The book, meanwhile, was an attempt to grapple with some of the big questions of mortality and loss, of what it means to be a father and what it means to be a son. The time I spent with my father was in part an excuse to ask him questions I might not have asked otherwise. As a decidedly non-emo sort of dad, he was not always comfortable with these questions, or the fact that his answers might wind up on a library shelf. I asked anyway.

Four years hence, the casket was finished, and so was the book, set for a January 2018 release under the title Furnishing Eternity: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life. As the publication date drew nearer, my father’s apprehension became more apparent. He still couldn’t understand why anyone would be interested in his cluttered old barn. He was uncomfortable about the prospect of losing his privacy. He wasn’t keen on the fact that I referenced his farts only six pages in.

I hoped that meeting the people who were making this a book might give him a different perspective. I hoped he would understand what I was doing, and why. I hoped he would realize that this book, like all books, was an attempt to understand something better. In this case, him.

The visit went well. Dad was treated like a visiting dignitary. My editor promised to send him a bunch of books. That helped. He loved both books and getting things for free.

* * *

One thing I’d never been able to shake was the delusion of my father’s immortality. This, despite that fact that my mother died six years ago at age 73, a loss, among other things, of my innocence regarding the death of a loved one. The delusion was stubborn enough to overlook the cancer my dad had been battling for most of a decade. (To him, this wasn’t a “battle” so much as an annoyance. His health had remained remarkably good and he regarded the disease mainly as a hindrance to his gardening regimen.) Although his hair had turned white, I still, when I pictured him, saw a head of wavy chestnut.

In her memoir The Wine Lover’s Daughter, Anne Fadiman reflects on her own conviction that her father, had cancer not taken him, would have lived well into his second century, “like a Russian Methuselah from a yogurt commercial.” Parents, the good ones anyway, come prepackaged with a dependability that leads us to such assumptions. We wish the good ones into immortality, and it’s an easy lie to believe. We dare not wonder how we will ever get by without them.

So I was lucky. The father I had was one I wanted to keep, and wanted to be romping around Manhattan with for as long as possible. We approached the ramp to his most anticipated destination, the Brooklyn Bridge. This had been on my dad’s bucket list for years, to walk across, to see and feel the wonder of what David McCullough had described in The Great Bridge, one of Dad’s favorite books. Evan and I had to keep calling out to him to stop as we paused to snap tourist photos of city hall and he kept on trucking toward the high-wire spectacle.