My birthday sometimes falls on Father’s Day. My mom’s birthday is right after. So the third weekend in June was always one for celebrating — until 2013, when my dad died. Our reason for celebrating that particular day was gone. But the day itself wasn’t. The birthdays are still birthdays. But that weekend, it’s Father’s Day that seems to speak the loudest. Most of the year, his chair in the living room is just a chair. That Sunday, it isn’t.
Many people still have their dads to celebrate. For them, Father’s Day is a phone call, a cookout, a card, and a hug. Others lost their fathers years ago and have found a steady way to carry the day.
And some are facing the first one without him, looking at a Sunday that used to be simple and aren’t sure what to do with it now.
A Day that Can Look Any Way You Want It To
If that’s you this year, I’m not going to tell you how to get through it. I don’t know your father, or what he was to you, or what the day brings up when it comes. I can tell you that the stages and timelines of grief you’ve heard about were never meant as instructions.
David Kessler, who wrote On Grief and Grieving with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, has spent years correcting that: the five stages of grief were meant to describe what people feel, not prescribe what they’re supposed to do. Grief doesn’t run on a schedule, and you’re not behind on yours.
Spend the day the way you feel is best for you. Visit the cemetery, or don’t. Cook the meal he always asked for, or order a pizza and don’t think about it too hard. Pull out the old photos and tell his stories to your kids, or keep them to yourself a while longer. Let the day pass quietly. Grief tends to find its own time anyway — some ordinary Tuesday when you’re not expecting it.
Ways to Stay Connected
If you keep your dad’s memory alive — visiting a place that feels like him, doing something he used to do, talking to him when no one’s around — there’s a name for what you’re doing. Researchers Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman called it continuing bonds — the idea that we don’t grieve by letting go, but by carrying people forward in a different form. Older grief models treated that as a problem to get past. They had it backward. For some, it’s how love continues after someone is gone.
So if you talk to your father out loud in the car sometimes, you’re in good company.
Some Father’s Days are harder than any of this. When the relationship is distant or broken, the day carries a different weight. If that’s closer to your story, we wrote something separate that makes room for it. You can read it here.
But if you’re not sure how to spend the day, the ritual was never the point. Visiting or not, cooking or not, talking or staying quiet — none of it matters as much as this: he mattered, and you remember.
Carrie Phelps-Campbell, Blog Contributor