Changing Tides: Introductory Reflections -- Cultivating a Goodbye to Harvest a Hello -- Leaving Practice in the Era of Independence -- A Black Woman Department Chair Approaches Retirement -- A Gathering of Crumbs, Stones, and Crows -- A Stuttering Course to Retirement -- For the Curious: A Brief Literature Review -- Facing Retirement: Grieving the Loss of Clinical Relationships -- Retiring, or Just Tiring? -- Shy But Not Retiring -- When God Gives You a Good Kick in Your Rear End -- Leaving My Patients, Losing Myself -- Shifting Grounds and Relationships: Some Parting Thoughts.

This book considers the family doctor relationship and the process of ending that relationship. What happens when a family doctor or someone like them, deeply committed to long-term relationships, decides to end those commitments? What's involved? What are the embodied experiences for doctor and patient, for doctor and staff, for physician leader and others? What comes next? This book invites the reader to immerse in personal stories and reflections of family physicians who choose to retire from practice, depart long-standing leadership roles, or shift from one place of deep relational commitments to something else. These stories concern the particulars of family medicine and general practice, but they share much with any vocation rooted in the duties, challenges, and rewards of relationships bound by covenant and not transaction. This book is relevant to all professionals involved in healing relationships.