Furnishing Eternity Read online

  There’s an ancient term for the grave: “the long home.” It appears in the Bible, in Ecclesiastes: “and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.”

  And desire shall fail. I wonder maybe if that’s what death really is. The end of wanting.

  So now this box was a clumsy wooden thing between me and my dad that couldn’t stand without us. A long home. The scent of dust; a shared labor; a warm room. And a trust—more than anything else, at least for now, a trust that there was some purpose in this, and that one or the other or maybe both of us would come to its truth.

  We looked at each other and chuckled at our conundrum. We were kind of trapped. Neither of us could let go.

  “Now what?” I said.

  “Slide your hands forward and squeeze the sides tight,” he said after a long consideration. “I’ll put some clamps on it to hold it together.”

  I stood with my arms trapping the pale blond wood together, pressing hard toward the center. My dad grabbed a small armload of the longer furniture clamps and began to set them. “You can let go now,” he said. I stepped back and looked at it. He was at my side. “It’s starting to look like something,” he said.

  “It is,” I said.

  It was big. It was bigger than I imagined it would be. Deeper. For some reason, that was my main impression: that if I were inside, I would be lost in its depth. I had a fleeting image of drowning, that somehow if I were inside and my head passed below the surface of the opening, I would be swallowed up.

  “What should we do now?” I said.

  “No turning back. Next step is to put it all together. But I’m out of glue. And we’re gonna need a lot.”

  “I guess we just walk away from it for now.”

  “Yep. Stop on your way home and pick up two big bottles.”

  I grabbed my thermos and pushed open the heavy glass-paneled door, pulling my coat from where it hung on the hook just outside.

  “Get the good stuff,” my dad said. “We don’t need the bottom dropping out of this thing.”

  * * *

  I have a theory that I’m sure is true. The only reason humans continue to explore new horizons is as an excuse to purchase new tools. I suspect that Lewis and Clark set off for the American West primarily because it would allow them to buy cool new spyglasses and hiking staffs. Space exploration has always, to me, seemed secondary in the NASA mission, with the real purpose being the development of badass hardware and innovative methods of defying gravity and ingenious systems to deliver liquefied hamburgers to the digestive system. Anyone who was an eight-year-old boy witnessing the Apollo 15 moon buggy’s debut knows damn well exactly what was going on. A high-level government scientist had just built a space dragster.

  At the same time my dad and I were assembling the box, my city’s mayor was making a bold proposition. Faced with the daunting necessity of a $1.4 billion sewer overhaul project, he proposed that the city start its own construction company to boost local employment. As a way to kick-start this, he set out to purchase six concrete trucks and four dump trucks. The plan failed, but I totally got it. After all, I had once come dangerously close to buying a dump truck myself.

  It was only a matter of time before the truth of my dad’s Christmas request revealed itself. He’d designed the corners of the box as rabbet joints, with the mitered ends intentionally left long, so after they were joined, they could be trimmed precisely and sanded smooth and flush. We had finally glued the four sides together, forming a frame, still with no bottom. Now that the box was assembled, those long rabbet ends stuck out about a quarter inch. As I ran my thumb down one of these, I asked how we were going to cut off the excess.

  “That’s what the trim router is for,” my father said.

  Now I understood. This hundred-dollar specialty tool had been acquired for a single step in my project.

  He went to his workbench and opened the top of the yellow cardboard box, removing the router and the accessories in their clear plastic packaging. Setting the instructions aside, he turned the router upside down and figured out how to open the chuck. Then he went over to one of the dusty shelves on the wall and pulled out the old wooden bourbon box where he stored his router bits. He found the one he wanted, tightened it into the chuck, then clicked the switch.

  Whhhhzzzzzzzzz!

  The tool whined in a pleasing oscillation of speed and power. Gripping its small casing with one hand, Dad approached the nearest corner of the box, set his feet in position, lowered himself slightly so his eyes were level with the corner, and eased the router’s guide plate along the edge of the box. Cautiously, he worked the spinning bit into the overlap of pine. A plume of rough sawdust flew upward, and the air filled with the piping howl of sharp steel chewing wood. He moved the tool upward, slowly and sure-handedly, as I stood watching.

  “Nothing like having the right tool,” he called above the high tenor of the spinning steel. He grinned.

  When he had finished several passes with the router, he shut off the switch and waited till the blade stopped spinning.

  “Wanna try?” he offered.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” I said.

  “Take it slow,” he warned. “And make sure you’ve got the guide tight against the end. If it starts to roll, you’ll ruin the corner.”

  I thumbed the switch and felt the torque take its own control. Holding the tool with both hands, I tentatively maneuvered it into place, then inched it into its first cut. Hot dust spewed from the hole at the center of the clear plastic guide, and after six inches or so, I began to feel my confidence. I adjusted my stance, finding the balance between me and this tool, its thrilling newness. My dad stood back near the door, overseeing. I glanced at him. He nodded. I kept going. At one point, I pushed too hard and the bit protested, whinnying. I eased back on the pressure. The router settled back in.

  When I was finished, I turned off the switch and ran my thumb along the newly planed edge. Satisfied, I looked up at my father, wondering if he was ready for another turn. His arms were folded. He gestured with one hand.

  “It’s your coffin. Keep going.”

  22: MARKING TIME

  * * *

  My first time inside my coffin was not exactly what I’d imagined.

  I was squatting on the cold concrete floor of the workshop, craning my neck into the unfinished wooden box, which was resting upside down on sawhorses. I’d been firing the nail gun from above into the plywood bottom, attaching it to the frame, and had missed the mark with a few of the nails, leaving them protruding through the plywood. I’d crawled underneath with a nail puller and was extracting the errant shanks. As morbid as assembling one’s own casket might seem, more morbid yet would be to lie down in it one day on a bed of one’s own sloppily driven nails.

  As I squinted up into the darkened pine-scented interior, head and shoulders fully enclosed, my dad continued working outside. Each firing of a nail KA-CHUNK! into the wood was compressed KA-CHUNK! and amplified, a dense KA-CHUNK! concussion that caused me to recoil, worrying with each KA-CHUNK! that I’d be shot dead should a nail pierce through the three-quarter-inch plywood, enter my skull, and send me to the most ironic death imaginable. One of my long-standing goals is not to die an ironic death.

  About that plywood. As with everything thing else having to do with wood choice on this project, my father had insisted we needed to buy a pressure-treated sheet, the chemical-greenish lumber intended to inhibit termites and decay and so forth. I had reminded him again that decomposition was an unavoidable consequence, and there was little benefit to its delay. Also, the pressure-treated was more expensive. I’d bought a regular sheet.

  It wasn’t until I was fully engaged in the work of nail pulling, feeling like I was being carpet-bombed from above by a nail gun, that it occurred to me: I was indeed inside my casket for the first time. I’d caught it—and myself—unaware, ente
ring from below, before it was ready. I liked it. It felt close and intimate. Warmer than the rest of the room. It smelled good. I didn’t even mind the sound now that I’d gotten used to it. I love rock and roll enough to appreciate good amplification and tone, and this box had the profound resonance of an AC/DC drum riff.

  When I finally emerged, lying on my stomach and shinnying out from underneath, I made the announcement to my dad. “Well, that’s it,” I said above the continuing thrum of the air compressor, brushing sawdust from my shirtfront. “I have been inside my coffin.”

  “Yeah? How’d you like it in there?”

  “Loud,” I said.

  “Enough to wake the dead?”

  “Something like that.”

  The bottom was attached. When we’d finished cleaning up the bits of excess glue that had squeezed out of the joints, we eased the coffin off the sawhorses and stood it on end. I stepped back and looked at it. And what I saw standing vertically there was not a casket. What I saw, suddenly and unexpectedly, was a bookcase. A very heavy, decently proportioned, overbuilt, and baroquely conceived bookcase.

  I made a quick calculation. Shelves could be mounted in a way that they could be removed later, with only small holes where the brackets had been. And those holes could be filled, or they could be left as part of the story. And those shelves could hold anything, for as long as I was alive.

  “Dad,” I said. “I think I’ve just found an elegant solution.”

  * * *

  Winter got hardcore serious. The snow mounds in the driveway grew and grew, and they never melted. Usually, Ohio experiences a spasmodic freeze-thaw cycle that leaves a profound abundance of potholes. But this winter had been uniformly arctic. As with everything else about the challenges of living in northern Ohio, I relished the fight and rose to it. I am a meticulous shoveler—no snowblower for me!—and by late January, the sculpted walls of snow lining the edges of my long driveway were likely visible from the International Space Station. The white architecture was a proud achievement, and I protested with undue harshness when my new-driver daughter backed into one of the snow walls and left a big bumper divot. There were days when the snow was incessant, and I’d shovel two or three times between dawn and dark and sometimes beyond just to keep ahead. I’d maintained a shoveled path to allow the dog to go out, the rest of the backyard being too deep for her short beagle legs. By February, that opening looked like a stage-set passageway for the Ice Capades, if the Ice Capades included a circle of poop.

  Another semester had begun, and the visits to my dad’s barn tailed off. I made a few treks out there over the course of the continuing winter, my boots squeaking on the narrow snowblower path he’d maintained from the house to the barn, and we accomplished some small steps of progress, but as before, the flurry of activity during my break from school gave way to more pressing concerns. My dad always had plenty to keep him busy.

  I missed our time together in the shop, but he continued coming over every Sunday for dinner. I had friends whose aging parents had become a burden in one way or another—emotional, financial, physical. I knew lots of people who’d been through the hell of Alzheimer’s. I think the most difficult challenge has to be the parent whose demeanor changes radically, either through disease or the increasing crankiness that accompanies the discomfort of age or whatever the decline of life entails, a grinding down of the old charisma, so that an adult child finds himself visiting with the person he has known longer than anyone else, but it is no longer the same person. This happened with my mother in her later years, when her carefree, adventurous spirit gave way to the pain of her body and the rising force of her mortality, and conversations with her narrowed themselves into the subjects of her health and her discomfort. She was still generous with her love, but these moments came as less frequent counterpoints to her dark and quiet distress.

  My dad, though, had remained good and welcome company. He had season tickets with my brother Louis to the University of Akron football and basketball games, and dinner invitations that filled his weekends and many of his weeknights. My brothers and our dad and I began attending monthly beer-tasting dinners at a favorite local restaurant, and very quickly, our father became the unofficial mascot of these events, always greeted with particular cheer by the chef and owner, who had nicknamed him “The Monsignor” and doted on him, keeping his glass full. I realized that winter that I was spending more time with my eighty-two-year-old father, and in the same kinds of social pursuits, than I had been spending with John in the final years of our life together. And often my dad had more stamina than I did. Some Sundays, as he and Gina and I and our daughter, Lia, sat in a foursquare euchre arrangement, I, a person who had always taken pride in my own endurance, was the one to declare that this would be the last round, otherwise he might keep us all up well past midnight.

  One Sunday, I invited him to come over early. The Richard Linklater film Boyhood had just been released on DVD, and I’d borrowed a friend’s copy. The movie had intrigued me for the same reasons it intrigued a lot of people, filmed in annual sessions over the course of twelve years, as a boy (both the actor, Ellar Coltrane, and his character, Mason Evans, Jr.) grows up in real time on the screen, along with his family, from ages six to eighteen. But it also intrigued me for more distinctly personal reasons. Ellar/Mason was just a year younger than my son, Evan, and the main focus of the film was his relationship with his father; father/son relationships were a consuming fascination of mine for increasingly complex reasons. This film fed straight into my appetite for high-concept narrative, and I intended to add a meta-wrinkle by placing my own three generations of men together on the couch to watch it.

  This, of course, failed. For one thing, the movie was long and slow-developing, yet I had created a situation in which neither my dad nor Evan felt like they could just watch idly, or wander off if they wanted to. I, an emotive person, had essentially made hostages of two patently nonemotive people—a civil engineer who came of age under Eisenhower and a self-conscious teenager who himself had not yet fully come of age. We sat in a row on the sofa, knee to knee in the darkened living room, staring at the screen. Slowly, everyone aged.

  I don’t think either of them disliked the movie, necessarily. Evan responded more than once with mild glee at recognitions that he’d been the same age when a certain bit of pop culture—Game Boy Advance SP, Soulja Boy—would intersect with Mason’s life. When, after nearly three hours, the credits finally rolled, Dad set his palms on his knees, stood up, stretched, and announced that it was time for Manhattans, and we reverted to our usual unstudied chairs in the kitchen, where Gina was cooking something that smelled delicious.

  Date: 2/24/15

  Subject: Cleve Clinic

  From: [dad]

  Had my 9 month follow up today. 3 Things:

  1. The chronic cough is related to the treatment. The developing scar tissue is somehow interfering with the left lung air passage. He gave me some strong cough medication for temp. relief and some mild steroid treatments to alleviate it. This is nature’s cure method. If this doesn’t work, there is a procedure to correct which is last resort.

  2. The CT Scan shows that the tumor is shrunk with no signs of life. Like spraying a wasp with wasp spray.

  3. CT Scan also revealed a new tumor in right lung, small but capable of growth. There may be other new, tiny tumors lurking and he wants to identify and treat the whole. He is scheduling a PT Scan for next week. Nothing here I haven’t been through before. I’ll give more detail when I have time. Right now I’m going to eat my Swenson’s Galley Boy and choc milkshake and head to the St. V game.

  This email represented a confusing bit of déjà vu, a lung tumor diagnosis coming exactly a year after the previous lung tumor diagnosis. It all blurred together—the diagnosis, the treatment options, the decision to undergo a week of daily radiation blasts, and the way these things kept happening on the anniversaries of other things, so that the years were beginning to line up, for me, as benchmar
ks of disease and dying. I found myself again running math through my head, trying to put things in order.

  2011: John and Dad, cancer.

  2012: John and Dad, better; Mom died.

  2013: John died; Dad new cancer, left lung.

  2014: Dad, better; no one died.

  2015: Dad, new cancer, right lung.

  This logic process was beginning to resemble the bookshelves in my office. My books are arranged chronologically in the order I read them, and I almost rabidly maintain them in this order. Whenever they’ve been moved, I’ve meticulously replaced them in sequence, afraid of the consequences if that were lost. The importance has only grown as time—and the corresponding number of spines on the shelves—has gone on.

  I can touch any spine in that collection and immediately recall exactly where and when I read that book. If I were asked, I couldn’t tell you, for instance, what year we visited Virginia for a family wedding. I’m pretty sure it was 1997. Except I know I read T. C. Boyle’s Riven Rock during the car trip, and as I approach the shelf now, I can hone in on the tangible chronology and declare with surgical precision that it was December 1998. These books don’t just keep a time line. Their bindings and pages trace a narrative of who I was at every step along the path of my life. They tell me who I am by way of where I have been.

  In the same way, the confounding blur of illness and suffering and death of the past several years regains a linear coherence through the chronology of cancer: Mom’s throat, John’s esophagus, Dad’s throat, John’s lungs, Dad’s left lung, Dad’s right lung, etc. These are the markers by which I identify when other events occurred. But that linear coherence is indeed shot through with other life events not connected to death and disease. Even as my dad’s new diagnosis represented a new volume in this collection, a greater balance was continuing to form for me, with other, brighter events holding their space along the time line. Dad’s lung tumor, for instance, coincided with the celebration of John’s memorial exhibit; John’s decline accompanied Evan’s symbolic passage into manhood.