Empty nesters’ comfort in knowing they’re not alone

MY oldest child will graduate from high school in a few weeks, and before I know it he’ll be packing his bags and heading off to college, scarcely pausing to turn around and wave to those he’s leaving behind. Conventional wisdom holds that it’s easier to leave than to be left, and no matter how hard I look for comfort in “The Empty Nest,” an anthology of writers who’ve gone through the same experience, I know it’s going to be a rocky autumn.

But just as a tiny bit of illness can inoculate you against the full ravages of the disease, I’m hoping this collection of essays, skillfully gathered and edited by L.A. writer Karen Stabiner, will protect readers like me from some of the pain that lies ahead.

In the main, these 31 stories tell of childhoods coming to an end and new lives beginning, not only for the newly fledged young adults but also for the parents who gingerly carried them to the launching pad.

Certainly the book offers rosy tales of parents who rediscover their sex lives, reinvigorate their careers and unearth long-forgotten passions -- for singing, writing, ranching, you name it -- yet the overall sense is one of loss, colored by the fierceness with which we love our children. As Anna Quindlen puts it, “Tell me at your peril that the flight of my kids into successful adulthood is hugely liberating, that I will not believe how many hours are in the day, that my husband and I can see the world, that I can throw myself into my job.... I already had a great job into which I’d thrown myself for two decades. No, not the writing job -- the motherhood job.”

Fathers write here too: of the pain of separation, the newfound freedom, the rediscovered joys with now-adult children once the trauma of their actual departure is past. Harvey Molotch, who raised his children as a single father after his wife died, writes movingly of an epiphany in the grocery store aisle: “I was heading toward some long enshrined staple (Heinz ketchup perhaps) when I realized that there was no reason for it. I didn’t use ketchup. Not only were the kids not living under my roof, they were no longer the center of my moves.... I could buy anything I wanted. More important, I could buy nothing at all.”

These writers create a much-needed road map for those of us who will be making the same journey. Vicky Mann, in “The Rules of the Road,” provides some specifics, along with tales of how she learned these hard-won lessons: “Get someone to take good photos of you and your spouse for your child to hang in her college dorm room,” she counsels. “Learn to use your communications equipment” (cellphones, Palm Pilot, e-mail), and “Never rent a hotel room with more beds than you need” -- this last one learned after dropping her daughter off at her dorm, then returning to the room they’d shared the night before, with its tangible evidence of her daughter’s absence.

The stories are not exclusively of dorm-room goodbyes. Rochelle Reed writes tenderly of her son’s decision to join the Army after a recruiter’s jibe that if he thought the Army was so messed up he should try to do something about it. She watches as he enters his new life, “almost as unencumbered as that baby in the car seat, only a small blue duffel bag holding the few personal belongings -- underwear, socks, a Mach 3 razor -- he was allowed to take with him to boot camp.”

Other stories are rich with the kind of honesty you won’t hear at graduation -- stories of difficulties and rawness that keep the anthology from becoming too predictable.

“My children had an untidy adolescence,” writes Martha Tod Dudman in “Leaving the Island.” “Neither one was happy in school. My daughter took to drugs; my son, to the sea.”

Lee Smith tells of scattering her son’s ashes on a sunset cruise off Key West, his favorite place. After a long struggle with mental illness, he died of “acute myocardiopathy,” brought about, the author believes, by the weight gain that resulted from taking an antipsychotic drug for too many years.

So, yes -- it’s the kind of book you’ll cry while reading. But this is my wish: If I cry enough now, feel the emotions these writers have so deftly brought to the surface, maybe I’ll be OK on that day when we allow our son to walk alone into his dorm room and enter his brand-new, yet-to-be-opened adult life. I’m hoping I’ll agree with Martha Schuur, who assures me in her essay “3GRLMOM”: “[T]his is going to be something like childbirth -- enormous pain, and then great joy.”

Bernadette Murphy is the author of “Zen and the Art of Knitting,” and co-author of “The Tao Gals’ Guide to Real Estate.”