Over dinner two weeks ago, my cousin Rick used the word “orphan” to describe how he felt this past Christmas, the first since his dad, my uncle, died last August (my aunt had died in 2002). I nodded in agreement and sympathy—my mom died in 2000; my dad in 2005—but I wondered, too: Can a sixty-year-old man and a forty-seven-year-old woman be orphaned?

The word felt a little false, as we sat sipping Pinot Noir and sharing an appetizer at an outdoor table. Sure, the definition—from the Oxford English Dictionary—doesn’t specify the age of the one “deprived by death of father or mother, or (more generally) of both parents”—but the word carries a whiff of Dickens, of foundling hospitals, of waifs wandering barefoot through squalid cities. I thought of the summer I wore a glass-chip ring on the third finger of my left hand while traveling alone in Italy: a kind of pretend identity. And yet, what other word so conveys the shock, the bereftness, the starkness of finding oneself so deprived?

I was reminded of this as I sat poring over a list of my regular expenses, looking for ways to trim costs. Turn down the water heater; use the cell phone for long distance; dine out less; cancel my local newspaper subscription. I’ve joked for years that the only reason I subscribe to the local paper is for the comics. The rest, after all, I can get online. Five hundred dollars a year for the comics. It seemed an easy call.

And yet.

My dad loved the funnies, as he called them, while my mother thought they were a waste of ink, as silly an interest as soap operas. Before my parents were married, my mother shared an apartment in San Francisco with her friend Martha. Martha never married, and to my childhood eye, epitomized glamour and sophistication, with her hot-pink polished fingernails, her cigarette, her martini glass and infectious laugh. Martha was a lot of fun, the kind of grown-up that the kids liked to have around. Martha loved the funnies, and she and my father would talk about the doings of Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, of Dick Tracy, of the gals in Apartment 3-G, as though talking about real people. My mother would heave a sigh and accuse them of leaving her out of the conversation. (She would say the same thing years later, when Dad and I talked about Luann or Calvin and his tiger.)

Later in life, my mother became devoted to the Jumble and the horoscope, phoning long-distance to tell me whenever a day’s outlook for Libra looked particularly good—but her entire life, she actively disliked the comics. It was as if they’d done something to offend her.

And perhaps they had. My mother married in 1960, three years before the publication of The Feminine Mystique. She converted to Episcopalianism to please her future mother-in-law, my high-church Grandma who once spoke of a Presbyterian neighbor in a whisper, as though mentioning Satanism. Mom never finished college after having to drop out her sophomore year after contracting tuberculosis. She did what women of her milieu in 1960 did: she married, moved to a nice suburb, maintained a small house and then a bigger house, made dinner, raised the children. The comics implied something my mother didn’t have a lot of: free time. She was too busy poaching eggs and toasting toast and pouring OJ to take two minutes to read up on Gordo or Fred Bassett or—when the sixties became the seventies—Joanie Caucus.

But that’s only part of the reason that my mother never took to the funnies. Mom wasn’t an escaper or a daydreamer the way Dad and I were. She was more of a do-er, an extrovert, talking to people and finding out about their lives. She did this at every restaurant we frequented as a family, asking the waiter about his graduate studies, the hostess about her kids whose names Mom remembered, while Dad and I smiled politely, our fingers itching to get back to a book. When she did get free time, Mom spent it on the phone, keeping up with her lifelong friends, their tragedies and comedies.

To this day, when I read about Luann’s latest pickle, or wonder when “For Better or For Worse” is going to return to Mike and Elizabeth Patterson as adults, I think of how my dad would respond. True, I don’t need the comics to remember him. Comics are hardly the most evocative of associations in terms of my parents. And yet, I’m not ready to give them up. With the page spread before me, my cereal bowl weighing down the corner, I might as well be a girl again at the kitchen counter, Dad with his tie slung over his shoulder as he stabs into the yolk of his poached egg, Mom handing me another slice of cinnamon toast, its pools of butter perfectly glistening with sprinkled sugar, orphanhood the stuff of story books.