The Sound of Emptiness

The Loneliness of an Empty Nest

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The Sound of Emptiness: The Loneliness of an Empty Nest

When she left for college, I walked around the desk and saw her purple plaid backpack on the floor. It was worn out; she had left it behind in favor of something newer and sturdier to take to college, something a bit more grown up. I remember thinking to myself, I won’t see her backpack here anymore, no more papers and books on the table, no more hearing her voice around the house.

(photo credit: Unsplash)


I still had her two younger brothers at home, but the grieving process of missing that one child was real. The house felt emptier without her laughter, without her joy sprinkling the days with goodness and life. The first two weeks were the hardest. My other kids noticed. Life was changing, ready or not.

She was in college about five hours away (six with traffic), so trips weren’t terribly frequent, but once I drove there and back in one day when she was sick, to take her to the doctor. What else would a parent do? I’m thankful I could make it. When I got home, I had a house full of four extra young men in town for a debate camp, staying in my basement, my bo friends, and I loved hosting them.

Fast forward another 3 years, and it was her brother’s turn to leave for college. The house became really quiet then. Child #2 chose a college nearly 14 hours away by car. No one any idea he’d end up having to come home his freshman year because of a pandemic. While it was nice to have him back home, the world was in a state of flux with online classes and confusion.

In the fall, he returned to an off campus apartment and continued with online classes. He felt the pain of the distance at times. By his junior year, classes resumed on campus, and though there was testing and masking, at least the campus was open and there were people around, and he said it felt like being a freshman all over again, reconnecting, picking up where they left off. Senior year was the best of all, and graduation was bittersweet for us all. It went by way too fast, even in the turmoil of a pandemic.

And now he’s moving to a new city, far away. I had the task of packing up whatever clothes are left in the house in suitcases. There is still the matter of getting his books to him. He began growing his own library some years ago, going to library sales, yard sales, Goodwill, etc. I was so proud of that.

Two years later, the youngest one left. He’s less than two hours away and I know how fast the next two will fly. And he’s gone this summer. Sometimes they came home from college during the summer, sometimes they did not. Maybe more often they did not, I think.

And with #3 gone, I experienced a brand new kind of quiet—an empty, hollow, quiet house with the sound of no kids at home any more. It was the sound of emptiness. 

One thing I can tell you is that the years went by very fast. It sounds like a trite thing to say. But it feels like just last weekend when I was praying and hoping for a good night’s sleep without any one kid waking up for any reason. It was just the other day I was tossing Cheerios on a high chair, I was connecting the sprinkler in the yard on a hot summer’s day for them to run through, or having children small enough I could actually pick up and carry. It was the other day I was wondering about each of them, What will you decide to do with this one, precious life? Who will you turn out to be? What will you care about?

(robin’s nest in my yard this spring)


As they grew, I always wondered to myself: Will this be the last time I will be able to hold you? We never know what some of those “lasts” are. I can’t tell you when they were…we’re living life, and one day you realize it happened. The last child-sized hug. The last time you picked them up in your arms. The last time they cried on your shoulder. The last time they confessed a secret to you. The last time they looked at you like you were something of a wonder and not like you’re a weirdo and laugh at your lack of understanding popular slang.

Although I planned for the empty nest to some degree (I was considering different career options, working more diligently on my writing craft), I still didn’t prepare enough. It was empty, quiet—a sudden lull after many years of the presence of growing and budding souls who were learning to take flight in this world.

You come out of this on the other end and you hope you’ve not messed it up too terribly, though you know for sure you’ve made mistakes and regretted things you’ve said and done. You’re on the other end of this and you hope your children are standing solid and making wise decisions. You hope you can fill that piece of yourself that left when your kids left with something else meaningful. You hope they’re finding and creating meaning, you hope they’re loving well. You hope they realize how much they are loved. You hope they learn how to receive and give love—in less broken ways than you. You hope they never forget that they deserve to be loved.

The empty nest loneliness is a different kind of loneliness. It’s one that every parent must undergo, but it’s new, because it’s never happened to us before. It’s relatively newer in history, too, because in our industrialized modern society, we move and migrate. We don’t stay in proximity to our nuclear or extended families as previous generations used to. Our children (like us probably), didn’t just fly the nest to the next tree in the neighborhood; they migrate to lands hundreds of miles away. My parents, immigrants from India, flew all the way to another country.

It isn’t healthy or right, of course, for our children to live with us forever; that may sound absurd to Western ears, even to me, as I write it. But that is not entirely absurd in another cultures, where extended families have been together in the same area for generations, and where some families live in multigenerational households. Many of us in the U.S. do not have that experience, but I know many who do, who can trace their family history back a couple of hundred years in the same geographical location.  

My kids could end up anywhere on the planet. But, yes, while I don’t wish to clip their wings, I still also hope it isn’t too far away, and no matter where they go, I hope they don’t forget their way home.

(photo credit: pixabay)

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Book Writing Update

I’ve been busy working on edits, and it’s pretty intense time right now with a deadline looming. I wish I could clear off my calendar and remove all distractions. But alas, that is not happening. You might think that with an empty nest I don’t have distractions. That is one myth I’ve learned: life doesn’t slow down. Because now it’s not my kids, but my parents who are in need of help. There is much to say about all of this, but it will have to wait for another day.

For now, I’m doing a little research for the book, and have a quick little survey, if you’d like to participate-it’s completely anonymous and takes less than 5 minutes. I would be so grateful! Here’s the link:
https://forms.gle/B1aNVKcM6WhBGVh17

I’ll be back here soon, on the other side of these edits! In the meantime, the task for us all, if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, is to enjoy every beautiful, sunny, colorful, summer day that comes our way and to feast our eyes on every shade of green and every glorious color in bloom. Each day is a gift.

Make it a lovely one,

Prasanta