When Brendan Hoffman’s daughter Dawn was a patient at Community Hospice, she and her father walking the halls one day passed by a visitors’ TV-reading room at the center on Sunbeam Road.

Two girls were inside looking dubiously at an old dollhouse up on a shelf.

“It looks broken,” said one.

Dawn, who was 28, turned to her father. “Daddy,” she said, “you need to build one and replace that.”

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Hoffman said he’d never built anything like that and had never done much carpentry. To which she replied, “I think you can, and I think you will.”

Some 13 years later, he recalls her next words: “Even after I’m gone, I want you to make something for those girls that are terminally ill.”

Dawn, a graduate of Orange Park High School, died on Aug. 21, 2009, from melanoma.

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