My siblings and I thought it all a bit much, every year, this stack of colorful envelopes  laid at the altar of my mother’s suggestion. But then that Sunday in May arrived, and over a brunch table she would open all of those cards, one by one, and read them out loud.

She read them like story hour at a local library. She took her time. She offered comments like, “That’s true” or “Oh, that’s precious.” Then she flipped each card open and showed everyone the illustrations. We’d have to pass it around as she dug into the next one.

I never understood why greeting cards meant so much to my mother. Until one time I was visiting her apartment, a good month after Mother’s Day, and I saw them all displayed on the kitchen counter, each one opened and signed by her kids. And I finally realized the significance.

They kept her company while we were gone.

When we said ‘best mom,’ we meant it

This year marks the seventh Mother’s Day since she died. Seven years since we stacked her greeting cards. It’s such a strange thing, the erasure of a holiday. Ever since I can remember, Mother’s Day was sacred, reserved, circled on the calendar. Nobody traveled. Nobody left the house. Even as adults, living far away, we were expected to make an effort to get home.

I don’t know the true history of Mother’s Day. I don’t know who invented it. But I know my mother owned it. She had given every ounce of herself to her children, and when we signed our cards, “To the best Mother ever,” she smiled and knew we meant it. 

The first year without her, we marked the occasion sadly. We spoke about her and how she loved the fuss. The next year a little less. The next year even less. We began to celebrate with other relatives and friends. In time, we switched focus, and watched the younger people in our lives celebrate their mothers.

The greeting card tradition faded, and with it yet another marker of the woman who raised me.

I think back to the many mistakes I made with my mother. Keeping her at a distance. Not telling her how grateful I was. Forgetting to call no matter how many times she said, “Call me the minute you get home!”

But one thing I did right happened six years before she passed away. I got a video camera, sat her down, and had her tell me the family history. Everybody. Great grandparents. Grandparents. Uncles. Aunts. Cousins. It was, at points, enlightening, hysterical and tragic. I learned countries and names, feuds and secrets, who was loved and who was scorned. 

My father was sitting nearby, and he would occasionally interject a memory. And then they’d haggle. And then they’d disagree. And then my mom would say, “Ah, Sonny (my Dad’s nickname), you don’t know what you’re talking about!”

And we’d get back to the cousins.

Ask her. She’d love to tell you.

Today, if you have the time, and you’re lucky enough to have your mother in your life, I wholeheartedly suggest you try this. Get her to go through the entire tree, from top branch to bottom. Mothers are often the ones who retain the family history anyhow. And as I once wrote in a book, “behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begins.”

I don’t buy greeting cards for this holiday anymore. It’s another thing death steals from you. Even traditions you once thought silly are taken when your mother goes and you never get them back.

But I do watch that video. I have it on my desktop. I listen to my mother’s excellent elocution, the slight Brooklyn accent, the laughter that certain memories brought, like when she told her brother, my Uncle Mike, that if I was born on his birthday, he could name me, provided it began with an M to honor their deceased father. The day came. Sure enough, around 7 p.m., I emerged. And my uncle announced that my name would forever be … Marmaduke.

And my mother rescinded the offer.

I look at that video. I remember those greeting cards. And I realize I have quietly adopted my mother’s tradition, keeping something on my counter to retain our connection. The ways we become our parents. They never stop.

Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Download “The Sports Reporters” podcast each Monday and Thursday on-demand through Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify and more. Follow him on Twitter @mitchalbom.

It’s not for the kids. We have one of those, with little plates of cut-up turkey, and little legs dangling from the chairs, and little heads that fall asleep on little forearms as the night wears on.

It’s not for the desserts. We have a separate space for those as well. Pies of pumpkin, cherry, pecan and banana, ice creams and sorbets and brownies and biscotti and the family favorite of chocolate chip cookies and whipped topping, because every family has an original dish.

It’s not an out-of-towners table. They mix in with the locals, family from Maine, New York, Kentucky, Nevada, Florida, California and, this year, Haiti. We all sit together, in a labyrinth that forms a massive “L”, where chairs get turned to speak with the other side and yelling across the room is expected, and encouraged.

No, the table I’m setting this year is a new one. A different one. It’s a table for all those who are no longer coming, all those who filled the house with laughter and stories and singing and arguments, and who, sadly, will never walk through the door again.

This Thanksgiving will be the first that I host without parents in my life — parents who, for decades, held this holiday in their home, collecting us, once a year, for a weekend that, quite frankly, kept the extended family in touch.

Now, like so many of my older relatives, my parents are gone. But I can still see them. Hear them.

So I’m setting a table.

Empty chairs.

Absentees are growing

Look. There’s my grandmother, Ruth, as warm as a furnace, as squat as a fire hydrant, examining the plates and approving the moistness of the turkey.

There’s my Uncle Eddie, her white-whiskered brother, the tough guy of all tough guys, with a Popeye voice and a jut jaw and narrow eyes that tear up when you tell him you love him.

There’s his wife, Sarah, her hair in a short bouffant, her voice as scratchy as Edith Bunker. She’s arguing with another aunt, Molly, over something that cannot possibly be important: who used to live on what street, what year their parents came to America, what’s a better brand of instant coffee, you name it.

Next to them is my Uncle Bob, Molly’s husband, who supposedly has trouble hearing, although we suspect he just uses that excuse to check out of his wife’s conversations.

Alongside them, holding court, is my Uncle Mike, my mother’s brother, with a thick black mustache and a booming voice, letting everyone know he’s not eating a particular sweet-potato dish because, as he yells out every year, “It’s disgusting!”

And next to him is my mother, laughing as she always laughed at her kid brother, which made him smile, which made her smile, which made them lean in and share a hug.

And looking on, beaming, is my father, who had been with my mother since he was 16, who stepped in and raised Mike when Mike’s father, my grandfather, dropped dead of a sudden heart attack in his 40s, an event my mother witnessed as a teenager.

They are all gone now, from one thing or another. Cancers. Strokes. More heart attacks. One by one they disappeared from the Thanksgiving table, and each year we mourned the latest absentee, until the absentees outnumbered the original attendees.

Which is where we are now.

Empty chairs.

Echoes and memories

I still remember the day my mother turned over the Thanksgiving reins. My wife and I had settled into a good-sized house in Michigan, and upon a visit, Mom gazed around as if measuring the place (she was an interior designer, so this was entirely possible), then she pulled us aside and said, “It’s time.”

I was in my 30s then. Too young, really, to understand the implications of gathering relatives from around the world, too young to comprehend when she said, “It’ll be up to you to hold the family together.”

After all, I thought, it’s just Thanksgiving, an event shouldered by my parents for as long as I could recall, through a modest house in New Jersey, to a narrow townhome in Philadelphia, to a rural farm in Pennsylvania.

But as the years passed, it became apparent that with busy lives and busy careers and new spouses and new children, getting everyone together, even once a year, was a challenge.

With guidance, we undertook it. We learned the preparation, the sleeping arrangements (Thanksgiving for us, begins on Wednesday and ends on Sunday). I still recall the year when, just before eating, everyone quieted, as was tradition, and I turned to my father, the patriarch of the family, and nodded for him to stand up and give the annual greeting and gratitude for our blessings. He shook his head and motioned to my wife and me, saying, “This is your house. You should be doing it now.”

Looking back, that was the beginning of the final handoff. It ended last December, when my Dad died on a Friday afternoon from stroke complications. For the last few years, he’d been reduced to participating through Skype, unable to travel, and some of our family split Thanksgiving in half, eating here, then flying out to be with him for a “Saturday Thanksgiving” just to keep the tradition alive.

You can’t keep things alive. I’m learning that, painfully. No matter how much you love something, or someone, their existence is out of your control. You can weep. You can wail. But you can’t summon them back.

All you can do is carry on and remember. So I pull out the furniture and move it around, if only in my mind, which is where so much of this holiday lives.

Empty chairs. Missing loved ones. Lord, how their voices once filled the room, as their echoes fill it now.

I have been doing it my entire adult life. The message is always the same: “Happy Anniversary. I love you both.”

Sixty-seven years ago today, my mother and father got married in a Brooklyn restaurant. Christmas Eve was the only night they could afford. The owner gave them a deal.

And they sealed their own.

Christmas Eve. I need to make a phone call.

But I can’t.

My father died this month. It hurts to even write that. At the age of 88, he took his last breath, and went to join my mother, who took hers nearly three years earlier. From the moment she left us, he was waiting to be with her again. He even asked that her gravestone carry an etched photo of the two of them. When we’d visit the cemetery, Dad would look down from his wheelchair and say, “I’ll see you soon, Babe.”

But he was already seeing himself.

He was always an early packer.

I need to make a phone call.

I can’t.

The meaning of a hero

How do you live in a world without parents? Who do you turn to for counsel? And how do you say good-bye to your only real hero?

My life has been surrounded by sports stars who are worshiped by kids around the world. Powerfully built men who dunk, hit, throw and run like gods.

But athletes never held space in my heart. From the earliest, when I looked up, there was only one man. My father.

And I do mean the earliest. The story goes that when I was an infant outside Buffalo, N.Y., a big winter storm hit, and our family got trapped in our car. As the snow grew, and nightfall threatened, my father bravely went in search of milk for my bottle. Walking along the highway, wearing only his coat against the blizzard (it was probably a mile, but in our retelling it was at least 10) he finally found the only thing open: a bar.

My Dad went in, made his request. And the barkeeper said, “We don’t sell milk here.” Thankfully, the man’s wife emerged from the back and said to her husband, “What’s wrong with you? It’s for his baby!” She found milk in the fridge. And my dad trudged back through the snow to feed me.

The point of the story — even if the distances aren’t 100% accurate — is that my father was my protector and my champion.

Which is 100% accurate.

He adored my mother

Here are a few other things my Dad was: A Depression baby. A son of a plumber. A stickball champion. An Air Force vet. A first generation college grad. A budding opera singer. A Philadelphia Phillies fan. A lawn mower. A pipe smoker. An elegant dresser. A man who always smelled good.

Mitch and his dad, Ira

Friends, today is one of the saddest days of my life. My beloved father, Ira Albom, passed away last Friday after a long health battle. This afternoon, we will bury him beside my mother, Rhoda, who died nearly three years ago. Dad was lost the moment he said goodbye to her.

And am I lost now.

Cast adrift. That’s how it feels. Roots severed. No parents in the world. Talking with my sister and brother, we all agree that we are not ready to be the grown-ups, not ready to say goodbye to being someone’s child on this earth.

Yet we dare not complain. For we – and the world – were blessed with my father for 88 years. He was good and moral and strong and warm and while my happy hurricane of a mother urged me to all the good things I could be, my father is the reason for all the bad things I am not. I could always look up and see him as an example. If he restrained himself from violence, disrespect, coldness, insensitivity, then how could I do less?

“A man doesn’t do that,” he would often say about negative behavior. He was that paternal role model that so many kids don’t get today. How can I complain after having him all this time?

My Dad was born in 1929, just in time for the Great Depression, which is probably why he rarely complained later in life. The son of an immigrant plumber, my Dad was the first to attend college in his family. He was forced to be a man before he got to be a teenager, taking over the family responsibilities for my mother’s home when her father suddenly dropped dead and her mother fell into depression. He handled it. He always handled things. Dad was constructed of old-fashioned materials– family love, self-discipline, hard work, quiet suffering. He raised us and he raised many others, family and strangers gravitated to him, they felt protected under his wing. He helped them, paid for them, advised them, loved them.

And I was his son, his first son, clearly formed from his DNA catalogue: same ears, chin, hair, body. Same voice. As a teen, I used to call him at work and he’d answer “Albom speaking” and I’d say, “Albom speaking” and he’d say “Very funny” and I’d say “Very funny” and he’d say, “Knock it off” and I would, because you never, ever crossed my Dad.

He was a great singer, and could have joined the opera, his dream, but instead fought for his country during the Korean War and took an accounting job to support my mother and the coming children. Some of my most precious memories over the years are playing piano in the basement for him while he prepared songs for a family wedding or party. He liked to sing slowly. Really slowly. Whenever I tried to pick up the pace he’d say, “Too fast, Mitchie. Too fast.” This was during a ballad. To him, the word “ballad” meant “slow down by 50 percent.”

I loved to hear him sing and loved to him tell stories about travelling the world. I loved to hear the respect he showed strangers. He always wanted coffee the moment he sat down in a restaurant, but if the service was slow, he’d politely read the server’s name on a badge and say, “Excuse me, Charlene, I wonder if we could get that coffee now? Thanks very much.”

Ever mannered. Ever respectful. Ever aromatic. Yes. My Dad smelled good all the time. So many people have sent me memories of him mentioning his cologne or aftershave. It was part of the respect he showed the world. He smelled good. He dressed impeccably. People joked that he wore a suit to bed. But it was part of his quiet dignity.

I saw the beauty of that when, in his late 40’s, prime of his career, his company cruelly fired him after nearly 19 years of service, one year shy of making his pension for life. As a bone, they said he could use an office for a few months to make calls for another job.

Many men would have told them to shove it. But my father never complained. He put on a suit every morning and drove all the way there and said good morning to the people he used to manage, never losing his self-esteem, and he spent the day searching for new work to feed our family until he found something. When I asked him how he did this without being embarrassed, he shook his head at me and said, “They don’t control embarrassing me. Only I can do that.”

His dignity, as always, came from within.

More than anything in life, my father adored my mother. They met when he was 16, she was 15, and they never dated, kissed, or had eyes for anyone else. My father so respected, honored and cherished my Mom, that our next-door neighbor used to joke, “When I die, I want to come back as Ira Albom’s wife!”

They were married on Christmas Eve, 1950, the only night they could afford to rent out a restaurant for the ceremony, and this Christmas Eve, they will celebrate their 67^th anniversary in heaven, together, because they only belong together. True to his heart, my father wanted a picture of the two of them on my mother’s grave stone, and when we’d visit the cemetery, he’d see himself smiling next to her, and he’d say, “I’ll see you soon, babe.”

Today, he formally joins her. But I guess he never really left her, as I know he will never really leave us. Our hearts are broken. Our souls are bowed. But our lives have forever been enriched with love and guidance and wisdom and principle.

My family has a superstition, never say goodbye, only “so long.” OK, then. So long, Dad. All that I know in this world came through your mind, all that I see came through your eyes, all that I feel came through your heart. You are in mine forever and ever.

The family has kindly requested no flowers or gifts. If someone desires, a donation to help sick children at the Have Faith Haiti orphanage can be made in Ira Albom’s name at www.thechikafund.org.