It was always on loan

The hardest part of the first week is the sense of theft. They took it from me. The title, the parking spot, the team you built, the place you walked into every morning knowing your name was on it — gone, and it feels like a robbery.

Seneca, consoling a grieving mother, reached for a plainer accounting. The things around us, he said, are like furniture lent for a while: "they are only borrowed... it is our duty always to be able to lay our hands upon what has been lent us with no fixed date for its return, and to restore it when called upon without a murmur" (Of Consolation: To Marcia X, Stewart). The detestable debtor, he adds, is the one who rails at the lender for asking back what was always theirs.

This is not coldness. Seneca had buried people; he knew what loss costs. He's offering a way to carry it that doesn't double the weight. The job was real and good and you did well in it. It was also, the whole time, on loan — drawn against a market, a budget, a decision two levels up that was never yours to make. Restoring it without a murmur doesn't mean you're glad. It means you don't add the second injury of betrayal to the first injury of loss.