by Dan Robson
The doctor looks down at his chart and then back up at us, and begins to speak. He says something about the previous doctor and something about the size of the stroke. It was massive.
“All we could do was wait,” he says.
All we could do…
“The swelling…” he says.
Wait.
“In our opinion, there is no chance for any quality of life.”
Wait.
And it hits.
Jenna first. Jai follows. Mom folds over. A sharp, rising cry. I float above my body, watching them fall to the floor, watching myself stand still, staring at the doctor, hearing his words on loop, trying to process this moment—the moment I know my father will die.
I’ve thought of this moment many times before, ever since I first learned about death—when both of my grandfathers passed away, when I was old enough to know what it meant that they were never coming back. I’d dealt with bouts of severe anxiety in the years after, unable to spend nights away from my parents, worrying when they left us with a sitter, watching the clock if they took an evening walk. It was the kind of electric anxiety you can feel in your entire body. I overcame it with age and reason, but it’s always lived inside of me. That old current jolts through me now as I float, watching myself stare at the doctor.
The rage follows. I feel it in my lungs. What were we doing all this time? Watching him die? This man let my father die. Did you even try? Is there nothing else we can do? Why are you here—why aren’t you trying?
Then it all falls away, like a crashed wave. I am back in my body and my mind. Seconds have passed. My mother and sisters are sobbing on the floor and I don’t know where my father is. I’m a boy standing beside his bed in the dark of a haunted night, but he’s not there. I can’t speak. I can’t move. I can’t cry.
I stare at the doctor.
Then I hear my voice asking, “What do we do now?”
“We wait,” he says.
But he doesn’t mean we’re waiting for a second opinion, or even for some kind of miracle. He’s saying it’s only a matter of time; the clock is running down. We’re waiting for him to die.
It’s seven-thirty p.m. The doors at the end of the hall open. My aunt comes through first. My uncle follows behind, pushing my grandmother in a wheelchair. And I’m floating again, watching. I meet them before they reach my sisters and mom.
“He’s not going to make it.” I hear myself saying it—and again it’s some automatic version of me, operating while I’m weightless.
They melt beneath me. I’ve never seen my uncle weep. He folds over like the others. My grandmother’s head falls forward as she cries. She’s lived for more than eight decades and I’ve never seen her unhappy. It’s the most horrible, unsettling sight. I get down on my knees and hug her. I feel her tears on my cheek.
“Rick,” she says. My father’s name.
I don’t cry, still. I feel everything and nothing.
I don’t know how we get to the room, but now we’re standing outside of it and I hug my sisters and say something about how it’s okay, it’s going to be all right—something that Dad would say. I hold them hard, as he would too. But I don’t believe it’s true. Nothing is all right.
We agree to go in alone to say goodbye.
In my younger days when I thought about my father dying, I’d picture myself standing beside his bed and speaking to him one last time while he looked up at me and we shared a proper goodbye. But it was always sometime in the faraway future, like when you imagine what it will be like to be an old man looking back on your life. It was something that time tells you will come but that always seems so impossibly far off, until it isn’t.
There would be no final conversation, because there never really is. I walk in, floating still. He looks like he’s sleeping. I kneel down beside him and kiss his forehead. It’s warm and damp. He breathes softly, through a machine. I stare at his closed eyes, trying to will them open, begging him to come back from the faraway place where he’s drifted.
I hold his hand and squeeze it.
“I love you, Dad.”
He doesn’t squeeze back.
We wait fourteen more hours, watching him die.
More waves crash and I finally cry, several times through the night. I weep on his chest—deep, heaving sobs. I can’t hold it in. Dozens of family friends have come through the night to say goodbye, though I won’t remember who. Some pray for a miracle. Some weep, too.
Dad snores through much of it, restless and working to the end. I don’t know where his last dreams take him, but mine stay there, on the rise and fall of his chest—breathing and breathing. Breathing, forever.
2
The tool bag sits on the laundry room floor, exactly where he always left it. It lies beneath a row of old winter coats hanging from a rack nailed to walls painted a shade of peach that went out of style two decades ago. I’m soaked right through. Outside, it’s pouring. Thin legs of rain drip down the small window above the utility sink, lightning flashing through the downpour.
It’s the middle of the afternoon on the day my father died.
Dad exhaled for the last time at nine-thirty a.m. I watched his breath leave. We sat there, waiting for his chest to rise again, until it hit us one by one. This was the long pause that becomes the end. I watched his face go pale and harden. I cried hard then too. Probably the hardest I would.
And it was done.
I left the room quickly, because I couldn’t see him like that. But I’d left my bag behind, and had to go back a few minutes later. From the door, I saw my two grandmothers, both in their nineties, sitting on chairs beside his body. They held hands but didn’t speak. They were more familiar with the pause than any of us could be, but nothing in their long lives had prepared them for an endless gap as hollow and wide as this.
I walked in behind them, to the corner where I’d planned to write thousands of words but couldn’t come up with one. Dad’s body lay impossibly still, like a model of his image—but it wasn’t him. Standing next to my grandmothers, I took one last long look at his face, trying to memorize the shape of him before he became a ghost.
And now we’re back in the house where I grew up, and I don’t remember how I got here. I can hear a muted crowd just beyond the laundry room door. The voices are soft and sad, an incoherent hum. They’ve brought lasagnas, small sandwiches, and flowers—offered with mourning smiles and here-for-you hugs. I should be out there, in the hall, greeting them, thanking them. I should frown with them, and return their hugs and firm handshakes, and thank them for taking the time, for showing that they care. Because they do. I’m sure of it.
But I can’t take my eyes off my father’s tool bag.
It is black and grey, its soft case still thick and rough and sturdy. Quality before everything, he’d say. He’d buy one to last forever, but forever has come and gone. Now it’s filled with all the tools he’d accumulated over the decades, made of steel and meant to serve a lasting purpose, but stripped of all utility without the one person in this house who knew how to use them.
The old hammer with its brown leather grip, so worn and slick it was a marvel it didn’t go flying on every back swing; the small metal level that ensured no picture or shelf ever hung crooked; the chalk reel that laid out perfect lines; a screwdriver for every head.
These were the tools he’d employed with skill and purpose through every stage of his life. He replaced only the ones that went missing after he’d reluctantly lent them out—each with his R.R. initials or Robson signed neatly with a black Sharpie, a permanent reminder that it was his tool, one that had a specific role among the dozens of other absolutely necessary instruments living inside the bag with it. The Unreturned Tool was one of life’s greatest crimes. If you didn’t know that, you likely weren’t the kind of person adept at using them anyway, because in this world there are people wh
o know tools and people who don’t. The moment you swing a hammer, grip a drill, or angle a saw leaves no doubt. There are masters and then there are amateurs. Masters know the code. They stand in a construction job with confident ease. They know of a tool for every problem. Their hands know. They reach in the bag and their brain sorts through the mess of steel instruments as reflexively as a goalie reacting to a shot. They grab the precise one and execute the task. It’s clinical, like a surgeon repairing a broken heart or a mechanic beneath the hood of a dying car. It is serious, precise work.
Amateurs, in contrast, are easy to spot. They fumble and second- guess. They strike out on nail heads. They measure once and cut twice, then thrice—with odd angles and rough edges. They drill too deep, with a wobbly, unsure hand. They hover around employees at Home Depot and ask for help.
A craftsman just knows where things are. The trip is always quick. Ideally, it’s to the local mom-and-pop hardware shop they’ve frequented for decades. But if the Henry’s Hardware has been devoured by a monster big box store, the tool master still knows exactly where to find what they need. It’s instinctual. Ideally, they make the trip only if they absolutely need to—if, say, some rookie has borrowed a tool and forgotten to return it. God that annoyed him.
The tools that sit in my father’s bag, that line the workshop in our garage and his workbench in the basement, always signified something deeply inherent about the kind of person he was. There was, in him, a confident self-reliance. And because of that, a reliance on my father by those who surrounded him. We rely on those who rely on themselves.
These weren’t tools he’d dreamed of mastering. Rather, these were tools of survival and necessity. Tools that made him reliable and exact—tools that made sure every angle was perfect, every screw was secure, every foundation held. These were the tools that made him. Tools he used to mould a life that allowed me to find a different set of tools and a different life entirely.
He’d learned how to use his father’s tools as a boy. It was just assumed that he’d become equally adept with them. Being handy, in his world, was just a part of life.
It wasn’t only that there was value in understanding the mechanical function of tools; it was considered to be a fundamental skill set. A teenager who saved up to buy a new car didn’t just learn how to drive it; he also learned how the machine came to life. As a young man my father turned the oil-stained driveway of his parents’ modest suburban bungalow into his own mechanic shop, taking apart the engine of his tiny yellow Volkswagen Beetle, then later the hulking army-green Toyota Land Cruiser, then upgrading to a roaring blue Firebird.
It was a time when our hands knew the working of the machines in the world around us. They had an essential role in the homes we lived in, the cars we drove. Handiness was still a function of being, at least in the life of the working class.
Today, beyond hobby-making, it seems a lost art. Yet we’re not that far removed from a time when many families actually built their own homes. At the turn of the twentieth century, prairie homesteaders looking for a new beginning were granted land with the expectation that they’d build a house capable of withstanding the notoriously windy, frigid winters of the open plains. Likewise, many of the now million-dollar houses that line the streets of Toronto’s formerly working-class neighbourhoods were constructed, maintained, and repaired by their original owners. A friend’s basement renovation in the west-end community of Roncesvalles recently revealed that a tree stump had been used as a corner foundation. There was a resourceful ingenuity to the art of building. And it wasn’t just a hobby; it was a fundamental part of life.
But there remains something about craftsmanship and handiness—about being able to construct and maintain—that still feels essential. Not necessarily the actual constructing of a home from scratch, but the ability to hold something up and to keep it standing.
There’s an inherent independence that comes with a proficiency with tools. I often think about an Amish family I lived with for a time as part of a university project. They were a family of dairy farmers who lived entirely off the grid, virtually disconnected from the world beyond them. The parents had built the house and two large barns on their property near Kitchener, Ontario, with the help of the local community. Decades later, one of their sons built his house on the same property, adjacent to his parents. The family and their friends helped piece it all together, from the foundation to the roof. They even carved a wide tunnel that connected the basements of the two houses so that through winter nights they could reach each other without facing the snowy winds that ripped across the fields. They lived without electricity. They farmed the land together. They were completely self-sufficient in the function of their home. Anything that needed to be fixed or built was done by them.
By necessity, this family was masterful with their tools. And having been invited into their home for a brief time, fumbling along as I helped in the barn, I witnessed something I lacked: an intimate relationship with the tools and machinery that kept my world functioning in the most basic ways. I wasn’t alone in this. Handiness was an art that had long been devalued in the culture that framed my youth. Ontario’s education system pushed skilled labour to the bottom of the class hierarchy, viewing it as an option for “remedial” students who were unlikely to attend university. Shop class was quietly understood as a place where you wound up rather than a place you aspired to be.
I’ve often wondered about the outcome of that underlying attitude. What have we lost with the increasing expectation that broken things are meant to be discarded and replaced—or, if absolutely necessary, repaired by someone else?
Previous generations of my family had an intimate relationship with tools and handiness. There was pride in repairing your own engine, in building your own fence. It was much more than a do-it-yourself hobby; resourcefulness was part of who we were. It was always that way, until me.
I’d always admired my father for being a master craftsman. Our house was filled with wooden cabinets and dressers he’d built. Our home and yard had been transformed by his skill as a renovator and a contractor. He had assembled the world we lived in and he, quite literally, held it together.
But now?
There is a small puddle at my feet, pooling on the linoleum, and my socks are soaked. I pull my rain jacket over my damp head and hang it on top of several other coats clinging to a single hook. The tool bag is nearly full to the top with the instruments of my father’s wizardry, very few of which I could properly name even though I’d seen him use each one hundreds of times before.
I’ve never seen it zipped closed. It was always wide open, wherever he brought it—sitting in the backseat of his Ford pickup, hauled into my dilapidated university apartment or around the block to his boyhood home to fix up the place where his mother still lived. He’d reach into his bag with a quick glance, or, sifting blindly, he’d feel the shape and weight of the instruments to pull out the perfect one for the job.
The bag sits on top of a solid red case holding a Milwaukee hammer drill that pounds through concrete. A drill for big jobs. A mother of a machine. It kicks back and waywardly if you don’t press with enough confident force. I learned that the hard way, when he tried to show me how.
“Hold it steady, buddy, straight—and push,” he said patiently as the piercing whine of steel-on-concrete ripped through my apartment, a modern concrete shoebox built to have an “industrial” look. Some concrete powder fell to the floor, but the bit went in only a millimetre at most.
“Try again,” he said.
Another horrible, piercing whine. Concrete dust. Another millimetre.
“Hold it steady, and push with all your weight,” he said.
Same result.
“Okay, slow—and make sure it’s not on an angle…Yep, got it.”
I sighed. Horrible whine, concrete dust, nothing.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll do it.”
/>
He took the drill. And done, first try, with no effort. His hands knew something mine didn’t. Screw drilled. Painting hung.
The sight of the drill’s red box brings a burst of anxiety—the kind I used to feel as a kid whenever Dad was taking too long to get home or was late picking me up from an after-school practice. It rises from my chest and shoots through each nerve to the tips of my fingers and toes. My teeth clench, biting hard to hold it in. I take a few deep breaths as it passes through me, the scene playing out in my mind again and again: that stupid drill, useless in my hands.
“Try again.”
It’s impossible.
“Hold it steady, buddy.”
God.
“Push with all your weight.”
Noise and dust…and nothing.
“It’s okay, I’ll do it.”
Done.
When I was two years old he gave me a little tape measure on which he’d inscribed Danny Robson, 1985. I’d follow him around in a tiny blue hard hat, mimicking his moves as he measured up the wood beams for the family deck he built in the backyard. As he sawed the pieces precisely I’d gather the discarded ends and use them as building blocks—pretending to measure, saw, and hammer together my own creation while he completed the project in real life.
For my father, it was probably just another task that needed to get done. I don’t know that he took particular pride in what he was able to accomplish, although he was always adamant that it be done to perfection, no corners cut. But he never pushed me to learn about tools the same way his father had with him, and he never became frustrated when I wasn’t as adept or if I showed little interest. My father didn’t have a university degree, and that always seemed to be a point of quiet shame for him. So in his own home he’d push me away from the workbench and the tool bag—away from skills that didn’t seem to be valued the same way they once had been. Skills I’m not certain that he ever fully valued in himself.
Standing in this puddle, staring at the bag of tools my father once wielded, I realize how useless they are absent the mastery of his hands. These instruments were part of him; they’d built my vision of who and what my father was. Now they’re pieces of steel that, without him, hold no magic.