Your Dad Deserves More Than One Sunday a Year: Building Rituals That Last

Father's Day gives you one Sunday. Grief doesn't check the calendar.

The men who figure out how to carry their dads forward aren't the ones who had a good cry in June and felt better by July. They're the ones who go to Dairy Queen every March 14th, whether they feel like it or not. Whether the kids are being difficult. Whether it's snowing. Whether they'd really rather just stay home.

That distinction — between the annual release valve and the year-round practice — is the whole thing.

The Problem With Father's Day When Your Dad Is Gone

For most men who still have their fathers, Father's Day is a mild inconvenience: find a card, make a call, maybe grill something. For men who've lost their dads, it becomes something more complicated — a culturally sanctioned pressure point that compresses a year's worth of grief into a single, commercially packaged Sunday.

The holiday doesn't know how to hold that. It wasn't designed to.

What tends to happen is one of two things. Either the day produces a big emotional release — a real one, raw and genuine — that evaporates by Monday morning, leaving you exactly where you started. Or you study the holiday from a distance, avoid it as much as possible, and get through it by staying busy, which means you spend the day carrying something you never actually put down.

Neither outcome is wrong. Both are exhausting.

The real problem isn't Father's Day itself. It's treating it as the only permission slip to remember him publicly. One day a year isn't a grief practice. It's a pressure valve. And pressure valves leak.

Why Annual Grief Doesn't Hold

Grief researchers have documented for decades that loss doesn't follow a calendar. But for men especially, there's a particular trap: because grief is supposed to be private, and because there aren't many socially accepted moments to bring a dead father up without making the room uncomfortable, the official holidays become load-bearing in a way they were never built to support.

When you only visit the loss once a year, a few things happen. First, the grief grows heavier in the interim — not because you're carrying it, but because you're not, and it's accumulating. Second, the annual moment starts to feel obligatory rather than meaningful. The same vague sadness, the same scroll through old photos, the same conversation that doesn't quite get to the point.

And then there's the longer-term problem. If you have kids, you're watching this happen in real time. Scott Cunningham, co-host of Dead Dads, wrote about the moment he realized that his kids — still young when his dad died — were running out of new things to remember. Each conversation about their grandfather just cycled through the same few core memories. He could see the day coming when he'd be the only one who really remembered his dad at all, and bringing him up would get the same eye-rolls he used to give when adults tried to make him care about his own grandfather.

That recognition is a diagnosis. And it points to something the annual model simply cannot fix.

What Rituals Actually Do

A ritual isn't a memorial. It isn't a moment of silence or a sad playlist on a hard day. A ritual is a repeated, intentional action that carries meaning — and the meaning deepens over time because it repeats.

Dr. John Gottman's research on family connection distinguishes between routines (getting things done) and rituals (building relationships). The difference isn't complexity. A walk after dinner is a ritual. Saturday morning pancakes are a ritual. What makes them rituals is their regularity and their emotional weight — the fact that the people involved know what to expect, and that expectation itself becomes part of the meaning.

For grief, this matters enormously. A ritual creates a reliable moment to let your dad in — not a crisis moment, not a breakdown in a hardware store, but a structured, recurring occasion that holds the door open. You don't have to be in the right emotional state. You just have to show up.

That's actually the point. Rituals work precisely because they don't require you to feel anything in particular when you start them.

The Dairy Queen Model

Scott's solution was elegantly specific: every March 14th — his dad's birthday — the family goes to Dairy Queen. That's it. That was the whole idea.

Not a formal dinner. Not a ceremony. A Blizzard.

What happened next is the part worth paying attention to. His kids started counting down to it weeks in advance. They started asking questions — When was Papa born again? Is it time yet? — questions that opened the door to stories, which opened the door to the grandfather they were too young to really know. A trip for soft serve became a context for memory. The Blizzard was never the point. The annual occasion was the point, and the occasion created a structure where the kids wanted to hear about their grandfather rather than tolerating it.

There's research that supports why this works. Dr. Barbara Fiese's work on family rituals shows that children in families with regular rituals develop a stronger sense of identity and belonging — and those effects extend into adulthood. The ritual isn't just a nice memory. It's load-bearing structure for how a family understands itself.

The Dairy Queen ritual works because it's attached to something concrete: a date, a place, a specific item on the menu. It doesn't ask anyone to perform grief. It just makes space for the grandfather to show up in conversation, naturally, because there's a reason to talk about him.

Building Your Own: Three Design Principles

Not every family has a Dairy Queen story. The point isn't to copy the format — it's to understand what makes it work, and then find the equivalent for your own dad.

Anchor it to something specific about him. The Dairy Queen ritual worked because Dairy Queen was synonymous with Scott's dad. The specificity is what keeps it from feeling generic. What was your dad's restaurant? His Saturday morning ritual? The game he always watched? The thing he said every time you left the house? The ritual should point back to him, not to grief in the abstract. If your dad made terrible pancakes every Sunday, make terrible pancakes every Sunday. That's the ritual.

Make it low-stakes and slightly inconvenient. This sounds backwards, but it's the reason rituals stick. If the bar is too high — a full memorial dinner, a structured reflection exercise, something that requires emotional preparation — you'll find reasons to skip it when life gets hard. The Fathering Project notes that the most durable family practices are simple and consistent, not elaborate or expensive. A ritual that survives a busy week is worth ten that require perfect conditions.

Let it be joyful without requiring it to be. The goal isn't to manufacture happiness or avoid sadness. It's to create a regular occasion where both are possible. Some years the Dairy Queen trip will be light. Some years it'll hit harder than expected. Either is fine. The ritual holds them both.

The Generational Dimension

There's a quieter reason this matters that doesn't get enough attention: if you don't build these structures, your dad doesn't just fade from your memory. He fades from your kids' understanding of who they come from.

This came up directly in a Dead Dads episode featuring Bill Cooper, who lost his father Frank after years of dementia. One of the sharpest points in that conversation was this: if you don't talk about him, he disappears. Not from your grief — from the living chain of family. Your kids carry forward what they know. What they know is what you give them.

For men who lost their dads before having children, or whose kids were too young to form real memories, this can feel urgent. There's a window. The rituals you build now are the mechanism by which a man your kids never knew stays present in their lives. That's not a sentimental idea. It's a practical one.

See also: How to Introduce Your Kids to the Grandfather They'll Never Meet — a full piece on this specific challenge.

The Other 364 Days

Father's Day will come around again. You don't have to boycott it or force it to mean something it can't. But the men who navigate loss well tend to have something going on the rest of the year that means Father's Day is just one node in a larger network — not the whole thing.

That network can be simple. It can be one dinner on his birthday. It can be watching the same movie every fall that he loved. It can be his coffee mug, pulled out once a week, not as a relic but as a small recurring gesture that says: he's still here in some form. The Gottman Institute frames this as "turning toward" — creating reliable opportunities to make emotional contact rather than waiting for the crisis that forces it.

Grief doesn't need a holiday to knock you sideways. The random Tuesday in a hardware store can do it — and often does. What rituals provide is the counterweight: a planned, regular occasion where the grief has somewhere intentional to go. The hardware store ambush still happens. But it's less destabilizing when you've also built in the March 14th Blizzard.

For a longer look at what long-term grief actually requires, Why Men Need a Long-Term Grief Playbook, Not a Five-Stage Pamphlet goes deeper into why the standard models fall short.

Start Small, Start Specific

The version that works is the one you'll actually do. It doesn't need to be meaningful yet — it needs to be repeated until it becomes meaningful. That's how rituals work. The meaning is made by showing up, not by showing up with the right feeling.

Pick a date. Pick something specific about your dad. Show up.

Do it again next year.

That's it. That's the whole framework. Dairy Queen optional, but highly recommended.

If you're figuring out what this looks like for your family, the Dead Dads community is a good place to hear how other men have done it — without the pressure to do it perfectly. Listen, share your own story, or just find out you're not the only one working through this. Find the show at deaddadspodcast.com or subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.