The trees began falling shortly after my father died. Close to the house, where my mother still lives, then deep in the yard. Big hardwood trees, several feet across. Their thick corrugated bark was like the hide of mammoths. They had begun to rot and pieces were snapping off. When they were taken down, the trunks were cut into disks the size of coffee tables and piled on the grass like the cogs of a massive and broken machine.

That my father might somehow have propped up the trees doesn't seem surprising—he quite literally propped up the house. He built half of it, and in the crowded, Blakean basement, great wooden pillars and other posts support the floor joists like the inside of a mine.

His sprawling workshop was down there, a tangle of table saws and routers and drill presses, clamps suspended from the ceiling like wind chimes—everything he needed to keep the upstairs intact. It was heated by an antique iron stove that seemed to spit fire whenever its door was opened and paper trash was tossed into its ashen maw. The default sound was soft classical music broken by the occasional scream of a saw. It was where he was most at home.

We were both quiet people, more intimidated by small talk than big ideas, which left little to be said in most situations. We shook hands hello and goodbye. When I visited, we would leave magazines open to articles we thought the other would enjoy, about classic cars or Pete Seeger or the Hubble Telescope. When I left, the trunk of my Honda Civic would be full of things he thought I could make creative use of—window frames, flash bulbs, medical slides, a knife caked in solder, a railroad spike—and for lack of storage they sometimes stayed there. "It's how he shows his love," a friend told me, surveying the trunk, and I said, "I don't have any more room for love." But I have all of these things still.

He died at 66, before I met Lucy, got married, bought a house, had Pepin. I hadn't progressed very far from college, and I worried after his death that I wouldn't be able to prop up a house and a family, as he did, without his aid and counsel. What did I know about home loans, table saws, and keeping the floors from caving in? What did I know about keeping trees in the sky?

And yet I also felt bulletproof. You put your father in the ground and it seems there's little you can't do. You've already been to the other side. Vanities fall away, along with all the pretensions you thought you needed to prop yourself up. I stopped taking the pills that promised to keep what hair I had left and shaved my head. I ended a relationship I knew was going nowhere. I bought an old pair of combat boots that made me feel I could trudge through anything. And I told some friends, just before my first date with Lucy, that I was not interested in anything unserious.

Six and a half years later, the conversations I thought I'd be desperate to have with my father are now moot, and it's unlikely we ever would have had them anyway. The home loan—turns out it's easy to sign over the next 30 years of your life. The house—we bought one practically new and may never do anything with it but close the doors when we leave. The table saw—I never did learn. The basement was advertised as containing a "sexy laundry room" and the garage workshop has hardly been homesteaded. It's so vast and white and empty that neighbors call it the Garage Mahal. I've used it mostly to cut some hearts out of wood for the Christmas tree.

That's not entirely true. Last year I brought home a table-size slice of a fallen tree from my parents' yard. I stuffed it in the Prius, hoisted it onto sawhorses, and thought I would in fact turn it into a table. It was hollow inside, having long ago rotted out. I began sanding the top but soon the bark began to peel. All of it, in great thick chunks, like the skin of a petrified fruit. I tried sanding what was underneath, the softened wood webbed with insect trails, but that too began to pull away until there was just a skeletal core, a rock-hard wooden vertebrae. I put it in the garden, sorry to have interrupted its journey of decay. It will be with me a long time yet, if not in the form I envisioned.

(Photo: Getting a haircut from my dad in his basement workshop, 1974.)