Today is Father's Day, which isn't a special day for me because my father died a few years ago. Mother's Day isn't a special day for me because my mother died many years ago. Even though I'm in my forties, I sometimes think of myself as an "orphan".

Robert Frost said, "You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular."

I didn't have a very good relationship with my father for much of my life, but it improved in later years, which I could tell by the grief I felt when he died. My grief when my mother died was visceral and impossible to describe.