“How does it feel to be Empty Nesters?” a friend asked this week, with a wink. There’s an expectation that the answer be something like, “I just can’t believe it—my little girl—it goes so fast—it seems like just yesterday she was saying her first word—where did the time go…”
But it felt like the most natural thing in the world. I wouldn’t wish either of my children a minute longer at home when it’s their time to move forward….Or would I?
Tonight I arrived in New York for a day’s rest and some fresh clothes. From the station, I walked the six blocks south. A block away from home, I looked across ninth avenue to the apartment windows and for a split second I wondered whether my daughter, Miriam, was home from school. And then, to my immense surprise, I felt a flash of very profound sadness. Before I started a real meditation practice, and before I studied Daoist medicine, whenever these flashes occurred, I would steel myself, hold my pericardium in a kind of rigid state, and although I would allow myself to cry because I couldn’t stop it, I would resist the process of moving through the emotion and almost resent that I had to go there.
When I was nine years old, a cousin from Europe came to visit us in Williamstown in Melbourne for three months. She was in her early twenties. She was given my brother’s bed in our shared room. I loved every minute spent with her. She took me to fun places and to her work place where she had a job as a bookkeeper, and introduced me to her new friends. When she left, we made a promise: I would write her the first letter and she would write back and we would keep writing to each other. (Calling Europe on the phone at that time was affordable for only a few people.) When she left I was inconsolable, but since I was always very aware of the hardships my parents had faced, I kept my grief to myself. My father, who had the gentlest heart I’ve ever encountered, once told me about the time he emigrated and worked on a farm in Gippsland as part of the scheme to import men to replace the enormous number of Australian and New Zealand soldiers lost in Europe during the World Wars. When he noticed me struggling to conceal my grief, he told me—just once—that in his first while in Australia he would go to his room and cry uncontrollably. He wanted to go home but was effectively working for his keep and couldn’t go anywhere. There are many infinitely worse stories that people tell, but as a child I found this story about my father heartbreaking to my core. So when my cousin left and I was bereft, I began the habit of trying not to experience the sadness, because I felt that the emotion was not warranted. I was not depressed, but I experienced things profoundly as many children do, and when I felt deeply sad, I did my best to hide it. I wrote my cousin a letter but never heard from her again.
Fast forward 42 years to the day after my father died, my mother told me she couldn’t be in the house another day and would immediately put the house on the market. I happened to be in Australia at that time and so I helped her gather some personal things. In a box under the bed, I found that letter to my cousin. I stared at it in disbelief. Why didn’t she mail it for me? I read it and was stunned at the profundity of the emotion it contained. With the total innocence of a nine year old, I had written how I miss her so much that I can’t take a deep breath and am crying every day, and that my chest hurts. My mother probably didn’t know what to do with it. I said nothing, tore it up and threw it away.
When I looked up at Miriam’s window this afternoon, the feeling of loss was the same, and it’s with me now as I write with tears streaming, but now the experience is of the sadness being beautiful. The experience of being human is so beautiful. That we can feel so deeply, that we can love so deeply, that we can experience so much loss and so much love at the same time. What an existence we have as we’re in the moment of everything, being present with every precious response. The medicine gives us an understanding of this gift we have—the gift of living as an emotional being and the experience of being true and in the moment with what arises…the knowing that it is essential that our full humanity be fully experienced… What’s it like to be an empty nester? It is the most exquisite sadness.
Ann Cecil-Sterman
New York City
18 September 2024