And Then They Were Gone.

"And then they were gone."

So said a friend's Facebook post as her daughter and her daughter's friends bid adieu and returned to college after a visit with the family.

I could almost hear the "poof" and see the cloud of purple-pink smoke that the students left in their wake. I thought about how these things often go: the long-planned and much-anticipated arrival, the reveling and rush of the visit itself, and the letdown that follows the departure, which can feel so sudden, even when it's not.

It's been that kind of week.

On Wednesday I learned that the company at which I've spent most of my career will be no longer. The firm itself has a long and storied history, and my share in it is only a tiny sliver, but it's been a big part of my life for many years. It's where I grew up - as a person and a professional. And "poof", almost like that, it's gone - or soon will be - at least in the form that I have always known it.

Wednesday I rode a roller coaster of emotion. Shock. Disbelief. Denial, then detachment. Disappointment, then sadness. I took comfort in knowing I was not alone, and in the caliber of the people and relationships I have known in my time there. It is also comforting, I suppose, to know that most of the people I know have been through this at least once, and that it's just my turn.

Our business line is being sold, and understanding what this really means could take many months.

So when I returned on Thursday, it was to "business as usual". We are moving forward, focusing on the future, positioning ourselves and our customers for brighter days ahead. And that's good. It makes sense, for a host of reasons. And certainly, I will be very busy for the foreseeable future, helping our various constituents to make sense of what these changes mean to them.

Yet amid all that busy-ness, an era is ending. And it seems, during the day at least, there's so little time to acknowledge that. We mobilize our teams and task forces, put people and project teams on call, reorder our priorities and go. Hard and fast and with singular purpose. The hours fly by, there seems to be even less time in the day than usual, and there's hardly a minute to think about what all of this means or feels like.

Except in the restrooms or in hushed hallway conversations, where people ask one another if they're okay, what they plan to do during or after this transitional time. People worry about their jobs, their families, their mortgages and tuition payments, their health insurance. They think about the unemployment rate and stay up too late refreshing their LinkedIn profiles and reaffirming old connections, making new ones. They focus on what they can control, and hope it's enough to make a difference in all the areas of their lives that it needs to.

It's all a bit surreal. At the end of it, whenever that is and whatever it looks like, I will have added "acquired" to my work experience. I may have stepped through a door as a career employee at one company into an unknown future at another. And with each day that brings me closer to that new future, the world I've known will get smaller and smaller as it recedes into my past until, like a free-spirited college kid catching the last train out, "poof" - it'll be gone.