As a manager, if you have to give the termination conversation as a layoff, have you ever seen that person cry from losing the job?

Yes.

Firing people is the worst thing I ever had to do in the workplace.

If you've been a hands-on manager your employee shouldn't be surprised when they're fired. Unless it's a severe infraction and you need to terminate them immediately, you would have discussed performance issues along the way. I only had one employee who seemed very surprised, and cried. They shouldn't have been surprised. I tried for a year to coach them up, finally put them on a written performance improvement plan saying they'd be fired if they didn't improve their performance.

When the decision was made to terminate a person's employment, I did the deed as soon as it was feasible. If someone's on their way out it's not fair to keep dragging them along. If the situation were reversed I wouldn't want to be strung along any longer than necessary. Doing it quickly also gets it over with quickly so you're not living with the stress of knowing it's coming. Procrastinating usually leads to more procrastination.