One day, out of the blue, my dad decided to turn our back porch into a screened-in back porch with a big cathedral ceiling. We didn’t need a screened-in porch with a big cathedral ceiling. No one had asked for one. The existing porch worked just fine and wasn’t even that old. He’d never even mentioned the project until the day the work crews showed up.
The project dragged on forever, but my extremely impatient and cheap father never complained about the delays or the money once, which was beyond weird. Then it dawned on me and my siblings: Dad was convinced that as long as the porch was under construction, our mother, who had late stage cancer, wouldn’t die. We thought he was nuts. Maybe he was. But the fact is that Mom enjoyed many afternoons on that beautiful, completed screened-in porch before she left us.