Mom told us everything. In the winter of 1988, Dad lost his job at the sawmill and then collapsed in this very barn with chest pains. The doctor said his heart was failing and gave him a year, maybe less. Dad never told us kids. He was terrified of leaving Mom with bills she couldn’t pay, because just months earlier, her own father had died and the family had barely scraped together enough for a burial. Dad had watched her sell her mother’s ring to cover it, and he promised himself she would never go through that again.

So he spent three freezing weeks building his own casket from oak boards he had saved for a porch swing. He carved the message on the lid, then asked Mom to hide it under the tarp and promise never to speak of it until he was gone. The doctors turned out to be wrong, and he lived decades more, yet neither of them ever moved it. Mom said she could not bring herself to burn the proof of how much he loved her.

Darren sank onto an overturned bucket and covered his face. He admitted he had been drowning in debt since losing his own job in the spring, and he had been too ashamed to tell anyone, so he had taken it out on Dad’s funeral. Mom did not scold him. She took his hand and said a man who hides his hurt is no different from the one who built this box. Then she asked him to be one of the four men to carry his father.

The director arrived with his truck, lifted the lid, and admitted he had never seen finer craftsmanship. On Tuesday, half the county filled the church, many of them neighbors whose porches Dad had built. Darren carried the front corner with his own hands, and I held Mom’s arm all the way to the grave. She whispered that she was finally done waiting alone, and for the first time in decades, the barn stood empty.