For anyone who has lost a parent long before he or she expected to, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are unsettling occasions, prompts to show appreciation that become prods to revisit grief.
They’re also proof that the world is full of accidental actuaries. I don’t know how else to explain it: the number of people who look at you and seem to calculate, correctly, that when you’re 33 years old, your mother should not yet be gone, and that there’s a good chance, according to median life expectancies, that she’s still around when you’re 37 and even when you’re 40, unless she had you late.
Two of the kindest things our parents taught my brothers and me were:
1. No one needs a faux holiday, created to boost sales of stuff, in order to honor a parent.
2. We don’t celebrate Mother’s or Father’s Day, because if we respect and care for them as we should, we’ll honor them every day.