There are many deaths we experience long before our physical one. Some arrive quietly, without ceremony, and leave us standing in the middle of our lives wondering who we are now that something we loved no longer exists.
For me, one of those deaths was the slow, almost imperceptible ending of a career I never expected to grieve: retail.
Brick-and-mortar stores. Fashion and fixtures. Employee discounts, holiday rushes, store visits, and the relationships built along the way. For more than a decade, retail was not simply where I worked. It became part of who I was.
As an HR leader, I witnessed the best of people and, unfortunately, some of their hardest days. I celebrated promotions, coached leaders through challenges, welcomed new team members, and stood beside associates whose careers were ending because stores were closing, companies were restructuring, or entire organizations were disappearing.
I have lost count of how many conversations began with hope and ended with uncertainty—not because people had failed, but because industries change, businesses do not always survive, and sometimes life writes a different ending than the one we planned.
Over time, I came to understand that Human Resources is not only about policies, compliance, employee relations, hiring, or firing. It is about people navigating change. It is about identity. And more often than we acknowledge, it is about grief.
Human Resources, Not Human Remains
I handed out tissues during difficult conversations and coached leaders through saying goodbye to teams they genuinely loved. I wrote talking points for conversations that no script could ever make easier. Sometimes the most meaningful part of my job was not what I said, but simply being willing to sit beside someone while their professional world changed forever.
Looking back, I realize I spent years helping people navigate endings: store closures, layoffs, restructures, career pivots, unexpected retirements, and dreams that suddenly had to be rewritten.
Retail taught me that grief does not only happen at funerals. Sometimes it happens in conference rooms. Sometimes it happens while cleaning out a desk or driving home after a final shift. Sometimes it arrives when you realize the title you carried for years no longer belongs to you.
That is professional grief, and it is real.
A job can provide far more than a paycheck. It can offer routine, community, purpose, recognition, and a sense of identity. When it ends, we may not only mourn the work. We may mourn the version of ourselves who existed within it.
Welcome to Death Retail™
Of course, anyone familiar with my writing knows that I often cope with difficult things through humor. So naturally, after years of witnessing grief in corporate America, my imagination decided to create an entirely fictional business empire dedicated to making loss just a little more stylish.
Welcome to Death Retail™—where grief meets glam, and severance comes with sparkle.
Griefwear™
Griefwear™ offers fashion for the emotionally overdressed. Why settle for plain black when your mourning attire could include Elastic Waistbands of Denial, Blouses of Regret, or Silk Scarves of Subtle Revenge, tastefully monogrammed with “WTF”?
Not something you would ordinarily wear to work—unless, perhaps, you worked in HR.
Hug Lite™
Hug Lite™ is designed for the emotionally exhausted. It is a contactless, calorie-free hug for those moments when you care deeply but simply have nothing left to give.
It is perfect after funerals, breakups, layoffs, or back-to-back HR meetings that leave you spiritually dehydrated.
AfterLife Coaching™
AfterLife Coaching™ is for anyone who has outlived the career they thought they were supposed to have. It specializes in reinvention, resilience, and helping people realize that endings are often beginnings wearing very convincing disguises.
Certified in grief, glam, and exit interviews that feel suspiciously like rebirth.
Crematinis™
Crematinis™ are signature cocktails created for moments of emotional whiplash. Featured flavors include Burnt Orange Bitters, Salted Tears & Tonic, and the Lavender Goodbyetini™.
Each pairs beautifully with casseroles from people you barely know and unsolicited advice about how everything happens for a reason.
Ash & Sass™
Ash & Sass™ is a candle line inspired by life’s unfinished conversations. Best sellers include Left Unread, I Told You I Was Sick, and Unsent Texts, Emails & Tobacco.
No refunds. Only closure.
What I Know Now
Humor aside, I have learned something I could not fully see while I was living it. I have not spent my career simply working in Human Resources. I have spent my career holding space for grief, transition, uncertainty, identity shifts, and reinvention.
Those moments changed me just as much as they have changed the people sitting across from me.
Eventually, my own career shifted. The retail chapter closed, and the professional identity I had worn for years no longer fit in quite the same way. For a while, I thought I had lost something. Now I wonder whether I was simply being invited into something new.
The in-between is uncomfortable. It is where fear lives and doubt becomes especially loud. But it is also where creativity quietly begins to speak.
Some of the ideas closest to my heart—including The Empowered Crossing and Dying My Way—were born during seasons when I was not entirely sure what came next. Perhaps I did not need another promotion as much as I needed permission to become someone new.
Like it or not, we grieve jobs. We grieve titles. We grieve companies, routines, communities, and the lives we thought we would have. We grieve the version of ourselves who knew exactly where to go on Monday morning.
Sometimes we reclaim our power by writing the obituary ourselves.
Writing My Own Career Obituary
I have stopped thinking of my retail career as something that failed. It had a beginning, a beautiful and complicated middle, and eventually, an ending. That ending does not diminish its value. It simply creates room for another chapter.
So here is to the career that shaped me: every store I walked through, every associate I learned from, every leader who trusted me, every difficult conversation, every goodbye, and every lesson.
Thank you.
You helped prepare me for work I am only beginning to understand.
Perhaps that is the point. Sometimes we do not lose ourselves. Sometimes we simply outgrow the version of ourselves we have been living.
My retail career lived from approximately 1997 to sometime in the 2020-somethings. It is survived by a woman who owns too many shoes, a website, several unfinished stories, and a handful of grief-themed businesses that may or may not deserve a real launch.
If you have ever grieved a job, a title, a company, or a version of yourself you thought would last forever, please remember this:
You are not beginning again with nothing. You are beginning with experience.
And that is a very different thing.
— Reyna C. De La Cruz
Until we meet again…keep living your way.
The Empowered Crossing 
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