Thank you for such a thoughtful response.

Maybe it has something to do with realizing that we are now the same age or older than our parents as we remember them from childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood so we understand some of the pressures that weighed on them and how they were doing their fallible human best to bear up while claiming some measure of happiness for themselves. They may have succeeded or failed, and in the process hurt or helped those closest to them but now that is all beside the point because we are not so different. Recalling it strongly enough to write about it shakes us because what could contain more pathos than human beings — in the proximate case our own parents — struggling to make their way in the world?

The latest missive from PS I Love You lists Little bird little bird under fiction. Oh well. As I pointed out to a previous respondent, while one or two minor details were invented for the sake of the narrative, for example, while we got our own meals for a while, my mother managed to keep up with the laundry, it is on the whole true as I recall it.