The cabinet door over the microwave at my parents’ house has come loose again since my last visit.
It’s not really broken. The hinge just doesn’t hold the way it used to. Every few weeks, the door starts swinging out a little farther than it should, and every few weeks I tighten it back up, and every few weeks it loosens again.
My dad would have taken the door off the hinges on a Saturday morning and dealt with it properly, once, years ago. He doesn’t do that kind of thing anymore. So I keep tightening the hinge.
I drive up to visit them most weekends I can, and I have started to notice that the first hour of every visit goes about the same way. I come in, I hug them, I put my bag down, and within twenty minutes, I’m quietly handling something. The cabinet door. The loose stair rail. The smoke detector that has apparently been chirping at a frequency only I can hear.
None of it is asked for. I just do it, and they let me, and we move on.
I told myself for a long time that this was helpful. I’m starting to think it’s something else.
The list keeps getting longer
At first, it was just one or two things.
A doorknob that had gone wobbly. The weatherstripping coming off the bottom of the back door, which I taped down on a visit two summers ago and which I’ve re-taped twice since.
Now there’s always a list. I don’t sit down and write it out, but I clock things the second I walk in. The lightbulb out in the hallway. The dishwasher that’s making a sound.
I notice these things the way I imagine a contractor would, except I’m not a contractor and the house is not a job, and what I am actually doing is reading the entire dwelling for evidence of decline.
I don’t make a production of any of it.
I do the easy ones first, the ones I can handle with what’s in my car or what’s in the toolbox in their garage, and the harder ones I file away for next time or to bring up later with my sister. The whole choreography takes maybe ninety minutes, and by the time my mother is asking what I want for lunch, the worst of the visible decline has been quietly smoothed back into the version of the house I remember.
I was halfway through a visit when I realized I was hiding behind the fixing
The thing I caught myself doing, on a visit a couple of months back, was answering a question my mom hadn’t quite asked yet.
She’d wandered into the kitchen and started to say something, and before she’d gotten the question all the way out, I said something about the porch light. I noticed it’s been flickering. Let me grab a bulb from the basement. And I left the room.
She had been about to ask me to spend the afternoon with her. And I had heard the beginning of the sentence, and I had reached for a task before she could finish.
I changed the bulb. I came back upstairs. I sat on the porch with her for an hour, and the visit was fine. But the moment kept replaying. I had used the bulb the way a smoker uses a cigarette in a hard conversation — to have somewhere to go, something to do with my hands, a way to be in the room without being fully in it.
It was easier to fix the light than to look at her and notice, all the way, how much smaller she’s gotten this year.
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My dad used to do all of this, and neither of us has mentioned it
My dad was the one who walked around the house every Saturday with a coffee in one hand and a mental list in the other, and the house ran the way it ran because of that walk. He didn’t make a thing of it either. It was just the maintenance of the place where his family lived, and he did it for forty years without ever calling it work.
He doesn’t do it now. I don’t know exactly when he stopped. There wasn’t a moment, that I can identify, when he sat down and decided he was done.
We have not had a conversation about this.
Research on adult children and the decline of aging parents describes a particular kind of slow grief that begins long before anyone dies — the grief of watching a parent become someone who can’t do what they used to, in tiny increments, none of which are big enough to warrant their own conversation.
You don’t sit down at a kitchen table and announce that your dad can no longer fix his own cabinets. You just both let the fact arrive, in pieces, in the texture of how visits go now.
My dad and I have signed an unspoken agreement. He doesn’t ask. I don’t offer. I just do it, and we both pretend we haven’t noticed that this is what we’re doing now.
I am becoming the version of him who used to do this
I noticed, on a recent visit, that I was walking through the house the way he used to.
Coffee in one hand. Mental list forming as I went. The dishwasher sound, the lightbulb out in the hallway, the cabinet door I was already planning to come back to before I’d taken my coat off.
The cadence of it was his. I had absorbed it without ever sitting down to learn it, the way you absorb a parent’s walk or the way they hold a phone, and now it lived in me, and I was using it on the same house he used to use it on.
I don’t know how I feel about that, exactly. There’s some part of it that’s tender — that the skill he built quietly over forty years has transferred over, intact, to me, and that the house is still being kept the way it was always kept, by someone in the family, without ceremony.
There’s another part of it that’s harder to look at, which is that the only reason I’m the one walking around with the list now is that he can’t.
I haven’t decided what to do with the realization, and I’m not sure I will
You might think that the next thing I’d describe is the conversation I finally had with them.
The Sunday afternoon when I put the screwdriver down and sat them at the kitchen table and said the thing.
I haven’t done that. I’m not sure I’m going to.
Part of it is that I don’t know what the conversation would actually accomplish.
My dad knows he can’t do what he used to. My mom knows. I know. There isn’t any new information to deliver. What there is, instead, is a feeling — a kind of sadness about who he used to be in the house and who he is in it now — and I’m not sure that putting words to that feeling would do anything for any of us except make the rest of the afternoon harder.
I just keep fixing things. I see the cabinet door, and I tighten the hinge, and I let the small ritual of doing it stand in for the larger thing I can’t quite face.
I’m aware that this is what I’m doing, now, and the awareness hasn’t actually changed the behavior. It’s only changed what I know about it while it’s happening.
Maybe that’s the honest place to land for now. Not the version where the realization breaks me open and I sit down and say everything that needs to be said. Just the version where I keep doing what I’ve been doing, and I let myself know, finally, what it actually is.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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