When parents die, even the mundane memories comfort their children. Here are their tales, as told to The Inquirer’s obit writer.

Jack Katz, a true-blue Phillies fan, headed south to Clearwater, Fla., for years to touch base with his favorite players at spring training. He took his daughter, Rose, with him for 10 straight seasons.

“It was our thing,” Rose Gobeli said. The palm trees and balmy breeze. The games and the sunshine. “Our thing,” she said.

Children’s memories with their parents are often indelible. Fishing with Dad in the bay off Long Beach Island. Meeting Mom for brunch in Manayunk. Spending springtime together with the Phillies in Florida.

I write obituaries for The Inquirer, and children tell me they remain nostalgic about even the most mundane of experiences with Mom or Dad. For many, this year’s Mother’s Day or Father’s Day will be the first they are separated from their parent by death.

“It’s going to be different this year,” Dick Smith Jr. said.

Smith and his father, Dick Smith Sr., spent many Father’s Days playing in golf tournaments or down the Shore together watching the final round of the U.S. Open on TV. And since the elder Smith’s birthday is June 17, it sometimes fell on Father’s Day, too.

“Family and golf were his priorities,” Smith said of his father, “and we always said the order was subject to change.”

Karen Marston knows how to fish. Her father, David Marston, taught her the difference between a bluegill and a flounder, when to wear waders, how to drive a motorboat, and where to drop bait.

He took her and her brothers, David Jr. and Mike, out in the bay at Long Beach Island on many Saturdays. But it was a day in Virginia she remembers best. “l caught the first fish,” she said. “That never happened, and I never forgot it.”

Beth Jackson Peele is a proud legacy member of Alpha Kappa Alpha. So she and her mother, Phyllis Jackson, a longtime member, were regulars at the sorority’s popular mother-daughter luncheons and teas. On Mother’s Day, they usually found their way to a jazz brunch in Manayunk.

They were so alike and together so often they were mistaken for twins. “If one was somewhere,” Peele said, “the other was not far behind.”

Jon Guerster called it “a no-brainer.” He was getting married and needed a best man. He had plenty of friends, but this one guy was special. The best man he knew was his father, Rene Guerster.

“I didn’t even think about it,” Jon Guerster said. “It was just the nature of our relationship. Father’s Day was every day.”

Cathy Sterba, Rene Guerster’s daughter, said the “many teenager eye rolls” she displayed at her father’s gregarious nature in public were offset by his tenderness in private. “He was not going to miss a chance to review with me at 6 a.m. for a math test that day,” she said.

And when he had to bring work home, “We learned to do our own homework while he worked alongside us,” she said.

Mother’s Day was acknowledged but usually no big deal for Joan Wadleigh Curran and her daughters, Maris and Mia. Maybe a card and brunch. It was Easter these women embraced.

Their mother and her friends were painters and other artists, so the daughters had oodles of dyed eggs that were colorful masterpieces of creative expression. Their father dressed up in a homemade bunny costume, and everyone scattered for egg hunts.

“She had a sense of humor,” Maris Curran said of her mother. “She was a troublemaker. If she saw a sign that said ‘Do not enter,’ she would say, ‘What if we went down there?’”

Frank LeMaster grew up in Kentucky, worked for a time on a horse farm, and played linebacker for the Philadelphia Eagles. His football nickname was “the Hammer,” and his joy was to fish, hunt, and camp with his sons, Justin, Brennan, and Alexander.

It was often during those expeditions, in the woods and around the fire, that the sons heard “jaw-dropping stories” from their father about the Eagles, coach Dick Vermeil, and the compelling life of a pro football player in Philadelphia.

He told of the work he put in to make the team, the emotions he felt when the fans cheered, how happy he was when they beat the Dallas Cowboys, and about the celebrities he met and cool places he went.

He made them part of it, too. On some occasions, “He would simply be like, ‘Hey, it’s all right if I bring my boys along, right?’” Brennan LeMaster said. It never mattered what the answer was. They went.

“It was all about the camaraderie,” Justin LeMaster said.

Betty “Kullie” Kullman Mellor was neither religious nor particularly spiritual. Nature stirred her passion. One afternoon, she and her daughter, Kris Soffa, were transplanting irises in the garden. Suddenly, Mellor stopped digging and directed her then-5-year-old daughter to gaze up at a glorious sky.

“We shared a warm moment of connection, astonishment, and awe gazing up at the majestic clouds together,” Soffa said. “I came to know a deep reverence for nature, which has shaped my life and the work I do.”

Frank T. Griswold, former presiding bishop of the national Episcopal Church, spent a lot of time with his daughters, Hannah and Eliza, and he tried to be subtle when mixing work with home life.

“He was always secretly blessing me and my sister,” Eliza Griswold said. “He’d put his hand on my head at breakfast and say, ‘Do you want more milk?’ Now I know what he was doing.”

Gabriele Guaracao was too young to stay home alone, so Elizabeth Guaracao sometimes took her daughter to night-school English class at La Salle University. Gabriele would munch on snacks in the back of the room while her mother learned English.

Elizabeth Guaracao left her native Colombia for the United States in 1988 to provide safety and more opportunities for Gabriele and, later, for her second daughter Anna.

She worked six days a week, went without so her daughters had, and checked on them daily even after they graduated college. Mother’s Day was every day for the daughters, Gabriele said, because “every day was children’s day” for their mother.

Almost every night just before dinner, one or two of the Stemmler sisters — Beth, Peggy, Cathy, and Joan — would race off from home to the top of their street in Merion. There, they would wait on the corner for their father, Edward Stemmler, to pass by on his drive home.

When he spotted them, he would pull the car over, wave them in, and they would explode with their news of the day as he drove slowly to the house. Then they would go inside for dinner together.

Leonard Howell Jr. liked to drive from Philadelphia to his family’s farm in Virginia, and he sometimes let little Fleta, his daughter, steer the car from his lap on back roads. “Then, when I went home, I would tell people I drove the car,” she said.

They visited with family and friends around Suffolk, laughing over dinners and sharing stories of the old days and plans for those to come. “He said, ‘I want you to know your family,’” Fleta Howell said. “‘I want you to know where you come from.’”