I’ve mended many things in the past 16 months since my mother died. I’ve tried to keep busy, to catch up on tasks put aside for a few years as I focussed on her.

I enjoy figuring things out, rolling the dice on maybe being able to put something broken back together. Couldn’t be a clearer analogy for trying to come to terms with the massive hole that my mother’s absence has left in my life.

I replaced a rotary switch on a 1960s lamp using an unused switch I found in a box in the basement. My father must have purchased it for some project, perhaps even for the lamp I fixed, the lamp that sat between his chair and my mother’s chair in the den of our old house.

I replaced the fuel filter on my 26-year-old lawn tractor and added a fuel shutoff valve while I was at it so I can burn off the gas in the carburetor when storing it for the winter. I also found out the hard way that hooking up a lawn tractor battery backwards will (hopefully) cause a fuse to blow when you try to start it, and the replacement fuse costs exactly a dollar plus tax. I also found that when you are grieving, you hook up lawn tractor batteries backwards and you’ll not understand why you can’t do something you’ve easily done for decades.

I took my mother’s single bed mattress to the waste facility for recycling in my small car by kind of folding it up, but boxsprings don’t fold, so I took it apart, recycled the metal springs and staples, disposed of the fabric and used some of the wood on a portable chicken coop and the metal frame as a garden trellis.

A digital scale I had for over thirty years stopped working. Before throwing it into the e-waste pile, I pried it open to see if maybe I could identify the problem. A thin wire had broken off and even my terrible soldering skills were enough to reattach it and the display popped back to life. It worked for almost a year, but wasn’t repairable by me a second time and will be off to e-heaven.

Our microwave door fell off, or at least the covering part with the handle did. It was attached with comically-tiny little plastic tabs that weakened and broke, so it is now reattached with massive amounts of epoxy and will never, ever fall off again.

Tonight, I was having a little fire in a Biolite stove and the plastic bucket in which I store wood scraps cracked. A piece of wire saved from something or other will likely hold the bucket together for a few more years.

Alas, my mother is still gone.