What Letting Go Sounds Like to a Soon-to-be Empty Nester

It is late September, and my daughter and I are driving home after touring Princeton. She is 17 years old and we are deep in the college hunt. It is a lot, or more than a lot, which is why it feels good at this moment to be just the two of us, in a car speeding along the highway, with the windows down and the music turned up.

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Bill Eville ’87

Jeanna Shepard

We don’t talk about the experience, don’t compare Princeton to other tours and other campuses, or go over the endless to-do lists and strategies of early decision, early action, regular decision, the list goes on and on. Nor do we talk about my time on campus, four years that changed my life for the better in ways that are still unfolding. She has heard that all before, far too many times.

Instead, we are quiet, letting the music fill our small space so that there is no room to talk about my past or her future, not really, not now. Besides, most of the songs are portals to our shared time together rather than markers of when we will separate. Many of the songs remind me of drives to school, beginning with preschool and lasting until midway through her junior year when she got her driver’s license and I reluctantly retired my chauffeur’s hat. Those short trips — five minutes, 10 minutes, or 20 minutes depending on the stage of her life and which school she attended — each had its own soundtrack, at first chosen by me, but over the years shifting to her desires.

As we drive from Princeton, I occasionally interrupt to ask who we are listening to and my daughter describes a recent discovery. I nod and my mind drifts, thinking about how not too long ago I knew everything about her life. Now, I mostly wave from the porch as she heads to her car, a freedom that does not include turning around and waving back. Her forward momentum is too strong for that, which is as it should be.

But I am grateful that at end of day she still recounts her adventures to me, although it often feels like I have purchased an audio book of her life rather than experiencing the real thing. Already, I am fearful of what metaphor awaits me when she heads off to college.

“What is the name of this playlist?” I ask, planning in my mind the need to listen to it next year, to relive and find connection to the life we led together. But then I remember an encounter I recently had with another dad who I had not seen in a while. He was with his daughter, a sophomore in college but home for the summer.

“Whatever you do, don’t listen to the songs you had together,” the other dad said about his empty nest and my pending one. “It will hurt too much.”

His daughter laughed. “Dad, it sounds like a breakup.”

“It’s worse,” he said.

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I wanted to give the other dad a hug, but we were in our bathing suits, still dripping wet from the water, with his daughter watching. It just didn’t feel right.

But in the car, I toss his advice out the open window. I can handle it, I decide, the ache of 10 or so songs, and it will be worth it.

I ask my daughter again the name of her playlist because she seemed not to hear me the first time.

“It doesn’t have a name,” she says. “It has a tulip image with it.”

A tulip, I think, cool, a pleasant image, this will be no problem at all.

Then she checks her phone.

“Wow, it’s 30 hours long,” she says.

My shoulders sag and I let out a sigh. The other dad was right — I am no match for this amount of memory. I turn back to the open road, realizing I also have no idea where I am headed next year.

Bill Eville ’87 is editor of The Vineyard Gazette. His published memoir is Washed Ashore: Family, Fatherhood, and Finding Home on Martha’s Vineyard.