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I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t butting heads with my dad about something and that often included loud fights. We had so much in common, but also drew vastly different conclusions from our experiences. But we were able to spend his last month together without any arguing.
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He requested his favorite meals from me and let me prepare him some new things that he’d never eaten before. Once he’d decided to cease dialysis and medication, he went all in on foods that conflicted with those medications. Grapefruit especially.
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He told all kinds of stories, many from his youth in Bedford–Stuyvesant. I’d heard some of them before, but there were so many that he’d previously withheld, I think because the vulnerability they represented was something he feared sharing.
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He was a Brooklyn boy until his late 20s when he and my mom married. Then for less than a decade they lived in the NJ suburbs where my siblings and I were all born. And then those two city kids leaped into their unknown of rural life, took us across the country to the PNW.
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That’s when he returned to the USPS (he’d worked there for less than a year shortly after HS) and built a log cabin where we all grew up and where my parents lived until a few years ago. They were DIYers, and I got that from them.
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This is where the ~PSA comes in. I don’t know exactly why it occurred to me, but as I traveled north by train to be with my dad last month, knowing he likely didn’t have much time left, I thought maybe I can make his casket. (I knew he wanted a burial in “a simple wooden box.”)
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When I brought it up here and there, many people wondered “is that allowed” or “is it hard” or whatever. It’s certainly not for everyone. And I imagine there are different regulations in different places. But, for me, it was allowed and it wasn’t so hard even with limited tools.
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For me, building the casket was a perfect way to spend the days after my dad died, an aide i grieving. I had some help from some family members and they said that was good for them too.
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