Here’s the thing about these made-up National Whatever Days: they’re fun right up until they’re not. Take National Donut Day, for example, that’s all right, I’ll have a donut. As for National Sibling Day, it doesn’t apply to me since I’m an only child and I just swipe past it without so much as a glance. Such days are generally just background noise, mere calendar confetti that I never give a second thought to. And then one of them suddenly approaches you with no warning and hits you across the face with the very thing you’ve been very carefully and deliberately trying not to think about today, even though I have several assignments from my therapist that I’m meant to be working on. Some algorithm has decided that today was the day it should remind me, appearing between a sponsored advertisement and a set of photos of someone’s dog, that I no longer have a mother or a father to celebrate with. Grief doesn’t knock; it just comes and goes, just as the children did in the 1980s when they played outside until the parent shouted, “Either in or out. You are letting all the cold air out!”
What’s truly breaking me down, though, isn’t even the question of whether or not I’m still a daughter. That question is almost too straightforward. It’s more really about who I am, because that’s what the idea of ‘daughter’ had actually been doing for me all along. It wasn’t just a label; it was an answer, telling me where I fitted in and with whom. And now when I ask myself that question, all I get is static. I haven’t actually stopped being a daughter. I’ve been transferred involuntarily. No one asked me to. There was no orientation packet and no welcome email. One day I was a member of the daughters’ club and the next I woke up as a member of a completely different one: the dead parents’ club. It’s the same person, but with a brand-new membership, and this one doesn’t come with brunch, or flowers, or a nice Instagram graphic. There’s no National Dead Parents’ Day and no one i tagging anyone in a carousel post about it. (Apart from if you have friends who are supportive and have a similarly dark sense of humor like I do) The club that isn’t marketed to anyone because no one wants to join, and yet here I am, with my card fully activated and no option to cancel it.
Can we acknowledge just how ugly grief really is, beneath all those “healing isn’t linear” quotes you find on Pinterest? The emotion I’m experiencing now is far from gentle. It’s not simply a single tear sliding down my cheek as I look wistfully out of the window, as if I were in a shampoo advertisement. It’s self-pity with teeth. When I scroll past someone’s posting about “brunch with mom” I feel a hot and unpleasant sensation rise inside me that I don’t really want to admit is jealousy, since jealousy seems such a petty emotion to feel about a dead woman. It’s anger with no one to direct it at really, who am I supposed to be angry with? God? Cancer? My dad, for having died? Or myself, for still being the one left here going over and re-reading my new membership card as if doing so twenty times over will make it any clearer? And yes, before anyone in the comments tells me so, I do know that I am “ultimately the Lord’s daughter”. I believe that. I’m not being cute or ironic about it. But C.S. Lewis expressed it better than I can: “If you talk to me about the truth of religion I’ll listen gladly. If you talk to me about the duty of religion I’ll listen submissively. But if you come talking to me about the consolations of religion then I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”
My faith didn’t shrink when my parents died, but my comfort sure did.
Here’s the part nobody warns you about: when both your parents die, you don’t just lose two people. You lose the whole foundation the rest of you was built on top of. I’m a wife. I’m a mom. I’m a grandmother now. But “daughter” was supposed to be the load-bearing one. The first identity I ever had, before I had opinions or a personality or a brand built on dark humor and trauma jokes. And now it’s just hollow. Not evolved into something new. Not “graduated.” Just a room in the house with the furniture gone, the wallpaper still up, echoing when I walk through it.
So today, on National Daughters Day, I’m not going to pretend I’ve made peace with any of it. I’m not going to give you the redemptive ending where I say “but their love lives on in me” and tie a little bow on it. Maybe that’s true. Ask me on a better day. Today I’m just a woman sitting with a membership she didn’t sign up for, mad at a holiday that clearly wasn’t designed with people like me in mind.
If you’re in this club too, the dead parents one, the one with no hashtag, no brunch photo, no pastel graphic, I see you. We don’t get a cute post today. We get to sit in the ugly part. That’s allowed. That’s still allowed.