A House for My Father
On grief, architecture, and the rooms we build for the people we've lost
This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.
What Chapter Are You…
Leaving:
I am no longer wandering or aimless.
In:
I’m in the “questioning all of my career and life choices” phase of midlife (and that stage of grief after losing my beloved dad).
Entering:
I am a seeker: intentional and hungry for joy.
“I need to build a house for him,” I told my husband every morning the week after my father died. Every night, I dreamt of walking through open houses with my dad, the way we had when I was a child and teenager. In my dreams, we were looking for a home for him. When I woke each morning, I tried to sketch what I had seen. I was trying to design the perfect place for him, wherever he was.
I was six years old when my dad designed our family home. In the blueprints, he drew every bedroom, bathroom, and corridor. He placed a swinging door between the dining room and the kitchen because, as he put it, “You shouldn’t have to cross the house to get from the dining room to the kitchen.” Then he would make me imagine carrying heavy platters of food. “You don’t want to travel far.”
Architecture was only a hobby for him. On weekends, he built entire worlds: train sets with towns arranged around them, and dollhouse rooms for my sister and me. During phone calls for his day job as an attorney, he doodled floor plans. I copied him.
“Don’t forget a powder room and a coat closet — both near the front door,” he reminded me when I was eight. “Rookie mistake, forgetting those. And every house needs a mudroom, where kids can take off their shoes and leave their backpacks. Combine it with the laundry room and put it by the back door or off the garage.”
He had firm beliefs. “Contemporary houses are cold.” “Living rooms are wasted space. The American family isn’t that formal anymore. If a living room already exists in a house, close it off, design built-in bookshelves, and turn it into a library or home office. Great rooms are the perfect combination of family room and living room.” He was also a big fan of entry courtyards and double-sided indoor/outdoor fireplaces.
I took it all in as I drafted. My staircases looked like ladders. Nothing was to scale. This made him laugh, but never in a mean way.
Late on Sunday afternoons, after temple services and Packers games were over, my dad and I drove around Milwaukee visiting open houses. We weren’t looking to buy; we were looking for fun. If he couldn’t see a powder room and a coat closet upon entry, or a mudroom near the garage, he knew we were in a poorly designed house. And he said so.
The houses he designed always made sense. They connected and flowed seamlessly from room to room. The houses I designed were at first influenced almost entirely by my father’s preferences. Then I branched out, drafting small cabins intended for Door County, the lake town in northern Wisconsin. “I love this loft idea,” he would say to me. “Great use of space.” Or, “Is that a built-in wood dining table and booth on the backyard boat dock? Nice!” He always paid such close attention.
When I visited him in his nursing home — a cold, disconnected space with the facade of a colonial home — as he slowly died of Parkinson’s disease and dementia, I retold my dad our house-design stories. He was only in his early 70s when he became nonverbal. “Remember that house in Bayside with carpet on the walls?” He would give me one of his rare but coveted half-smiles of recognition. I know he remembered.
For five years, we watched this giant of a man be slowly dismantled by disease. The injustice of his illness wrecked me. He had worked so hard his entire life, but never got the chance to enjoy the retirement he’d earned. After his death, I drifted through days in a fog of grief, unable to fathom that my dad was no longer in the world. I felt almost childlike in my confusion. “Where is he?” I would murmur to my husband. “He needs somewhere to be.”
A few months later, during a particularly rainy winter in Los Angeles, I arrived at the stage of grief where I began questioning all of my life choices, including the one that had led me away from architecture. I had wanted to be an architect for most of my childhood and teen years. One year, I asked for and received a drafting desk for my birthday. I memorized the names of every swatch in the books my mom brought home from the local fabric store.
After drawing houses, I would furnish them in my head. The summer before my senior year of high school, I toured a few colleges with excellent architecture programs, but at 18, committing to a career felt impossibly premature. So I chose a strong liberal arts college. In becoming well-rounded, I drifted away from my early passion. Twenty-five years later, and especially now that my dad was gone, I felt as though I had given up on a dream before even officially trying.
I became a writer, which has its own similarities to architecture. In both, you create something out of nothing. I build with words. When I sketch a house or craft an essay, I can feel my heart rate quicken. My face flushes a bit. It has always been this way.
Like my dad, whenever I doodle, I doodle floor plans — guest houses, artist studios, pool houses, even stables. I have crushes on houses. After a trip to Palm Springs, I became infatuated with midcentury modern style and read everything I could about Jack Meiselman and Bob Alexander. It finally made sense to sign up for an online architecture course at the local college.
“Oh, we have so many beautiful things to see!” the teacher, a slightly older woman barely able to contain her excitement, exclaimed on Zoom. It was the online version of a giant lecture hall course, my first meeting of Introduction to Architecture, and I already knew my father would have loved it. I had to stop myself from searching the hundred little Zoom boxes for his face.
“Let’s get started!” the teacher said, and I felt something stir in my chest.
The class was a feast for the senses: textiles, furniture styles, color chips, columns, coffered ceilings, and carved walls. We learned bits of architectural trivia, like how a red door on a house now means “welcome,” but once meant, “We have daughters of marriageable age.” Like an early version of Match.com. My dad would have gotten a kick out of that.
During the first weeks of my online class, I took notes and wondered if I was subconsciously taking them for him. I imagined us talking on the phone after each class: “What did she mean by adaptive reuse?” I imagined him making bad jokes after the textiles class, like “God DAMask!”
I knew he would have fallen in love with Spanish-style architecture, with its yellows and blues for sun and sea. He would have laughed, as I did, at words like Churrigueresque, which the teacher described as “like frosting on the front of a Baroque building.” In my head, I was giving him the second act he deserved.
As much as I enjoyed it, the class became difficult to attend, even virtually. It was only one night a week for 12 weeks, but my husband was working long hours, and my preteens needed me at night. Often, I would half-listen with one earbud in and the other out, trying to stay connected to the lecture while still hearing my children.
I began to resent the homework. I didn’t have time to write four term papers about houses when my own house seemed to be crumbling around me. As heavy rains doused Los Angeles, our roof started to leak in three places. Then a pipe burst beneath the house. My days became consumed by roofing estimates and research into pipe materials to replace the corroded ones beneath us. My nights were spent awake, listening to rain drip into bowls and pots in every bedroom.
Right after I dropped the class, my eleven-year-old daughter drew intricate floor plans for a four-story school. She said she had learned by watching me. She was so proud of the amphitheater and the smaller black-box theater, the indoor pool and two-story library, the science lab separate from the robotics lab. It was her dream school, she said.
I knew in that moment where my dad was. He was right there, watching my daughter with me.
I’m not sure I want to be an architect anymore. Maybe architecture was an excuse to be close to my dad when I was growing up and, now, a way to be closer to the memory of him. My home as an adult abides by so many of his beliefs: our living room has more than one purpose; our kitchen is next to the dining room; there is a coat closet and powder room near the foyer. I know that to build a home, you need patience, connection, and flow. I have also learned, on my own, that rainy seasons come and go, but slate roofs are the best protection, copper pipes are worth the expense, and our children benefit from us paying close attention.
Last night, with my daughter watching beside me, I sketched a two-story traditional house to all of his specifications: an entry courtyard, a double-sided indoor/outdoor fireplace, and a place, wherever he is, for my dad to keep warm.
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