The part where you start speaking about grief was where i thought i was meant to find this article. I understand your pain and relate to it in a different manner where once I was almost selected for an internal User Research position, only to be rejected at the end. Months later i wrote an article about it here on Medium, titled Rejection, and the 5 stages of grief, adding a new first stage called awareness because that hitting of news and realization is something that comes wayyyy before everything- it is the beginning of grief.
Thank you for sharing this however and i wish you all the best in life.