The empty nesters

When the last of her four children flew the nest, Olive Travers a 59-year-old psychologist, and her 61-year-old husband, Anthony, left the family home in Donegal where they had lived for 35 years. Olive was so affected that for an entire year she couldn’t go near their old place even though it was nearby and the couple still owned it.

“A home withers when children leave it. It’s like a clock stopping,” she says. “Not going back to the house wasn’t even a conscious thing. I never said, ‘I don’t want to go back.’ I was just too flooded with emotion to go back.”

Moving out had been “the unpacking of a life. I was an obsessional hoarder with crates upon crates of memories. Packing up the house was incredibly difficult. I kept seeing the stages of my own life passing as I was doing it.”

The couple have four children – two girls, in their early 30s, and two boys, aged 22 and 19 – all leading independent lives.

In some ways the transition has been harder for Anthony, who was “the main nurturer and sock-matcher”, according to his wife. “The last child to go reawakened the trauma of the first to leave, when she was 17,” says Anthony.

The couple represent just one of the 120,000 households in Ireland defined as “empty nests” by the Central Statistics Office, which uses the mother’s age – 45-64 – in its criteria.

The empty nest isn’t a syndrome in a clinical sense, but its symptoms are well known: the deep sense of loss that a child you had daily contact with has gone, very possibly to the other side of the world.

Candy McLaverty, a 48-year-old single parent and nurse in Galway, whose only child, Katie, has emigrated, says she has panic attacks every time she leaves after a visit. McLaverty then closes the door of her daughter’s room and can’t look inside it for days.

"What do you do with a child's bedroom for it not to become a shrine?" asks Piaras MacÉinrí, a social scientist at University College Cork, who has researched and written extensively on emigration.

For six years the former bedroom of his daughter Muireann, who now lives in Melbourne, remained untouched. On a rare visit home last Christmas Muireann spent much of the time dismantling her childhood bedroom and giving bags of possessions to charity.

The feelings of grief and loss linked to empty nesters were felt by Geraldine Kenny, a 57-year-old who lives with her husband, Conor, in Galway. “It was quite a shock when the doorbell and phone stopped ringing. At first I cleaned the house from top to bottom and cooked big meals even though there was no one to eat them.”

For Margaret Donnellan, whose third and last child to emigrate will fly to Canada in February, the grief and loneliness have been indescribable. When a friend she confided in said, “But you have your husband,” Donnellan answered, “It’s not always enough.”

On her small estate outside Galway city, all but one of the 20 children in their 20s who grew up there have emigrated. “It’s the rupture it leaves in the home . . . the emptiness,” she says.

Macho about emigration
There is a tendency not to admit in public to this sense of loss, and to be macho about emigration, says MacÉinrí. "It's almost like you are not allowed to grieve and we should take it in our stride as normal, but it's not normal. We haven't focused on the people left behind. Parents are afraid to say how bad they feel."

Worldwide, just 3 per cent of people emigrate and set up home outside their countries of birth. In Ireland 200,000 people in their 20s have emigrated since 2006, and a third of people have waved an immediate family member off to a life abroad.

“There’s something unnatural about the numbers leaving, and about having their youth and energy drained out of the place, and yet we are not allowed to transact that. Politicians don’t want to recognise the emotional pain,” says MacÉinrí. “There is an assumption that with Skype it’s less painful today than it was in the 1980s, but the silence when you put the phone down . . . people overlook that.”

MacÉinrí is one of the authors of Irish Emigration in an Age of Austerity, a report from last year. It states: "Although emigrating can sometimes be a positive experience for many emigrants, there are few positives for the family members left behind. In many cases parents are reluctant to have their children leave but are also supportive of them leaving as a means for them to better their situation. Emigrants are often conscious of this; however, whether their parents make them aware of the true scale of the impact is unclear."

Donnellan says, “You have to watch what you say to your children. You don’t want them feeling guilty.”

According to the report, “Emigration has a detrimental impact on the families left behind on a number of fronts: sense of loss, sadness and apprehension about what the future holds.”

Half of all young emigrants lived with their parents before leaving; these parents are in a “conflicted psychological position”, pleased that their children are healthy and educated enough to succeed far afield yet grief-stricken at being physically apart, says MacÉinrí.

Donnellan says, “Every parent knows their children won’t stay home forever, and they shouldn’t, but the fact that they went to the other side of the world I was not expecting. And it’s just because they had no choice.”

Two of her children, 28-year-old Louise and 24-year-old Daniel, are in British Columbia, in Canada. Now her son Shaun, who is 30, has decided to join them, even though he has a good job here that he likes. “All his friends in the locality have emigrated, and the career possibilities in Canada should offer him more options in the long term,” she says.

It’s three years since the whole family was together. Donnellan says it took weeks to recover when her daughter left after her most recent visit to Ireland, in November. “It’s lovely to have them home, but then you are counting down the minutes to when they walk out the door again, knowing you will have to deal with the departure. It’s heart-wrenching.”

Donnellan and her husband “don’t really talk about it”, she says. “Maybe it affects me more, as the mother.” She adds that her husband, “the quiet man”, hasn’t really noticed that she’s feeling low. They go on a few holidays every year together, take day trips and go on country walks, but it doesn’t make up for the stillness in the house, she says.

Laptop parenting
Many parents fill that stillness with laptop parenting, through Facebook and other social media. McLaverty "Snapchats 20 times a day" with Katie, who went to work as a nurse in Britain the day after her graduation. They follow each other on Facebook and talk on the phone two or three times a week.

“You spend more time interacting through social media than you do physically touching them,” McLaverty says. “When she visits I know she will cry all the way back. They miss home so much. The day she left for the first time I had to go into the airport pharmacy to buy Rescue Remedy.”

She chooses to see the positive and says that she and her daughter are even closer than they were when they shared a house. “I suppose our relationship is 10 times better not living together: we get on so well now. She would be more tactile and affectionate now when she sees me than when she was at home.”

McLaverty has her calendar marked in advance with scheduled visits, either of Katie coming home or McLaverty flying to London, but they spent Christmas apart because Katie had to work, so McLaverty volunteered to work in Galway.

The separations aren’t getting any easier. When Katie left last October, McLaverty says she came home and downed two vodkas at 11am because she couldn’t breathe. She tells herself that she can’t be living her life through Katie.

She still regards herself as “one of the luckier ones”, because Katie is only in Britain rather than in Canada or Australia.

But the empty nest also affects parents whose children have remained on the island. Proximity isn’t necessarily a cure. Geraldine Kenny has two children in Ireland and one in London yet still feels the loss.

“You could get very lazy: you have to push yourself sometimes. You could end up very depressed if you were of a certain disposition. If you purely defined yourself by your children, you could be thinking, My job is over: what now? For women living alone there’s a fear in the evening that you’d open a bottle of wine. I’ve seen a few lace-curtain drinkers. And if you hadn’t had a good relationship with your kids there could be a fear that they would never visit again.”

After years of cooking, cleaning and driving she had to learn to live with all the free time: an enforced lesson when she suffered from years of illness, including breast cancer. “I was a busy fool most of my life. Taking the routine out of my life took some getting used to. I learned to be easier on myself and to stop setting all these standards that had to be met. You can take a walk when you want to, meet a friend for lunch. I’ve spent a lot of time reconnecting with people and going to funerals, because I can do that now I’m not working. Friendships have blossomed.”

Today she has a personal trainer, does water Zumba, took a hat-making course and makes headpieces for friends.

Her husband, Conor, says his children have become friends who are in constant communication thanks to social media.

The economic collapse affected their three children differently. The two eldest – Celtic Tiger teenagers – had gap years travelling around the world, then returned to Ireland, where they now work in Dublin and Galway. But for the youngest “there was no prospect of this. It’s not done any more. He has gone straight to graduate studies in London, where he has had to research jobs and has been invited to do a PhD. Young people are well educated and have high expectations – higher than ours were. Their qualifications are strong, and they are more capable.”

A new room
Fathers tend to handle the rupture differently. Anthony chose to focus on the "occupational therapy" of project-managing the building of a retirement house for himself and Olive on the Atlantic coast. "This new house is the next phase and marked the transition from four children to no children," he says.

Olive gradually realised that “it’s our turn to be free”. She and Anthony have developed links in India, where they do voluntary work, and where she has found healing for the fibromyalgia that began to affect her after her daughters left home.

The couple have just left Ireland for their second extended visit to India, where they will spend a month volunteering and a month in a five-star air-conditioned suite at an Ayurvedic hospital, with Olive as the patient and Anthony as the designated “family member”, which is the custom there.

Anthony wasn’t crazy about India at first, but he has learned to adjust to it, partly because he has seen the good it has done his wife and partly because he can put his practical skills into helping Samuha, a community-development organisation that makes wheelchairs for children from old bicycles.

It’s a very different life, but necessary, Olive says. “This stage of your life is like a new room opening up, with new options. There’s something very liberating about that for parents.”

Anthony, too, has changed his perspective. Returning to the old house in Donegal, he set about transforming the vegetable garden he had tended for 30 years into a wild-flower garden that would last without him – all a part of letting go.