Perspective
Tales of an Empty Nest
A physican-mother confronts the grief that comes when children leave home.
By Maggie O’Connor, M.D.
I couldn’t bring myself to take down the board of photos that we had compiled for my sons’ high school graduation party. Every day, I paused in front of the montage on the living room wall, catching memories. The first picture in the hospital, one boy cradled in each arm with my index finger extended behind one son’s head and two fingers behind the other’s. Hard to imagine we had difficulty telling No. 1 and No. 2 baby apart.
Different pictures caught my eye each day. Two pictures, one of each boy going down a slide on his feet, arms outstretched, trying to match the feat of the other. Age 6.
I expected to shed a few tears when they moved out. I didn’t expect the raw pain after they left and emptied the house of friends, loud music, and dirty socks in unexpected places.
“Don’t you want the boys to grow up?” my friend asked after hearing my struggle.
How could I answer? “No, I’m really hoping they live on our couch for the rest of my life.”
Of course I wanted the boys to grow up. Yet there it was, a tenderness as if a strip of Velcro had been ripped part way off my heart, catching on the photos, or the sight of a boy skateboarding downtown, or the startling quiet of an empty house. Another picture, a bunch … group … gaggle … tribe. That’s it, a tribe of boys in the swimming pool making funny faces for the camera. I needed a copy of Empty Nest for Dummies.
I didn’t expect this pain. For years I had practiced my mantra: Let go, let go, let go. The chant had waxed and waned as the boys’ orbits spun out: walking down the stairs by themselves, biking around the corner to a friend’s house by themselves ….
Driving the boys home from preschool, one of them informed me that when he grew up he was going to smoke and join the Army. The other boy protested, “Mo-om, tell him he can’t do that.”
I squeezed the steering wheel, took a breath, and, hoping that my voice wouldn’t go up too many octaves betraying my dismay, said, “It won’t be up to me. By that time, you will be making your own choices.”
Let go.
Once we had made it home, run through the evening drill of dinner, baths, stories, and bed, I revisited the conversation in my mind as I drifted off to sleep. I imagined a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, and that led quickly to a gasping death. I dodged the image and like countless other times, I quickly put a tiny flexible Band-Aid on the painful cut it made on my heart.
Let go, but …
But not without a fight. He would make his choices one day, but I did not hold back from pointing out people pulling oxygen tanks at the mall.
Yearbook pictures, one boy leaning against a tree, smiling warmly at the camera; the other goofing around on a rooftop.
The first chaotic months after September 11, 2001, I rode my bike almost daily out into the prairies near our house, seeking understanding and solace in the natural turning of the season. Biking let me sort through my feelings at a time when the media said “we” felt unified, outraged, and patriotic. I felt blown out and empty.
The boys had turned 16 a few months earlier, old enough that I knew they would be leaving the nest soon but young enough that they still walked through my life every day. As the talk of war heated up, I raged at the thought of not only my boys but also the tribe of boys I had come to know being sent away to be broken physically or mentally or both in a war I felt was a mistake. Wishing I could protect these young lives, I imagined offering myself as an alternative draftee. I reasoned that the draft board might view a 49-year-old woman as less valuable than two young men, so I offered to serve double the years for each of them. As I slowly pumped up a long hill, I even made the offer to accept the most dangerous assignments and imagined being a member of a suicide squad of mothers storming across enemy lines to protect their children.
At that point, I realized that not only would the draft board deem me insane and unacceptable, but the boys would be appalled at the thought of my trying to serve in their stead. That is when the tears came.
Let go.
I could no longer protect these boys for whom I had labored and cared, given body and blood and time and love.
I realized that if events led them into a soldier’s life, I would give them one last hug and tell them I loved them. And then I would go figuratively to my place of prayer ‘down by the River’ and cry and walk and talk and hold silence. Praying not to enact their safety—my God doesn’t choose favorites in mankind’s bickerings—but rather to find the strength, courage, and fortitude to support the boys, hold vigil, and stay in touch despite the fear and pain.
Let go, but …
Letting go, I realized, did not include severing the connection, even a painful connection.
The fall of 2001 predictably moved into winter, and the chaos seemed suspended between horror and normalcy. One December evening when I came home buoyant with the unique joy of the first snowfall, one of my sons told me that he wanted to go camping.
A dozen thoughts about this crazy idea slammed into my mind, but once I realized he expected a response, I only managed to say, “Camping?”
After he parried every reason I could think of for not going, I understood that he and his friend really wanted to go camping on this particular night, not on some future date when the wind chill was above zero. School had just let out for 11 days and an adventure was in order.
I knew that they would not be far from help at their chosen site on a high bluff that felt isolated but was only a mile off the highway. I knew that they were willing to put on layers of warm clothes (in contrast to school days when a jacket was a mark of dishonor), that I could load them up with chocolate bars and instant hot food and a cell phone. So I told him he could go.
That evening after they left, as I walked the dog with the wind slicing through my down jacket, more doubts came vividly to mind: A slip and fall or a thoughtless decision could be deadly. We had talked about hypothermia, but I forgot to mention sleepiness as a symptom. I didn’t think to say anything about how alcohol can add to the danger. And I forgot to ask him to call me when camp was set up.
After the walk, I called the cell phone, which was not turned on. “Hi, this is Mom. It’s Saturday night. If you get this, would you call back and let me know how things are going?”
I sat and wondered about judgment. In particular, my own for letting him go, and his, given the unforgiving dangers of the natural world. Should I drive out and check on them? I could probably see their campfire from the road. And if I couldn’t see the fire, I could follow their path through the snow.
Let go, now?
After a long debate with myself, I decided not to drive out to check on the boys. To check on them would betray a trust in them, and in the world.
Instead, I climbed into a hot bath and minutes later heard my son come in the front door. I got out, dressed, and asked how things had gone. He told me the wind had been so strong they couldn’t get the tent to stay up, so they came home. I gave him a hug and said a silent prayer of thanks. Such good judgment.
Over the next year and a half, I felt as if my fingers were being pried open one by one with each crisis: Reviewing The Talk about sex when the first girlfriends came over and they necked on the couch. With each roll of my sons’ eyes, I felt a jolt, as if I had grabbed two ends of a live electrical wire and completed a circuit. Sitting back as one son made the decision not to go to college and angrily resisted every suggestion I made. Travel? Work in Alaska? No, many times no. He went into the year with no plans whatsoever.
In a dream at the time, I watched a steel ball rocket along a curved track, angled so that the ball might fall out at any time. My task was to keep the ball on the track without touching it. When I woke up I felt as if I had been presented with a Zen koan.
A couple times, I wanted to rip open my chest, pull out my heart, and hurl it over a cliff, blood vessels flailing like the limbs of some alien creature. Heart suicide. And so I prayed. For the boys to have a few moments of light on their paths, for my heart to stay open, for patience. Hoping I could keep a connection with each boy-spirit until he found feet or wings and moved out into the world. Holding so gently that I didn’t crumple some delicate wing, and yet tossing him up so he could test and strengthen those wings.
Let go, but don’t.
All this, I thought, would prepare me for the boys leaving home. Instead, I hurt.
One friend recommended that I get busy. I felt busy enough. Another said she found comfort in singing the Beatles’ Let It Be. A third gave pragmatic advice, “Just accept what is.”
Nobody said they grieved. No ritual marked the transition. Listening to friends talk about Johnny and Mary accomplishing this and that, I felt caught in an endless Christmas letter. No one spoke of loss or risk.
At the time, I kept recalling a television program about the Australian aborigines that I had seen as a child. The boys and girls each did a “walk-about” as young teens, going out into the desert to survive on their own. I couldn’t recall the details, but what I remembered was that many of them never came back to the tribe. As a child, I thought to myself, “How could their moms and dads let them do that?”
Our children don’t often go into the natural wilderness to be tested, and when they do they have CampMor packaged meals and cell phones. But they go into a wilderness of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. Working as a college health service doctor, I saw some of the casualties: one young man who tried “some drug” at a party and months later saw me for problematic flashbacks and intractable anxiety; another who had accumulated $24,000 in credit card debt and came in because of depression; a young woman who struggled with PTSD after the bank where she worked was robbed at gunpoint; and another who had a baby, gave it up for adoption, and never told her parents because her sister had already been ostracized for getting pregnant. I knew that with wise support, good luck, and not too many more traumas, these young people could yet have good lives. But I also knew that children moving toward adulthood might not recover; they might be lost in the wilderness.
I kept thinking about how my children, my friends’ children, all these young people I knew would need to rely on what we had managed to teach them, just as an aboriginal child had to call on all the learning of his or her short life.
Of course I wanted to see my kids grow up, but as I was pushed into the necessary process of releasing them, I could not ignore the possibility of choices, or fate, or arbitrary events destroying the lives I had so nurtured and loved.
Disaster aside, I would no longer get to watch the day-to-day events, I would only hear the brief, carefully edited headlines via e-mail. When else are we asked to release a person we love so deeply without death taking them away?
The grief of parents releasing their children is unseen and glossed over with comments about how wonderful it is not to find those dirty socks in the living room as you go to the door to greet company. The grieving is aborted. But like the surgical aphorism that all bleeding stops, letting go is inevitable, it happens one way or another. We have instructions woven into our DNA to release our children, even push them out of the nest if necessary. This is essential for survival of any species. The conundrum as human beings is that we also have the capacity to know the sorrow that we will be left behind as our children move into a future that we cannot share.
I kept the graduation montage up on the wall for a couple years after the boys left home. Countless times I savored the pictures. I ached and cried and laughed and only took it down when we moved to another city.
The boys have moved into their own lives. And I continue to send e-mails, little packets of my love, so that if they want to, they can just hit “reply.” MM
Maggie O’Connor is a palliative care specialist who practices at Abbott-Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis.