'What will you feel when you have no children left to wave goodbye to?'

children are about to pass their final exams and leave the nest. Nicci Gerrard remembers the tears when the time has come - and the possibility of transforming a time of loss in a new sense of liberation

about a year ago, a few months before leaving in the sixth college, my youngest daughter asked cheerfully, "How do you feel when you have no one to say goodbye in the morning?" And as if someone had pressed a button, I began to breathe a sea of ??tears.

It was like a sea of ??pain, I did not know how I could stop. I did not even know why I was crying with such abandon, because she was going, because the other three are gone, because I missed because I lost the person I was when all were young because his childhood was over and was happy, because I could not get those days when I knew I could guarantee their safety and protect everyone, because I was afraid it would be without them ...

And now throughout the country, teens are about to bring their A-levels and thus begins a farewell, and in all countries of parents like me, are appalled by an event that must always have known to come. We do not want to stay, it is terribly painful to let go

Sometimes I think I'm like a scaffolding erected around a building, and now the building is gone and no remains of the scaffolding. Although I have always worked since September 1987, when my son was born, how my life was dictated by my children, their needs and moods (there is a saying that is like a curse, "we are also pleased that your happy child ").

sleepless nights, early mornings, bottles, bibs, diapers, toilet training, beaten small body on her bed, night terrors, laundry, hot cars, the Cross and overcrowded pureed meal, buggies, bath time, first day of kindergarten, scraped knees, temper tantrums, a warm hand in yours, nits, rubella and cold in a loop, sand castles, concerts school and parent meetings, child care and child care to work steadily declining for calling in sick, reading for bedtime, telling them in the supermarket, homework help, boxes Lunch, reports, tests, issues of friendship, missing socks, lost fitness, loss of course, he lost everything, knocking on doors, rooms that beat with the disaster, later in the night calls asking you to collect, beer cans into bottles of vodka grass on the lawn, first novels, first holiday away from you, the first festivals, grief first, the progressive realization of the secrets, the meaning gradual that it can not do everything but juggle called fatherhood and do not realize when it's over what is perhaps also called happiness.

And if things go your way, if you're lucky, they leave. I was lucky and I went - and has developed a machine to process the daily rotation of your needs, I look in vain in his absence

I was quite surprised by the strength

my fault, but also by how many of my friends feel exactly the same thing, and how is physical. Failure hurts.

spoke of empty rooms in the room - with a disorder who complained on the day and for years were full of unpleasant tasks and now have some kind of space on them. I want for now. I can read books, take walks, visit friends, the cultivation of chili, bad paint, think about learning a language - but my mind did not understand my new freedom but

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When a child calls his mother, who is always there. The heart needs time to catch the change feels like a cinematic jump cuts. You are young and beginning and suddenly, you're middle aged. A wrinkled, creased, looks into the face of the mirror surprised indignation swollen

The problem is wrong, is staying behind in a life that suddenly feels the wrong way. The terrible story of the woman Georgie Fame, Nicolette Powell, who in 1993 jumped to his death from the Clifton Suspension Bridge, after their children left, is an extreme example of how many parents, especially mothers, transition can feel like a bereavement, redundancy, a sudden loss of eyesight and value.

How to convert this loss into the adventure and liberation? I know a couple who built a house together when their last child left, those who have gone on long trips, jobs have changed, made new passions and new skills. It feels important to be irresponsible, selfish and young again - open to change For my part, I learned to throw pots on a wheel and last year I trained to become a humanist celebrant. Now I can perform funerals, ritualized farewell, trying to help people say goodbye to my loved ones. However, despite all my efforts are still often wake me up at night with a feeling of fear the beating heart. At low tide, bad things are in the sand.

But I also know that empty nest syndrome is a form of happiness. The pain is of the form sadness of love, proper. And you do not really want them back! Regardless of empty nest syndrome - that the full-nest syndrome, so problematic? This pain is not a real duel, but for once the heart can be misleading. The children grew up and left, as it should be and how in turn it was - but not dead and have not disappeared. They are probably around with their dirty clothes.

• Some young people reported missing, however. This disaster is at the heart of my novel,
Missing Persons

, which tells the story of a young woman disappears and the impact it has on your family and friends . One source of emotional novel (with my general melancholy soggy and anxiety as the last child was ready to leave) was the trial of Rosemary West, which I covered for this newspaper.

As part of the gothic horror of what the partner feels dark stories of many of its victims: young women with a life in ruins that have not been detected and had barely been out of view, long before disappeared in 25 Cromwell Street. I felt that I was blind to all people living among us like ghosts, and the anguish of those looking for them to wait.

When I wrote
Missing Persons

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