The house is quiet. Too quiet. There's no loud music playing, no thumping noises at 2 a.m., no endless chatter, no bickering, no silly laughter. There are no clothes strewn about, no empty pizza boxes to scoop up and deposit in the trash. There's nobody to counsel, to ground, to coach, to share what you've learned about angst and joy and everyday life.

     When the kids have finally left the nest and flown off on their own, there's nobody left but the husband and wife, two people staring at each other in a house that can suddenly seem less of a home, hollow, full of echoes of what was but never again will be. Two people confronting the reality that, for the first time in decades, they're alone with each other.

     "I thought I was prepared, I really did," says Keith Schubert, 53, whose 23-year-old daughter and 21-year-old son moved out of the house in March. "Vicki (his wife) and I even helped them get set up in the apartment they're sharing. It was all exciting.

     "Then, that next morning, I got up and walked in there and it hit me like a bolt of lightning.

     "When Vicki and I had the kids living with us, if we didn't talk about them, there didn't seem to be a point in talking; they were so important in our lives."

     After they left, "Vicki cried a lot," he said. "'I don't know what my role is now,' she said. I didn't know, either. We'd look in their rooms and it was so empty and we'd go, `Oh no, here we are by ourselves.'"

     Although it didn't happen to the Schuberts, the sense of emptiness that confronts empty nesters can quickly expand into a vast gulf.

     "I did marriage counseling for a couple who had been married for something like 25 years," says therapist Katharine Rase. "As soon as their last child went off to college, all hell broke loose in the marriage. Eventually, they split up. They realized they had stayed together for the children. That's a classic story."

     Although the last child's leaving the house often can be the catalyst for this kind of dissolution, the waning chemistry and symptoms of incompatibility were probably there all along.

     "Chances are, the problems are ignored somewhat during the years of taking care of the kids' needs," psychotherapist Sarah Lincoln observes. "But it would be unlikely that the parents haven't paused to reflect on it earlier. It's not like a couple hasn't had time to prepare; it's not like kids are suddenly out of the home. They've been moving out of the home for years prior, becoming more independent, getting ready to undergo what's called 'launching.'"

     Lincoln says, however, that there's no clinical term for what the parents undergo.

     "I guess 'empty nest syndrome' works, but it's really only a pop-psychology term," she says.

     Maybe so, but what Ruth Anna was feeling was more painful than pop.

     "I thought I was gonna die, I hurt so bad. My poor husband didn't know what to do," she says, recalling the time she and her husband drove their daughter, Ronya, to school in Florida. At that time - six years ago - Ruth and Larry Anna still had son Rudi at home. By the time Rudi left, Ruth says, "We didn't hurt as much; we were more prepared."

     They just needed to "re-establish" the relationship they shared before parenthood, Ruth says.

     "Instead of worrying if Rudi or Ronya had an event we had to take them to, we had to worry about us," she says. "So we'd schedule a date night where we'd go out for a bite to eat or to a movie. We'd try not to let anything get in the way of that."

     Another thing the Annas did was move.

     "We never wanted to disrupt the kids' lives when they were living with us, but when Rudi went away (to college) we moved," Larry says. "We wanted a house where the kitchen and family room were one room because - guess what - there was just us now. We could talk, or if we had a disagreement we could settle it right there.

     "It really helped make the transition easier. ... It gave us a fresh perspective on our relationship."

     The Annas' approach to life together after the children left is indicative of the underlying strength in their marriage, a critical component of surviving the empty nest, Rase says.

     "If a marriage has held together and there's been a solid couple, where the two have always taken time for themselves, found ways to remain intact as a couple and keeping their intimacy alive, then the empty nest can strengthen things," she says. "It can enhance the intimacy because now you don't have any distractions."