Photo by Elmer Canas
His Last Project
Janine DeBaise
My mother has lived in my house for five months now, but she will still ask, “Where am I? When am I going home?” When I ask if she’s hungry, she nods, but she can’t request any specific food because she has lost those words. Sometimes she remembers my father—or at least the concept that she had a husband—but she doesn’t remember that he died last winter, just a few days short of his ninety-fifth birthday, only three days short of their sixty-eighth wedding anniversary.
“Where’s my husband?” she asks.
We discussed after the funeral what to tell her.
“Keep in mind,” my daughter advised, “tone of voice is more important than anything else to the Alzheimer’s brain.” My daughter’s PhD in psychology gives her insight into the brain that the rest of us do not have.
So the first time my mother asked, I took a breath and made my voice gentle. I put a hand on her arm.
“Oh, Mom,“ I said. “He’s in heaven.”
At first, that answer worked.
But then one morning in a rare moment of lucidity, she responded: “What? He’s dead? That can’t be right.”
I looked into her horrified face and thought, I can’t do this. I can’t tell her over and over again that her husband is dead.
So next time she asked, I said, “He’s upstairs, resting.”
I looked over at my daughter, who was sitting on the couch with her two young daughters. “I’m using metaphors now,” I said.
“Not a metaphor,” my daughter said. “I mean, if you think about it.” My father’s urn was upstairs on a shelf, waiting for the ground to thaw for burial.
“Resting upstairs” worked for a few weeks. But then my mother tried to go up the stairs, child safety gates be damned. We needed a different answer.
Coming up with a response was harder than you might think. Until my father’s death, my parents were inseparable. I couldn’t think of a place to name that wouldn’t make my mother feel bad that she hadn’t gone with him. They didn’t go out very often, but they both enjoyed the little Italian restaurant where my oldest sister worked until her death, and the lakeside inn where Dad’s lifelong friend Dick Walter worked as a bartender back in the 1950s. Mom and Dad took walks together every day. They even worked together until their retirement.
My husband came up with a solution. “The hardware store.”
That was the one place my father went without my mother. He was always working on a project—fixing that leak in the roof or building doll furniture for a grandchild or designing a new rudder for his wooden sailboat. When I was a child, he often let me tag along.
The local hardware store was run by the Fisher family. We’d walk in, and the man behind the counter—Jim Fisher—would gesture to my father and launch into a story for the other customers: “This man came in and bought a sewer pipe, and you know what he did with it? He built a telescope!” Jim loved to regale customers with the story of the Great Wind Machine. That’s what my father called it. At camp, we had no electricity, but we wanted to play card games at night, so my father bought sheet metal and designed a windmill that powered a car battery hooked to a single light bulb. My father’s quirky projects gave the Fisher brothers endless entertainment.
I myself love a hardware store, filled with nails and hinges and cleats, possibilities spread out like the blank page of a new journal. Walking through a lumberyard, smelling all that newly cut wood, brings back memories of watching my father work on his latest project. The whir of a table saw reminds me of the childhood winter when I sat at the top of the basement stairs and watched my father build an eighteen-foot sailboat.
The June before my father died, he asked me to drive him to his favorite lumberyard. He was ninety-four but still fiercely independent, and he was building a new little front porch on his house. He’d sketched his plan out on paper; he knew exactly how many two-by-fours he needed, how many planks of one-by-three decking. But he needed my van (and my muscle, although he wouldn’t admit that) for transporting the wood.
He chose Tracy’s lumberyard, of course. “It’s a real lumber store,” he said to me as we turned in. He was never a fan of those huge warehouses that sold light bulbs and detergent alongside piles of warped lumber and that hired teenage workers who had never built anything.
The winding dirt road at Tracy’s took us past sheds of carefully organized lumber, stacked in big piles. The workers there ride bicycles from shed to shed. A forty-something man in a blue T-shirt stopped to see if we needed help. “You want the third shed,” he said, pointing. “I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.
I parked near the shed, which was really just a big roof protecting the wood from the weather. We stood close enough to breathe in the sweet smell of cut lumber. Sun filtered down through new leaves. Buttercups and dandelions bloomed in the spaces between the sheds. I was grateful for a breeze that kept any bugs away.
“What a perfect day,” I said, and my father nodded.
He pulled his crumpled sheet of paper out of the pockets of his jeans, ambled over to the stack of wood, and ran his rough old hands over the smooth wood. “These will work fine,” he said. He did so love a project.
The worker in the blue shirt returned to help wedge the cut lumber into my van. He paused to listen when my father talked about his earliest memories of working with lumber. “I helped my father build houses,” my father said. “I was about nine when I started. My father was left-handed and I was right-handed, so we made a good team.”
The last house my father and his father ever built together was in 1958, the small Cape Cod that my parents still lived in. His father died soon after, before I was born.
Once the van was full, we drove back to the little office/hardware store near the entrance, and my father wandered happily amongst the shelves to choose a box of nails before paying his bill. My father had more than thirty coffee cans of nails in his basement, but a new project always required at least one brand new box of shiny nails just the way the first day of school requires new pencils and pens.
We stopped at my father’s favorite doughnut shop on the way home. He loved the old-fashioned doughnuts, the kind you can dip into hot coffee. We bought extra so that he could deliberately let them go stale, which is how he liked them.
He did build the porch. And paint it too, white to match the house. But that was my father’s last trip to the lumberyard, his last project. That autumn his health declined rapidly, his Parkinson’s dementia ramped up: scary, difficult months that ended with him dying in the downstairs bedroom of the house that he and his father had built.
“Where’s my husband?” my mother asks again, for perhaps the third time that day. It’s almost June, just about a year from that last trip to buy lumber and nails.
I look my mother in the eye and say, “He’s at the hardware store.”
My mother smiles, satisfied.
Maybe I’m not lying. I like to think that in the afterlife, my father is wandering happily through a hardware store or lumberyard, planning his next project.
Janine DeBaise
My mother has lived in my house for five months now, but she will still ask, “Where am I? When am I going home?” When I ask if she’s hungry, she nods, but she can’t request any specific food because she has lost those words. Sometimes she remembers my father—or at least the concept that she had a husband—but she doesn’t remember that he died last winter, just a few days short of his ninety-fifth birthday, only three days short of their sixty-eighth wedding anniversary.
“Where’s my husband?” she asks.
We discussed after the funeral what to tell her.
“Keep in mind,” my daughter advised, “tone of voice is more important than anything else to the Alzheimer’s brain.” My daughter’s PhD in psychology gives her insight into the brain that the rest of us do not have.
So the first time my mother asked, I took a breath and made my voice gentle. I put a hand on her arm.
“Oh, Mom,“ I said. “He’s in heaven.”
At first, that answer worked.
But then one morning in a rare moment of lucidity, she responded: “What? He’s dead? That can’t be right.”
I looked into her horrified face and thought, I can’t do this. I can’t tell her over and over again that her husband is dead.
So next time she asked, I said, “He’s upstairs, resting.”
I looked over at my daughter, who was sitting on the couch with her two young daughters. “I’m using metaphors now,” I said.
“Not a metaphor,” my daughter said. “I mean, if you think about it.” My father’s urn was upstairs on a shelf, waiting for the ground to thaw for burial.
“Resting upstairs” worked for a few weeks. But then my mother tried to go up the stairs, child safety gates be damned. We needed a different answer.
Coming up with a response was harder than you might think. Until my father’s death, my parents were inseparable. I couldn’t think of a place to name that wouldn’t make my mother feel bad that she hadn’t gone with him. They didn’t go out very often, but they both enjoyed the little Italian restaurant where my oldest sister worked until her death, and the lakeside inn where Dad’s lifelong friend Dick Walter worked as a bartender back in the 1950s. Mom and Dad took walks together every day. They even worked together until their retirement.
My husband came up with a solution. “The hardware store.”
That was the one place my father went without my mother. He was always working on a project—fixing that leak in the roof or building doll furniture for a grandchild or designing a new rudder for his wooden sailboat. When I was a child, he often let me tag along.
The local hardware store was run by the Fisher family. We’d walk in, and the man behind the counter—Jim Fisher—would gesture to my father and launch into a story for the other customers: “This man came in and bought a sewer pipe, and you know what he did with it? He built a telescope!” Jim loved to regale customers with the story of the Great Wind Machine. That’s what my father called it. At camp, we had no electricity, but we wanted to play card games at night, so my father bought sheet metal and designed a windmill that powered a car battery hooked to a single light bulb. My father’s quirky projects gave the Fisher brothers endless entertainment.
I myself love a hardware store, filled with nails and hinges and cleats, possibilities spread out like the blank page of a new journal. Walking through a lumberyard, smelling all that newly cut wood, brings back memories of watching my father work on his latest project. The whir of a table saw reminds me of the childhood winter when I sat at the top of the basement stairs and watched my father build an eighteen-foot sailboat.
The June before my father died, he asked me to drive him to his favorite lumberyard. He was ninety-four but still fiercely independent, and he was building a new little front porch on his house. He’d sketched his plan out on paper; he knew exactly how many two-by-fours he needed, how many planks of one-by-three decking. But he needed my van (and my muscle, although he wouldn’t admit that) for transporting the wood.
He chose Tracy’s lumberyard, of course. “It’s a real lumber store,” he said to me as we turned in. He was never a fan of those huge warehouses that sold light bulbs and detergent alongside piles of warped lumber and that hired teenage workers who had never built anything.
The winding dirt road at Tracy’s took us past sheds of carefully organized lumber, stacked in big piles. The workers there ride bicycles from shed to shed. A forty-something man in a blue T-shirt stopped to see if we needed help. “You want the third shed,” he said, pointing. “I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.
I parked near the shed, which was really just a big roof protecting the wood from the weather. We stood close enough to breathe in the sweet smell of cut lumber. Sun filtered down through new leaves. Buttercups and dandelions bloomed in the spaces between the sheds. I was grateful for a breeze that kept any bugs away.
“What a perfect day,” I said, and my father nodded.
He pulled his crumpled sheet of paper out of the pockets of his jeans, ambled over to the stack of wood, and ran his rough old hands over the smooth wood. “These will work fine,” he said. He did so love a project.
The worker in the blue shirt returned to help wedge the cut lumber into my van. He paused to listen when my father talked about his earliest memories of working with lumber. “I helped my father build houses,” my father said. “I was about nine when I started. My father was left-handed and I was right-handed, so we made a good team.”
The last house my father and his father ever built together was in 1958, the small Cape Cod that my parents still lived in. His father died soon after, before I was born.
Once the van was full, we drove back to the little office/hardware store near the entrance, and my father wandered happily amongst the shelves to choose a box of nails before paying his bill. My father had more than thirty coffee cans of nails in his basement, but a new project always required at least one brand new box of shiny nails just the way the first day of school requires new pencils and pens.
We stopped at my father’s favorite doughnut shop on the way home. He loved the old-fashioned doughnuts, the kind you can dip into hot coffee. We bought extra so that he could deliberately let them go stale, which is how he liked them.
He did build the porch. And paint it too, white to match the house. But that was my father’s last trip to the lumberyard, his last project. That autumn his health declined rapidly, his Parkinson’s dementia ramped up: scary, difficult months that ended with him dying in the downstairs bedroom of the house that he and his father had built.
“Where’s my husband?” my mother asks again, for perhaps the third time that day. It’s almost June, just about a year from that last trip to buy lumber and nails.
I look my mother in the eye and say, “He’s at the hardware store.”
My mother smiles, satisfied.
Maybe I’m not lying. I like to think that in the afterlife, my father is wandering happily through a hardware store or lumberyard, planning his next project.