insurance companies may not be as recognizable as someone like Musk or Zuckerberg, Thompson's death could lead board members and CEOs to review executive protection costs in a different light. The matter could feature more prominently as compensation committees draft proposals for their companies' future annual meetings.

• I returned to my sales job after my mother died, and I was still grieving.
• I was worried my performance would suffer and I wouldn't be able to meet my quotas.
• However, my coworkers were open about grief and shared their own stories with me.

My siblings and I received a call from our mother's caregiver in 2019. It was time to come home and say goodbye. She was losing her grueling battle with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

I flew from Seattle to my hometown of Virginia Beach to be with my mother as she passed peacefully. In the days following, we boxed up her rental home.

Eager to experience normalcy, I returned to work shortly after. I thanked my coworkers for covering my workload and tried to resume my responsibilities as a sales executive. New customers don't sell themselves.

Before I could open the handwritten cards on my desk, the warmest of homecomings came from my coworkers: a standing ovation that put me in tears. Attempting to make me feel comfortable with this new grief became a goal of the collective. But I still had hundreds of to-dos and messages to handle that reminded me of why I was absent in the first place.

Removing my out-of-office message wouldn't remove how mentally out of office I felt.

My coworkers never shied away from grief

Individuals who had lost a loved one at work and were willing to share their stories became my allies in the grief. Like a familiar deal, we understood the intricacies. Business is certainly not a one-man show, and the grieving process wouldn't be either. It took a cross-functional collaboration.

My coworkers committed to checking in, which alleviated my need to seek out conversation. Reading messages like, "I know we'll connect more when the time's right, but I'm so glad you are back. Thinking of you at this time," helped.

I felt valued and seen without needing to say anything.

Coworkers also reassured me I wasn't alone by sharing their own stories of grief. By proactively telling me their stories, they lessened the need for me to share, which could trigger unwelcomed sadness — typically in the form of a puffy red face and watery eyeballs. Every day, I knew individuals next to me were carrying the same weight.

I worried the grief would affect my output

I was terrified this mental out-of-office would take over my ability to perform, ultimately jeopardizing my paycheck. I was scared my job would feel like another funeral.

I thought my grief would make me lose productivity and lack a sense of purpose. I also wondered if I spent too much time thinking and talking about my mother, I wouldn't be able to reach my sales quotas.

But because my coworkers were so urgent in showing up for me, my sense of purpose and productivity didn't suffer.

The proof is in the pudding. I capped that first year of grieving by being the highest performer on my team. It turns out grieving is a team sport.

Amid grief, I learned I had a support system at work. Having co-workers who are open to helping you experience grief rather than hiding it makes not only a more productive employee but also a stronger team.

Liza Shaub is a writer with a background in technology and sales. She lives with her three daughters and husband in Baltimore, MD. You can find her on Linkedin and Instagram.