Like anyone who has lost a parent, I have gone through all the stages of grief. When we celebrated Christmas recently, I learned how hard the anger stage can really be. I’m not mad at my mother or her doctors or anything like that. I’m just mad at the world.

For the first time in my life, I will have to buy my own Sports Illustrated.

For years, my mother has given all the men in their family a subscription to the magazine. This year, I got no card informing me of my subscription. No special gift from Time-Life. Nothing.

Well, I did get a copper butterfly that was from a rather interesting sculpture that hung on her wall ever since I can remember, but that doesn’t include weekly updates on the NFL as far as I can tell.

Even when I went to college, Mom made sure I got my SI. Guys in my fraternity who never met her thought she was an amazing person because they didn’t have to spend a dime on the magazine.

I don’t think I’m the only one upset about this whole development. What about the publishers? How will they ever recoup this revenue?

We’re not talking about your garden-variety subscriber. I have four brothers and three brothers-in-law, plus a bunch of nephews she might have bought the magazine for.

Has anyone checked the stock price of Time-Life’s parent company lately?

The only thing I can think of that remotely resembles this was the impact my father’s death had on Girl Scout cookie sales. I bet if you look back at their records, 1996 was a very bad year.

Sports Illustrated will look at 2006 the same way eventually. When they have a backlog of the free gifts they give to subscribers, they will wonder what went wrong.

I used to love those gifts. I even used one of those shoe phones for a while. It worked about as well as you would expect.

Mom would never let SI send her any gift that involved the swimsuit issue. She wouldn’t block that issue itself, but no calendars or anything like that as long as she was paying.

I remember one time when the person on the phone was practically forcing her to take eight or 10 or 12 swimsuit calendars because of her large order. I thought Mom was going to crawl through the phone and strangle the person.

So maybe that’s the bright side – I can get the swimsuit calendar for myself now. The downside is, I actually have to pay for it with my own money.

Until I do that, I’ll survive. I looked for something to thumb through and picked up one of Maria’s magazines, the kind that tell you how to whip up an easy 10-course meal or renovate an outhouse into a six-bedroom cottage on a budget.

They had a feature on how to combine an area for a washer/dryer with a bar. Put some curtains and a shelf up and pour yourself a drink while you get rid of those tough stains.

If only the whole magazine had ideas like that. And they came with a shoe phone.