Parkinson’s survivor makes dollhouses to help children

In 2012, doctors handed Barry Roberson a grim forecast: Parkinson’s disease would likely kill him in four to seven years.

So he rolled his wheelchair into the field behind his house for a conversation with God, asking for direction for his last days, explaining he couldn’t work, couldn’t drive and fell down three times a day.

“He said, ‘Build dollhouses,’” said Roberson, 61.

“I think I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ I told him, ‘God, I came out here for an answer. Dollhouses is silly.’ ”

Seven and a half years later, Roberson has built more than 120 miniature houses, some of them 4 feet across, detailed down to the tiny bricks in the chimneys and the elephant patterns on the wallpaper.

Each one of them took at least a month to assemble and cost upward of $800 in supplies, but Roberson has given them all away.

Most he gives to children with terminal diseases — the majority of whom he has never met.

“This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, this disease, and it’s hard to say that,” he said. “I’m supposed to be dead now.”

Nearly 1 million people are living with Parkinson’s disease in the United States, the majority of them older than 50, according to the nonprofit Parkinson’s Foundation in Florida. A progressive disorder of the nervous system, its symptoms come on gradually, often showing up first when a patient’s face stops showing expression or arms no longer swing while walking. Tremors are common.

Neither a cause or a cure is known, but patients — Roberson included — take many medications to ease the effects of the disease, and doctors often recommend aerobic exercise, massage, yoga and even pet therapy.

Roberson’s neurologist endorsed Roberson’s instructions from above, so the grandfather of four started tacking together his first dollhouse from a kit.

But his heart wasn’t in it until his wife, Dawn, told him he wasn’t building for the right reasons. He should make a house for Kate Zidanic, a girl at their United Methodist church, who had cancer. He hasn’t stopped building since, sometimes going all day without a pause, even when it can take 10 seconds just to take the first step away from his work stool. Kate, he reported, is now six-plus years cancer-free.

“She would spend hours just sitting in the corner, just putting things in it,” said her mother, Cindy. “It’s one of the best things ever. People don’t think little things can be so big. But when you’re confined to the house ... ”