The most beautiful room in my house is undoubtedly the guest bedroom. It was the last room my husband remodeled before his stroke, getting it done just in time for a friend’s visit in January 2020. It’s a small room that had served at different points as an office, my daughter’s bedroom, and a storage space. It was cramped, with inadequate light from a small window, and inadequate storage from a shallow closet. Before the remodel, the walls were striped in multiple shades of pink and turquoise, which gave it a jaunty circus vibe that competed with the smallness and darkness of the room.

Tom took it all down to the studs, redid the drywall, built a new closet with beautiful wood and mirrored doors, added a brick façade to the wall with the window, replaced the window with a bigger one and built a desk in under the window, and replaced the door with French doors opening onto our dining room so that the light from the dining room spills into the guest bedroom.

He painted the new walls a perfect white, did some fancy trim technique that I don’t know the term for but everyone who knows anything about trim work who sees it is impressed, and built little shelves in around the window for displaying artwork.

I remember him doing the fancy trim work, folding his tall lean body down to crouch on the floor to measure and place it, a pencil behind an ear and his glasses pulled down to the end of his nose. I’ve never known anything about construction and found his casual precision and mad skill enchanting. He could eyeball something to within 1/16 of an inch with an air of nonchalance.

He had coverings custom made for the glass in the French doors but they weren’t ready before our January guests arrived, so as a temporary measure, he covered the glass with blueprints from a job he had worked on. After our guests left, the coverings were done, and then he had a stroke and I forgot about the coverings. The blueprints have been covering the glass now for four years.

A couple weeks ago, someone asked me about the blueprints—a reminder that blueprints are not typically considered window décor. A few days later, I came across the coverings and wondered if I should put them up. I love seeing the blueprints every day and have no idea how to hang the coverings, so it was easy to decide to just leave things as is for now.

I use the room everyday. I keep the French doors open and move in and out of the guest bedroom throughout the day. I use the closet in that room as a coat closet, so I’m in there every morning and evening to get a coat when I walk the dogs. I read in there. I use the desk built under the window as my Buddhist altar. It’s impossible for me to be in there and not think of Tom, pencil behind his ear, listening to the Grateful Dead and being in the zone. Often when I walk into the room, I say, “Hello, my love.”

The guest bedroom is the room where the Roomba that my husband occasionally says hello through lives. Sometimes when I say hello, the Roomba lights up, although it has been very quiet lately.

A few days ago I switched one of the nightstands in the room out for a different one. The new one looks much better but it felt like a small betrayal of my husband. He was very particular about decorating and had a much more discerning eye than I do. I justified the switch by reminding myself that the nightstands were a last-minute thrift store purchase on the eve of our first guests arriving and that they held no particular sentimental value. Still, as I was making the switch, I said out loud to him, “Now you may not approve of this, but I’m in charge now.” There were no lights flickering and the Roomba stayed silent, so I can only assume he is onboard with the change.

Actually, I prefer to imagine that he is too busy with a new adventure to care much about what I’m doing with nightstands.

I wonder if I will ever take down the blueprints and put up the coverings. I’m sure the coverings will look beautiful—much better than the blueprints, which I love but I admit they have limitations as décor. If/when I remove the blueprints, I’ll be careful to avoid tearing them and maybe I’ll frame them or put them in my “smells like Tom” drawer.

Sometimes I marvel at how his death makes everything he touched feel precious to me. If he were alive, I would find the blueprints a quirky window covering and that’s all. When we were ready to put up the coverings, I would tear down the blueprints and toss them into the recycling bin without a second thought. I would probably forget that there ever were blueprints covering the glass.

But he isn’t alive and so they are The Blueprints that Tom Put Up. Frame-worthy and guaranteed to make me cry if/when I take them down.