Raise your hand if your mom’s dead. Raise your other if your dad is, too. Raise whatever other appendage you can if you’ve got dead parents with whom you wish you could have a few more words, a few more moments. Raise your ire if your dead parents raise your ire.

One morning, when I was 17 and full of zits and quasi-confidence and a lacking reality thereof, when my posse lingered in my kitchen, awaiting the trek to the high school, my pinnacle almost met, my younger brother’s yet to rise, the vortex between the two of us manifesting in my mother’s inability to mitigate the friction...