Book Review: The Empty Nest

by Karen Stabiner
(Hyperion, 2007; 302 pages)
Reviewed by Alicia Wright

Our children are our most precious gifts. If we do a good job as parents, these young people leave us, establish themselves elsewhere, and begin the process again. The Empty Nest is a compilation of essays assembled by Karen Stabiner and written by parents whose children are in the leaving process.

How We Let Go
Each of the 31 authors has a different response to letting go, ranging from deep depression to joy. Hilary Mills’s sadness dripped from the pages in “The Last Summer.” Her description of their family’s home life was one of contentment: “On Saturday nights when the fire and candles were lit, a good dinner cooking on the big Garland stove, music and wine flowing, our little family cozy and warm together . . .” During that last summer before her son left for college, though, his attitude changed from that of a “loving, charming, engaging boy who actually liked to be with his parents” to one that left his mother “constantly off balance.” She added, “His mocking disdain left me emotionally gutted.” By contrast, the humor in Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s story “Epiphanies of the Empty Nest” helps us see the fun of enjoying sex without fear of children listening and the nicety of not worrying about young people’s whereabouts at two in the morning. She also points out that they just might come back, even though they’ve been on their own for a while!

In “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” Fran Visco confesses that she actually helped her son leave home. She and her husband sold their old house and moved into a loft two weeks before their son’s high-school graduation. She thought that “it might help him to go—it might help us to let him go—if we moved out when it was time for him to leave.” Yet, in “Migrations,” Ellen Levine says, “Separating from my children and leaving them at kindergarten, camp, or college had always been hard for me.” Her children did move away, as children should, but she wanted them to come back. She relates how a like-minded friend even built an “amusement park” to attract his and his wife’s grown children and grandchildren. Levine and her husband think of their home as a “bird sanctuary,” where their children and grandchildren can find rest and renewal.

Not Just to College
Not all of the stories are about children leaving home for college. In “Leaving the Island,” Martha Tod Dudman writes about exchanging one life experience for another—leaving a small island in Maine and her dreams of being a published writer to take over her family business on the mainland. She marries, has children, and divorces; then her children depart, one for California and the other for the island.

In “Without a Net,” Jon Carroll writes about his daughter, who is a trapeze artist. “For me, the trouble with the life of a trapeze artist is not the danger; it’s the separation. Circus is by nature an itinerant profession.” One gentleman, Harvey Molotch, in “My Cart” described the fluctuation in his household population as it applied to the groceries in his shopping cart. In “A Rotten Enough Parent,” Douglas Foster tells of taking his son on safari to gain a closer relationship with him. He confesses, “I used to torture myself with mental lists of all the myriad ways I’d failed any conventional test of parenthood—working impossible hours at overly demanding jobs, regularly venturing off on reckless reporting trips, longing for him to return from time he spent in his mother’s house, and pressuring both of us to make up for lost time once he did.” Harry Shearer, in “Godfather,” expounds on his decision to have no children and, consequently, no empty nest. Now that his godchildren are off to college, he rejoices that he “may actually see more of them than their parents will in the next few years . . . [that his] nest, never yet having been full, won’t be really empty.”

The most poignant story of all is Lee Smith’s “Good-Bye to the Sunset Man.” The Smiths experienced the ultimate in losing a child. Their son Josh was 33 when he died in his sleep of “acute myocardiopathy, the collapse of an enlarged heart.” Prior to Josh’s death, his parents had already lost him to the brain disorder schizophrenia, diagnosed when he was in high school. Josh left home, not for college, but for a series of psychiatric hospitals, closed communities, group homes, and supervised apartments. Each year, though, the Smiths took a family trip to Key West, to see the glorious sunset. The ultimate good-bye came for Lee and Hal on their trip to Key West after Josh’s death. As they watched the sun set and the stars emerged, Lee offered her farewell: “I throw the ashes out on the water behind us; like a puff of smoke, they disappear immediately into the wake.”

In Stabiner’s The Empty Nest, each author has a unique take on his or her child’s departure. Each essay touches the heart in a unique way. Each causes one to think, to reflect long after the book has been read.