With a whimper

It's funny, being a lame duck employee. When you first learn you're being laid off, most co-workers are solicitous and sympathetic, while others never say a word. "Huh? What elephant in which living room?"

The work itself keeps coming pell-mell at first, especially when a high-profile annual event is only weeks away. Gradually, though, your activities begin to taper off, partly thanks to exclusion (no need to attend directors' meetings anymore) and partly because those staying on are looking ahead and adapting to a workplace without you.

People at work cut you a lot of slack when you're a lame duck. You are frequently out of the office to meet with human-resources staff and job counselors, to go for interviews or training. Since you can't begin any long-range projects, you do just the basics and begin cleaning up your office, packing personal objects such as framed photographs, freelance samples, and what's left of your Star Wars collection. You delete old emails and put personal digital content on disks and thumb drives. All of this makes you sad, because your office is that special "room of one's own" where you have been YOU, a creative professional with an identity separate from that of mother, wife, and grandmother.

What you miss most in these waning days of a long career is being needed: for input, brainstorming, institutional perspective, urgent text or web posts, opinions. All of those occasions when one or another boss said, "Let's put Anne on the [choose one] web redesign committee/ research communications group / Clinton visit planning committee / Summer Studies marketing audit team" – they are in the past. You're off the list, dropped from the batting order, cut from the A Team or indeed any team whatsoever. No one cares what you think about this or that proposal, this or that strategy. You are suddenly so yesterday.

Here is the truth: The life of a lame duck is boring, frustrating, demeaning, and melancholy. Driving in each morning to this particular office in this building at this campus on this historic hill in this capital city is What You Do – or rather it has been for more than 30 years. You're three weeks away from losing the whole enchilada – the colleague-friends, the cherished edifice, the professional identity – and you are alternately agitated and verklempt.

Mostly, you are alone – drifting away on your little boat, like it or not. The voices on shore get fainter, the lights on the dock dim, and the mouth of the harbor approaches. Soon even that will recede as you reach the open sea.