What I have not said yet, and what is also true: the grief part.
I have never been someone who talks about feelings first. I organize them into spreadsheets first and talk about them later, which is a pattern my therapist has noted with the particular professional neutrality that means she has an opinion about it. The grief about losing this job existed alongside the spreadsheet and was not separate from it but was processed in a different place, at different times.
I cried twice in the first week. The first time was in the shower, which is private by definition. The second time was while I was looking at a version of the exception log that existed in my own recall — not a file, not something I’d copied, just the accumulated knowledge of what we’d built and what I’d contributed to it, held in my own mind, while I sat at my desk thinking about what to put on a resume.
I was mourning the work. Not the company. Not the family relationship, which would take longer to sort out. The work, which had been good and which I had done well and which was now being inherited by someone who did not fully understand what it was.
This is a specific kind of grief and it does not have many of the dramatic markers of the grief that shows up in stories. Nobody had died. I had not lost a house or a relationship or anything that could not be rebuilt. I had lost eighteen years of work that I was proud of, in the specific way of someone who has spent their career building something carefully.