Nine emails for one call sounds like you were dating them, not selling to them. Next time just send a calendar link and save yourself the typing practice. At this rate your sent folder deserves a commission.

It's wild how one offhand comment from someone can live in your head rent free (Dana probably forgot she even said it by lunch). I've noticed this pattern where people stay in jobs they've outgrown mostly because the devil they know feels safer than the one they don't, and the routine itself becomes a kind of comfort trap. Six years is long enough that you're basically a different person than the one who started, so it might be worth asking if current-you would still take that job today.

That line about being glad she never knew what you lost hit me hard. I read a piece in High Country News last year about a guy in Glacier National Park who brought his kids to see the last named glacier in the park, and he said almost the same thing, that their normal is already broken and they won't even know it. There's a term for it, shifting baseline syndrome, where each generation just accepts the messed up state of things as how it's always been. Your kid doesn't know what's missing, which is a strange kind of mercy and a sad one at the same time.