Zoe Desmarais Memorial Bench Made From a Pin Oak

For years, Lori Desmarais of Dunbarton would park outside a gym in Concord, New Hampshire, and simply look at a tree. The pin oak by the door of the Zoo Health Club was the last place her daughter Zoe had been, and sitting near it was where she told a reporter she “felt at peace.” This October, that same tree came back to her as a bench, delivered to her home on a Sunday, according to the Concord Monitor.

The story is a quiet one about a tree, a family and a craftsman who never met the person he was honoring. It is also a reminder of what a single tree can hold for the people who lived beside it.

A tree that marked the last place Zoe had been

Zoe Desmarais was 21 when she died outside the Steeplegate Mall in Concord on the evening of Sept. 25, 2019, according to Patch. The Concord Monitor describes the pin oak as standing outside the gym where she trained, in the mall’s parking area, and places the loss seven years before its October 2026 report.

Her mother kept coming back. She often sat in her car in the gym parking lot, facing the tree, the paper reported. The oak had become the place where she felt closest to her daughter.

Saving the oak before the mall came down

The mall was heading toward demolition, and Desmarais did not want the tree to disappear with it. In an earlier Concord Monitor story, the paper reported that her cousin Mike Dion spent months coordinating with the mall’s owners and contractors so the pin oak could be taken down and kept.

The tree was cut in October 2025. Desmarais was at the gym that day to make sure the parking lot was cleared, and she walked into the gym for the first time. She described the day as a healing one. At that point she had not settled on what the wood would become. A bench, Christmas ornaments and a game Zoe loved, Rummikub, were all possibilities. “Something good is going to be made from it,” she said then.

A woodworker who learned Zoe’s story afterward

The bench came from Paul Decarlo, a New Hampshire woodworker. A member of Zoe’s family whom he had never met asked him to build the piece, and he knew nothing about her story until then, the Concord Monitor reported. The League of New Hampshire Craftsmen lists him as a juried wood furniture maker in Sandown, with more than three decades of professional experience. He studied furniture design at the Worcester Center for Crafts and moved back to New Hampshire in 2022.

Decarlo named the finished piece “In Memory of Zoe” and carved her name on the back. The backrest uses individual branches from the tree, left in their natural, raw form, so the shape of the oak is still part of the seat. Nothing about it was meant to look factory-finished; the branches keep the irregular lines they grew with.

Why pin oak takes patience

Building from a single felled tree is slower than buying dried lumber. The Concord Monitor said construction took months: the wood had to dry slowly, and Decarlo had to work out how much of it was usable, since pin oak is structurally weak and prone to flaws.

Wood references describe the same character. The Wood Database lists pin oak as easy to glue and good at taking stain and finish, with a Janka hardness of 1,500 pounds-force and uses that include furniture, cabinetry and flooring. It also moves noticeably as it dries, with tangential shrinkage of 9.5 percent, and it has minimal rot resistance.

The Morton Arboretum describes the species as a fast-growing landscape tree that reaches 60 to 70 feet, with smooth gray bark that develops shallow, dark fissures with age. It prefers acidic, wet soil and tolerates clay and occasional flooding, which helps explain why it turns up so often beside parking lots and streets, and also why a bench from one takes care.

The first afternoon on the bench

When the bench arrived, relatives took turns sitting on it. Desmarais set two sunflower cushions on the seat, each carrying a photo of Zoe. One of Zoe’s aunts sat down and spoke to her niece by a childhood nickname, “peanut,” the paper reported.

Desmarais told the Concord Monitor that she tries every year to find a different way to honor her daughter, and that Zoe would approve of this one.

Families who lose a tree they cared about often look for a way to keep a piece of it. Lovely Garden Roots has followed other families who built living memorials, including a memorial garden for a stillborn daughter and a firefighter’s memorial for coworkers. In this case, the memorial is a seat made of the tree itself.

The Concord Monitor’s report does not say where on the Dunbarton property the bench will sit. It describes only the family gathering around it on the day it came home, and a mother who had spent years looking at a tree from a parked car, now able to sit on it. For a family that has marked each year with a new gesture, the bench gives them a place to gather that did not exist before.

This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.

Image: “Pin oak in autumn” by HelenOnline is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (illustrative image of a pin oak, not the Concord tree).