I could not tell you the date of my mother’s death. I could not tell you the date of my dad’s death. These are not dates that I find significant.

In this remark, Simpson presents himself as someone who does not attach emotional or symbolic weight to commemorative dates, even those as culturally charged as the anniversaries of a parent’s death. The statement functions rhetorically as a defense against expectations of sentimentality: by claiming such dates are “not significant,” he implies that forgetting them is not evidence of callousness but of a different value system. In public discourse, the line can also read as an attempt to normalize a perceived lapse in memory by reframing it as principled indifference to date-keeping rather than personal neglect.