The Permission to Grieve What We Stop

In Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar reflects on the shrinking timeline of grief. Seneca, he writes, believed grief should not last longer than seven years. Nâzım Hikmet imagined twentieth-century grief lasting at most a year. By the twenty-first century, Akbar suggests, grief may have been reduced to only a few hours before it is supplanted by necessity.

As I reflected on one of our previous blog posts,The Permission to Stop (or at Least to Do Things Differently): Leading Libraries Through VUCA, Akbar’s writing about grief stays with me because it names something many of us feel but rarely say directly: contemporary life gives us very little time to grieve. Not just the grief of death, though certainly that too, but the quieter griefs that come from change, loss, endings, and forced adaptation. We are expected to absorb disruption quickly, make the calendar work, update the workflow, attend the next meeting, and keep moving.

When Endings Feel Like Loss

Libraries know this kind of grief well.

A service ends. A database is canceled. A familiar workflow is redesigned. A collection is reduced. A physical space is reconfigured. A colleague leaves and is not replaced. A program that once mattered no longer fits the institution’s needs, budget, staffing, or strategy. From the outside, these may appear to be administrative decisions. From the inside, they often feel like a loss.

That loss is real because library work is not abstract. People invest care, expertise, identity, and time into services, collections, spaces, and routines. A discontinued service may represent years of relationship-building. A restructured workflow may unsettle someone’s sense of competence. A canceled resource may feel like a retreat from a value the library once claimed. A redesigned space may be exciting and necessary while still carrying the grief of what it replaces.

But grief does not mean the decision is wrong.

Letting Go Is Not Failure

Sometimes letting go is the responsible choice. A college may be facing financial pressures that require difficult decisions for the institution to survive. A service may no longer be used in the way it once was. A workflow may have made sense under one staffing model but become unsustainable under another. A resource may have been valuable at one point but no longer aligns with student needs, curricular priorities, or the realities of the budget. In those moments, holding on can become its own kind of harm. It can drain capacity from work that is more urgent, more equitable, or more closely aligned with the institution’s future.

This is where leadership requires both honesty and care. We should not sentimentalize every past practice simply because people worked hard to build it. But neither should we dismiss that work once the organization decides to move on. The fact that something must end does not mean it never mattered. It may have mattered deeply. It may have served its purpose. It may have helped the library meet a need for a particular time, under particular conditions, with the people and resources available then.

Letting go, at its best, is not erasure. It is discernment.

That discernment becomes even more important when organizations are stretched thin. Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez argues that many organizations suffer from too many projects and too few that truly matter. His point is not simply that organizations should become more efficient, but that they need to build the habit of stopping. He notes that starting new projects often feels exciting and visible, while stopping them feels uncomfortable, politically charged, and sometimes like failure.

That insight matters for libraries. We often talk about change as if more activity automatically means more progress: more pilots, more tools, more committees, more programs, more services. But when staffing, budgets, and institutional capacity are limited, doing more can actually weaken the work that matters most. Stopping, pausing, consolidating, or redesigning a service may be the only way to protect the library’s ability to support students, faculty, and the future of the college.

Nieto-Rodriguez’s most useful reminder is that continuation should be a conscious choice. In too many organizations, projects continue because no one challenges them. Libraries can fall into this pattern too. A service keeps going because it has always existed. A committee continues because no one wants to disband it. A workflow remains because changing it would require a difficult conversation. A program survives because stopping it would feel like admitting failure.

But stopping is not always failure. Sometimes it is the clearest evidence that an organization is paying attention.

This does not make the grief disappear. It gives the grief context. A service can be meaningful and still no longer sustainable. A project can have value and still need to end. A workflow can reflect care and expertise and still belong to an earlier version of the institution. The leadership challenge is to make those decisions clearly, communicate them honestly, and create enough space for people to understand not only what is ending, but why.

Grief is not always resistance. Sometimes grief is evidence that the work mattered.

Grief Is Information

Rakshitha Arni Ravishankar makes a similar point in a Harvard Business Review piece on grief at work. Writing during the pandemic, she observes that collective grief does not disappear when people enter the workplace. Instead, she argues that talking about shared grief can create space for healing and that leaders should model empathy, presence, listening, and kindness.

That insight matters beyond moments of crisis. In libraries, shared grief may emerge around staffing reductions, discontinued services, canceled programs, organizational restructuring, or simply the accumulated exhaustion of doing more with less. People may not use the word grief, but they may still experience loss, frustration, helplessness, or sadness. If leaders respond only with productivity language, they risk missing what the transition is asking of the people who must live through it.

Anna Ranieri’s “How to Handle Shared Grief at Work” is also useful here because it treats grief as something teams can navigate together, not only as a private emotional experience. Ranieri describes four elements of shared mourning: acknowledging, permitting, celebrating, and choosing. The workplace must first acknowledge that a loss has occurred; then it must permit people to express grief; then it can celebrate what mattered; and finally, it can choose how to remember and carry meaning forward.

Those four elements translate well to organizational change in libraries, even when the loss is not a death. Acknowledging means saying clearly that something is ending and that the ending matters. Permitting means allowing people to name what they feel without immediately labeling it resistance. Celebrating means honoring the work, relationships, and values that were built through the service, collection, program, or workflow. Choosing means deciding what should be carried forward, even if the original form of the work cannot continue.

This is also where colleagues matter. Letting go should not be treated as a private adjustment each person has to manage alone. When a service, workflow, collection, program, or role ends, the people who sustained it often need to hold space together for what is being released. That may mean naming the work, remembering what it made possible, acknowledging the care that went into it, and recognizing that the ending affects people differently. Some may feel relief. Some may feel sadness. Some may feel frustration. Some may feel all of those things at once.

Holding space does not mean staying stuck. It means giving people enough room to metabolize the change before asking them to fully inhabit the next version of the work. It also means recognizing that institutional memory lives in people, not only in policies, reports, or workflows. When colleagues are given space to talk honestly about what is ending, they often help identify what should not be lost: relationships, practices, lessons, values, and forms of care that can be carried into whatever comes next.

When people are upset that something is ending, they may be telling us that the service had meaning, that the workflow carried hidden knowledge, that the resource supported a community we have not fully considered, or that the change touches identity as much as efficiency. Their grief does not automatically mean the decision is wrong. It does mean the decision deserves care, and that care is often best practiced collectively. 

This distinction matters. Creating space for grief does not mean giving every stakeholder veto power. It does not mean avoiding hard choices or preserving unsustainable work indefinitely. It means recognizing that the emotional experience of transition is part of the change process, not an obstacle outside of it.

A library can sunset a service and still honor the labor that built it. A leader can restructure a workflow and still acknowledge the anxiety that comes with losing familiar ground. A team can move toward something better while still naming what is being left behind.

That naming is powerful. It prevents false cheerfulness. It resists the pressure to pretend that every change is only an opportunity. It gives people permission to say, “This was important,” even when the organization has decided, for good reasons, that it cannot continue in the same way.

Questions Before We Move On

In practical terms, this means building grief into the process of change. Before asking only, “What should we stop?” we might also ask:

What did this work make possible?

Who depended on it?

What knowledge, relationships, or values should be carried forward?

What should be documented before the work ends?

How do we acknowledge the people who sustained this work?

What rituals, acknowledgments, or conversations would help people mark the transition?

These questions do not slow change unnecessarily. They improve it. They help leaders separate the analytical question of whether something should continue from the human question of how people experience its ending. They also help preserve what is worth preserving, even when the original form of the work can no longer remain.

This is especially important in academic libraries, where so much work is relational and cumulative. A service may be measured in usage statistics, but its value may also live in trust, memory, habits, and local knowledge. When we stop doing something, we are not only removing a line from a workflow. We may be altering how people understand the library’s role.

Twenty-first-century grief may be pressured to last only a few hours before necessity takes over. But leadership should resist that compression. Necessity may require action, but it should not require emotional erasure. Libraries can move forward without pretending that nothing has been lost.

Conclusion

The permission to stop must be paired with the permission to grieve. Otherwise, change becomes another demand for performance: be resilient, be flexible, be positive, move on. But real resilience is not the absence of grief. It is the ability to carry loss honestly while still making thoughtful decisions about the future.

In libraries, we need more of that honesty. We need leaders who can say: this needs to end, and it mattered. We need teams that can evaluate services clearly without dismissing the people who sustained them. We need change processes that make room for evidence and emotion, strategy and memory, necessity and care.

Because stopping is not only a strategic act. It is also a human one.

The hardest leadership question is not always “What should we start?” Sometimes it is, “What are we brave enough to stop?” And when we answer that question, we need to remember what speed can cost. Urgency may be necessary. Survival may require difficult choices. Some services, projects, and workflows may need to end. But even then, people need a moment to name what is ending, honor what mattered, and understand what can still be carried forward.

That space may be brief.

But it should not disappear.

Further Reading

Akbar, Kaveh. Martyr! New York: Knopf, 2024.Akbar’s novel provides the opening meditation for this post: the idea that grief has been compressed by history, modern life, and necessity. Its reflection on Seneca, Nâzım Hikmet, and twenty-first-century grief offers a powerful frame for thinking about how quickly contemporary workplaces expect people to move from loss to function.

Dawes, Trevor A. “The Permission to Stop (or at Least to Do Things Differently): Leading Libraries Through VUCA.” Inclusive Knowledge Solutions.This earlier post is the conceptual starting point for this one. It argues that libraries need permission to stop, pause, redesign, or let go of work that no longer fits their capacity, mission, or institutional reality. This post builds on that argument by asking what happens emotionally when we actually do stop.

Nieto-Rodriguez, Antonio. “Your Company Needs to Focus on Fewer Projects. Here’s How.” Harvard Business Review, August 15, 2025.This article is useful for connecting grief and letting go to strategic focus. Nieto-Rodriguez argues that organizations often suffer from too many projects and too little prioritization, and that success comes from stopping work that no longer creates value. His emphasis on making continuation a conscious choice strengthens the argument that stopping is not failure; it can be a necessary act of leadership.

Ranieri, Anna. “How to Handle Shared Grief at Work.” Harvard Business Review, May 26, 2015.Ranieri’s article is useful for thinking about grief as a team experience. Her framework of acknowledging, permitting, celebrating, and choosing offers a practical way to think about how workplaces can respond when loss affects a whole group.

Ravishankar, Rakshitha Arni. “Dealing with Grief at Work: Our Favorite Reads.” Harvard Business Review, February 24, 2022.Ravishankar’s article emphasizes that grief, exhaustion, and anxiety do not disappear when people enter the workplace. It is especially useful for leaders because it connects grief at work to empathy, self-care, listening, kindness, and the need to make space for collective healing.