One of the hardest gray areas we can experience in life is this season of the in-between. The empty nest, aging parents and the grief most of us carry alone. I’m talking about no longer needed by the kids, while becoming your parent’s caretakers at the same time. Everything from the random Sunday afternoons in a house that used to be full of noise is now empty to juggling medical appointments and making decisions you don’t want to make.
When my sons moved out 14 years ago, they did it within the same week. One moved in with his now-wife. The other left for college. And just like that, Rob and I were empty nesters. I remember Rob grabbing my hand and saying, this is a new chapter for us! We smiled at each other and celebrated. We now had “FREEDOM”!!!
And then, slowly over time and years, I realized something. They boys were no longer coming to me for advice anymore, at least on a regular basis. The dinner table felt eerily quiet with just me and Rob. And somewhere underneath all the freedom and the pride and the genuine gratitude, something I was not expecting showed up.
Grief.
The kind that just sits there beside you while you are proud of everything your kids have become but yet greatly miss being needed in the way you used to be. If you know that feeling, this one is for you.
That Grief Has a Name
There is a term in psychology that I want to share with you because I think it describes this season better than almost anything else I have come across. Researcher and family therapist Pauline Boss spent decades studying a particular kind of loss that does not fit neatly into our traditional understanding of grief. She called it ambiguous loss.
Ambiguous loss is the grief you feel for someone who is still here but no longer present in the same way. Someone who is physically present but emotionally or cognitively changed, like a parent with Alzheimer’s or dementia. (Something I am also currently experiencing with my dad). Or someone who is emotionally present but physically gone from your daily life, like a child who has successfully launched into their own world. Sound familiar?
Boss found that ambiguous loss is uniquely difficult to process precisely because it lacks the social permission that traditional grief receives. When someone dies, the world acknowledges your loss. People show up. There are rituals. There is a language for what you are going through. But when your child leaves and thrives and builds a life that no longer centers around you, the world tells you to celebrate. And you do. But the grief is still real, and it still needs somewhere to go.
What makes the sandwich generation so particularly disorienting is that most people in this season are navigating both forms of ambiguous loss at the same time. Your children are gone in the way that means you did your job right. And your parents are changing in ways that remind you that time is moving faster than you want it to. You are simultaneously releasing the generation below you and being called to catch the generation above you. And somehow you are supposed to figure out who you are in the middle of all of it.
You can be proud and grieving at the same time. You can feel joy and loneliness in the same hour. Both things are true. And the fact that both are true does not make you ungrateful. It makes you human.
The Numbers Behind the Feeling
If this feels isolating, the data says otherwise. According to the Pew Research Center, roughly one in eight Americans between the ages of 40 and 60 is simultaneously raising a child and caring for an aging parent. When you expand that to include people who are financially supporting both a grown child and an aging parent, the number climbs to nearly one in four. That is an enormous number of people navigating the exact tension you might be feeling right now.
Research published in the Gerontologist found that sandwich generation caregivers, particularly women, report significantly higher rates of stress, emotional exhaustion, and what researchers describe as role overload, the experience of having more roles than you have capacity to fill well at any given time. The roles don’t go away. They just shift, and often in the direction of more responsibility rather than less.
The American Psychological Association has found that identity disruption in midlife, the experience of losing or significantly shifting a primary role you have held for decades, is one of the leading contributors to increased alcohol use in the 50 to 65 age group. Not because people are struggling with addiction in the traditional sense. But because alcohol is readily available, socially acceptable, and reliably effective at filling the space that a lost sense of purpose leaves behind. That connection between the empty nest and the fuller glass is real, and it is worth naming.
The Identity Question
For twenty-ish years, your primary identity was mom or dad. You organized your schedule around it. Your decisions, your finances, your weekends, your emotional bandwidth, all of it revolved around raising your kids. That was your why. It was built in, constant, and it gave your days a clear shape.
And then it changed. Not overnight, but substantially. And the question that is sitting underneath all of it, the one most people are afraid to say out loud because it feels ungrateful, is simply this: who am I now?
Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson described midlife as the stage of generativity versus stagnation. The central question of this season of life, according to Erikson, is whether you are going to find new ways to contribute and create meaning, or whether you are going to stall out in the absence of the structures that used to give your life its shape. The empty nest, the aging parent, the shifting roles, all of it lands right in the middle of that developmental question. And how you answer it has everything to do with what the next twenty or thirty years look like.
The research on purpose in midlife is clear on one thing. People who intentionally redefine their identity around this transition, who grieve what is ending and then turn toward what is beginning, tend to experience significantly better outcomes in health, relationships, and overall wellbeing than people who try to simply fill the void with more activity, more numbing, or more of whatever used to work before. The filling does not answer the question. Only the asking does.
A Few Things Worth Sitting With This Week
Let yourself grieve without apologizing for it.
The season that is ending was crucial and important. You did your job. Your kids needed you in a particular way for a particular stretch of time, and that is over now, and that is a real loss even inside the pride. You don’t have to perform gratitude at the expense of honesty. Grief and pride are not mutually exclusive. Give both of them room.
Name the identity question directly.
Who am I now that my primary role looks different? Not who you were, not who you think you should be. Who do you actually want to become in this next chapter? That question deserves more than a passing thought. Write it down. Let it sit. Come back to it. Because the answer you arrive at is going to shape the next twenty years more than almost anything else.
Watch what you are using to fill the quiet.
The space that opens up when kids leave and parents need more is real, and it does not stay empty for long. Most people fill it with something, busyness, travel, work, screens, or drinking. None of those things are inherently wrong. But if what you are reaching for is starting to feel less like a choice and more like a need, that is worth paying honest attention to. The void has a name. Filling it is not the same as answering it.
Recognize what has actually opened up.
This is the part that tends to get lost in the grief. You have time now that you did not have before. Real time. Time to invest more deeply in your marriage, your health, your faith, your friendships, the parts of yourself that got set aside during the years when everything revolved around raising your kids. That time is not a consolation prize. It is an invitation. The question is what you are going to do with it.
This Week on Beyond the Gray
Episode 15 drops Tuesday, May 26th, and it is one of the most personal conversations I have had on the show. I share what it actually felt like when both my sons left within the same week, what Rob and I noticed about ourselves (more me!) in the years that followed, and the questions I think everyone in this season of life deserves to ask themselves. I also get into the sandwich piece directly, including what it is like to watch a parent decline while your kids are launching, and why both can be true and both can be hard at the exact same time.
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I want to leave you with this. You are not crazy for feeling all of it at once.
The pride and the grief. The freedom and the loss. The gratitude and the loneliness. That is not contradiction. That is just what it feels like to be human in the middle of this season. And naming it, really naming it, is the first step toward figuring out who you are becoming on the other side of it. That’s what I am doing.
There is life beyond the sandwich generation. I promise you there is. But you have to be willing to feel your way through it first.
Kari
P. S. If you’re navigating this gray area and you’d like support to see it through, I’m here to walk it out with you. Schedule your FREE call here.
Be sure to check out THIS BLOG ARTICLE on the importance of sleep and how to stay healthy and active during this gray area season.
