My dad and I often spent our afternoons debating the price of grapes, a pound of hamburger, and a gallon of gas. A close second was the temperature difference between his apartment in Cloquet, Minnesota and my home in Iron River, Wisconsin. Even Google, AI, the national weather service, and receipts were no help for two stoic, stubborn Scandinavians believing they were right. I left those debates self-righteous and often times annoyed about the inefficiencies of caretaking when I had a career, motherhood, and life to attend to.
What I’d give to relive those debates today. In 2020, my dad died during the height of COVID-19. A global pandemic heightened the tense narrative around how he died, but the emptiness that followed was eerily similar to my mom dying two months before my high school graduation. Grief is funny that way.
As we enter this Hallmark season of first celebrating our mother and later our father, I find this time triggering at worse and nostalgic at best. I’ve come to learn that our society struggles to manage the complexities of grief. The harsh reality that anything of value, we will inevitably lose. It is after all, the price of admission to a life well-lived. Oftentimes, in our rush to do more, be more and experience eternal happiness, we attempt to simplify loss to a 5-step process and the unfilled promise of moving on.
This past year, I was struck by how that played out in a marketing email. A women’s brand I adore, in an attempt to be sensitive to the complex relationship between mothers and daughters, offered a simple solution to their Mother’s Day marketing – opt out. As if by clicking a single button on your computer, one could opt out of the multitude emotions of grief we all face at some point in our life.
The marketer in me was intrigued. A part of me almost clicked the button. But the philosophical, personal development geek inside me paused. What would it mean to opt out of our grief? To erase all memories of our pain? At first blush, perhaps instant relief. A dopamine hit of how perfect our present day life has achieved. The problem in this equation is within those painful memories are countless extraordinarily, ordinary moments that equate to a life of meaning and purpose.
I cannot blame Hallmark or this women’s brand for commercializing Mother’s and Father’s Day, any more than I can hate on up ticked Valentine’s Day flower pricing and integrating Santa breaking into your home via a chimney to deliver presents as a key component to the birth of Jesus.
But, if you look back further, these days dedicated to honoring our parents morphed out of grief. A campaign in the early 1900s by an Anna Jarvis to honor her mother Ann who passed away. Father’s Day followed as a way for Sonora Smart Dodd to honor her dead father, a single father of six. Eventually, our country’s highest office deemed these campaigns worthwhile of a national holiday—somehow validating these relationships matter.
I’ll never get to debate the price of grapes with dad again. Or, seek relationship advice from mom. It is a harsh reality I grapple with regularly. Yet, I still opt in to get the texts, an acknowledgement that life is not a series of opt ins and opt outs. A Mother’s Day necklace sale does not remind me that I miss my mom any more than wearing it reminds me how much I love being a mom. I live both every day. Yet somehow, I share this because at least for me, it was a good reminder of how lucky I am to live a life void of absolutes. Of ultimatums of all in or all out. Life is not an either or, but rather a messy, bold and beautiful adventure not just on Hallmark holidays but every day.