The position you are in
Neither villain nor victim
There are two places a man can stand while doing this, and both of them are more comfortable than the truth.
The messenger
The first position is that you did not decide this. It came from the board, from the parent company, from the numbers. You are only delivering it.
The first half is often entirely true. It never makes the second half true. You are the one in the room, and yours is the face attached to the worst week of somebody's year. That does not transfer upward, however accurate the organisation chart is.
The version of this that does real damage is when the man says it out loud in the meeting: this was not my decision. What the other man hears is that nobody is accountable to him, and that even this conversation is being held at arm's length.
The villain
The second position is that you are the bad man in this story, and that the guilt is the price. It is oddly comfortable, because it gives the weight somewhere to go.
It is also false. Businesses run out of money and work disappears. The act of ending somebody's employment is not a moral crime and you are not required to treat it as one.
And there is a practical cost to holding it: a man who has decided he is the villain will avoid the room, delegate the telling, or go stiff and formal to get through it. All three are the things people never forgave.
What the weight actually is
You feel this because you understand what it means for them. That is not a problem to be resolved before you can act. It is the exact thing that will make you do it decently, and the men who feel nothing are the ones who do it badly.
So the position is uncomfortable and correct: you did not choose it, and you are still answerable for how it is done. Both, at once, without resolving into either.
Nothing on this site will absolve you and nothing on it will condemn you. Neither would be honest, and neither would be any use on the morning.
Afterwards
Relief, when it is over, is not coldness. It is the end of weeks of holding something, it will probably arrive before you expect it, and it may sit badly with you.
What the fortnight after actually looks like — the building, the calls that come and the ones that never do, and what the market hears about you a year later — is set out in full on the week after.
Talking it through
If there is nobody you can say any of this to, that is the situation this site was built for. The AI guide gives no law, no process and no wording, and it will not help you decide who goes.