The Stages of Grief

I have left jobs and felt loss. Some endings came with a second‑guessing grief. The wondering about whether I walked away from something I should have stayed with longer. The slow work of replaying decisions and imagining alternate timelines.

I’ve left other jobs and, while still a loss, I knew it was time to go. There was relief then. Happiness. The work had run its course. The ending fit.

I have also been through a layoff. That felt different. A gut punch. Abrupt. Impersonal. The work was not the problem, and the ending was not chosen.

When Microsoft announced the Voluntary Retirement Program, the email itself was unremarkable. Neutral subject line. Careful language. I remember hesitating before opening it. Something shifted anyway. Not a conclusion. More like a tilt.

I’ve spent enough time with grief to recognize early signals. Last week it showed up wearing familiar shapes. Not cleanly. Not in order.

Denial came first, disguised as competence. Stay focused. Be useful. Keep moving. If I didn’t look directly, maybe it wouldn’t fully land. There was no conscious refusal. Just momentum.

Depression followed. Not despair. Weight. Fatigue. Attention narrowing. Gravity increasing overnight. It became harder to pretend nothing had changed. I opted out for a day and focused on family. Not avoidance, processing information.

Bargaining came next, as it tends to for engineers. Mental math. Timelines. Scenarios. Running paths forward and evaluating how each one might feel. It looked rational. It wasn’t.

Then anger. Not explosive. Clarifying. A sharpening that cut through fog. Boundaries became visible. Systems move on, with or without individual investment.

Acceptance showed up briefly. Not peace. More like a place to stand without deciding. It didn’t stay. The days held more than one state at once. I’m not done.

What surprised me was not the grief, but that the stages themselves appeared here. I’m not looking to leave. I’m not tired of the work. The opposite is true.

In conversations with others, I’ve heard the same thing. A startled quality. A quiet insistence. Not ready. Many of us have pivoted into AI and feel young again. Not inexperienced. Awake. Curious. Willing to learn in public and be wrong early. Work has that pull again. Minds buzzing. The aliveness matters, and it isn’t nostalgia.

This grief isn’t about wanting out. It’s grief for a chapter that is still open. For momentum briefly flattened. For identities mid‑evolution.

Long careers carry more than tenure or compensation. They carry continuity. Belonging. A story that lives inside the work. When continuity becomes optional, the body seems to register the loss before the mind can decide what it means.

I’m not writing to argue for or against any outcome. I’m noticing what happened when grief showed up anyway. Naming it hasn’t resolved anything. It hasn’t completed a process.

But it has made the experience legible enough to move through the days without forcing a direction.

I’m not ready to choose.

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Alison + Wiggins