The Goodbye I Refused to Say

Last Thursday morning, before our final call, she sent me a message.

How do we say goodbye this afternoon?

I told her we wouldn’t. We would simply have our meeting — a handover, her passing me the threads to hold while she went on holiday — and I was not going to say goodbye, because that is not a thing I do.

I meant it as strength. I am still not sure it wasn’t fear.

Because here is what we both knew and neither of us wrote down: by the time she comes back from her three weeks away, I will be gone. The handover she gave me was for work I will not be there to finish. She was leaving for a fortnight. I was leaving for good. And I could not sit inside a word like “goodbye” and stay upright, so I refused it.

We never shared an office. We worked remotely — a call most mornings, messages threading through the day, the small steady contact of two people who trusted each other across a screen. That is the thing that has gone quiet now. Not a desk. A morning message that doesn’t come. The first amputation is always smaller than you expect, and it is always the one you feel.

When the call ended on Thursday, I did not do anything large. A few tears went down my cheeks. I made myself a coffee and sat with it in the quiet for a while. I wasn’t really thinking. I just felt heavy — that was the whole of it. Heavy, and quiet, and done.

Since then I have not been hungry. I lie down and sleep will not arrive. I move through the day with no current running under the movement — performing the actions of my job with the power switched off somewhere I can’t reach. Drained is the word people offer, and it isn’t quite right; drained sounds like something spilled out. This is more like a building shutting off the lights in rooms it has decided it will no longer use.

I expected relief. Everyone around me is feeling it for me. My partner, my friends — they have a countdown running, and in their countdown the shrinking number is good news. Soon you’ll be out. Soon you’ll be free. They are not wrong.

But from in here the countdown does not feel like freedom. It feels like a held breath. Each day off the calendar is a day nearer a door I keep expecting to swing open, and it keeps, instead, quietly closing. I don’t feel relieved. I feel empty. And no one warns you that a way out you half-wanted for years can arrive feeling like a loss.

I should be honest about how I got here, because the honesty is the whole point.

I am not leaving in a clean, chosen way. My team was dissolved. I signed an agreement. What I was given was time — a year in a covering role, a chance to work in a field I’d never touched, and, on paper, a runway to find somewhere else inside the company to land.

I didn’t land. Partly because there was nowhere to land. And partly — this is the hard part to say — because somewhere in that year, a quiet part of me stopped looking. I had wanted out for a long time. I had never said so. Not to my manager, not to my friends, barely to myself. So when people ask whether this is what I wanted, I don’t have a clean answer. I didn’t choose it. And some hidden version of me had been choosing it, silently, all along.

That is the knot. And if you are near your own ending, you may know it exactly: the thing is being taken from you, and you also cannot honestly say you wanted to keep it.

Here is what I am least proud of. I have started to forget my own job.

Not because I can’t remember. Because remembering has become unbearable. The business still wants my input on next year’s plans — a year I will not be part of. The colleague returning to the role I covered wants deep dives, wants me to hand back everything I learned. And I sit in front of these entirely reasonable requests and find the files gone dark. The knowledge is in there. I cannot make myself reach for it.

I thought this was a failure of discipline. I have always been the one who pulls through to the last day, who hands over cleanly, who lets nothing drop.

It is not a failure. It is something older than my work ethic, making a call my conscious mind wasn’t ready to make: do not keep pouring yourself into a place that has no room for your future. The mind puts distance between you and the thing you are losing, because staying fully present would cost more than you have left. I am not forgetting my job because I stopped caring. I am forgetting it because I cared for years, and the caring has nowhere left to go.

The other thing slipping is the face.

For years I wore the professional mask well. Composed in the meeting. Fine, when asked. The surface calm that work rewards and quietly requires. I was good at it — the easy-to-like version of myself, the good soldier.

I can’t hold it now. It slips mid-call. And I have started asking the question that dissolves it completely: for whom am I wearing this? The company has already built its plans around my absence. The mask was a contract with a future I no longer have here. So I have begun, carefully, to take it off — telling one or two people how I actually feel, and watching them blink, because they assumed I’d be nothing but thrilled.

I will be. But underneath the thrill is a grief I had not budgeted for. Years of routines, of trusted voices on a morning call, of work that once mattered to me. That does not evaporate because leaving was, in the end, the outcome.

This is the part I most want you to keep if you keep nothing else.

There is a grief that is given no ritual. Kenneth Doka named it disenfranchised grief — grief for a loss the people around you do not count as one. Losing a job is one of his own examples. When you leave a role — pushed, or half-choosing, or both at once — the world hands you congratulations instead of condolences. You are not permitted to mourn something you were supposedly glad to be rid of. So you mourn it alone, in the gap between everyone’s celebration and your own sleepless, unhungry, emptied-out body.

What is happening to me is not weakness, and it is not ingratitude. It is grief arriving early, before the loss has finished landing — and recovering from it takes the time it takes. It cannot be scheduled to end tidily before a final day.

I thought I would reach the end at full strength. My body has told me otherwise: that I cannot pull through untouched, that I should not have to, and that the emptiness is not the absence of a future. It is the weight of a past that was real enough to grieve.

So I refused to say goodbye. Maybe that was strength. Maybe it was the only way I could stay standing. I have stopped needing to know which.

If your countdown feels less like a release than a held breath — if you have started, quietly, to forget the thing you have not yet left — you are not doing it wrong.

You are only the first one in the room to know that you are already leaving.

Ilka 🫶🏻

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