Once, when I was in my late twenties, I taught at an inner-city Catholic school. It was a job I loved, even though the money was dismal, and even though I had sworn, in my high-falutin,' second wave of feminism fervor, that I would never teach nor type for a living.
But I discovered, to my surprise, that I was actually a pretty good teacher, and that the job was hard and joyful and, sometimes, even, very, very funny.
My first beloved principal retired, and an equally respected principal signed on, and things, of course, then shifted.
One day before school, the principal asked me to stop and see him at the end of the day. So that gave me something to worry about for the next six and a half hours. But what he wanted to say was this: my wonderful colleague was stepping down as assistant principal. Would I consider taking on that role?
I was surprised and I was excited, but I asked if I could think about it, and talk to Mark about it, and we did all that, and of course I said yes.
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When the ink was dry on the contract and the news was about to be announced, I called my mother so she'd hear it from me first.
"Guess what!" I said. "I just got promoted to assistant principal!"
There was a long, long pause on the other end of the phone.
Then, "You're KIDDING," my mother said, flat and disbelieving.
My bubble deflated. We didn't talk long.
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I sat at the dining room table for a minute after that conversation, trying to get the buzz back, doing some self-talk.
And then the phone rang.
It was my brother Dennis.
"Hey," he said, "congratulations! Tell me about this new role!"
Apparently, my mother had gotten off the phone with me and called him. Dennis had completed his administrator's certificate a few years before, and HE was an assistant principal at a much larger, much more complex school.
And he was excited for me. He told me stories, sweet stories, funny stories, exasperating stories, about the middle schoolers he worked with. By the time I got off the phone, I was all pumped up again.
That was my big brother Dennis. He was, often, one of my biggest boosters and supporters.
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Of course, there were other phone calls, too; Dennis called fairly often.
"Hey," he would say, and then he would launch into a tale about whatever was happening in his life, usually a nice success at work, or something great one of his kids had done, or about a race he'd run, or, often, he would tell me about an article he was writing or the idea he had for a children's book.
Sometimes he would tell me about things that were frustrating him, about obstacles that he was struggling to get around.
He would talk and talk and talk, and, after, say, an hour and three minutes had gone by, he would wind down.
"How's everything with you guys?" he'd ask. "Good?"
I would open my mouth to answer, and he'd say, "Okay! Great talk!"
And he'd be gone.
THAT was Dennis, too: master of the monologue and the quick escape.
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This weekend, my siblings, my nieces and nephews, and my family are gathering at the cemetery where my parents are buried. At the foot of their grave, Shayne, Dennis's daughter, recently had a memorial stone laid for her father.
It's been 21 years since Dennis died. He was much too young—only 55—and he had so many things left to do.
His flames burned hot and quick and then they quenched, just like that.
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It was August of 2002; it was dinner time; we were sitting at the kitchen table in our newly painted single-wide—our answer to "Where the heck can we live that's private and cozy while Mark finishes his law degree?"—when the land line rang.
Mark was closest; he grabbed the receiver.
His eyes lit.
"Hi, Judy," he said to Dennis's wife.
And then his face stilled.
"Uh huh," he said, but he didn't look like he liked whatever he was agreeing to.
And then he asked questions, questions I did not want to hear answers to, and so I sang to myself—Lalalalala—until Mark finally got off the phone and told me about Dennis.
He had a bad, bad neck ache. He wouldn't go to the emergency room. Judy slipped out to teach in the morning; she didn't want to wake him.
But when she came home, Dennis wasn't sleeping.
He was dead.
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Mark told me that, and I swallowed it.
Then I spit it back out.
"There's a mistake," I said.
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But of course, there wasn't.
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I had talked to Dennis a few weeks before, after a fairly long break in communications—there was nothing wrong, though; we were just, both of us, busy. Dennis had taken an early retirement after a pretty successful superintendency. Among other things, the school system had laid the groundwork to produce their own electricity under his leadership. That innovation saved the district a LOT of dollars.
After retiring, because Dennis was rarely able to sit still, he took a job in workforce development and he signed up to teach at a SUNY college. In the spring of 2002, he put together a job fair kind of thing, gathering employers and support services and vendors, college and training schools, and inviting students and adults interested in career changes from all across his county.
His colleagues tried to prepare him.
People won't come, they told him. They just don't come on weekends; it's a tough crowd. They're busy; they don't realize how important it is.
We've tried this before, they said. Don't be disappointed.
Dennis sent me a photo from that event; he was standing in a pathway between exhibitors, beaming. Around him swirled a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd.
Thousands of people came to that fair. It was a triumph.
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He called, late that July, to relive that triumph, and to mull plans for the future. He talked about his adjunct teaching, too, and the tough knocks his students bounced back from. He talked about driving to Ohio with Judy in October, pulling the trailer, camping someplace close to us for maybe a week or so.
What do you think Mom and Dad would say, he asked, about Mark going to law school in his late forties?
I thought about that. I think, I said, that Mom would pause for a long moment, and then say, 'You're KIDDING.'
We laughed, remembering.
And then he said, serious now, "We need to stay connected. We can't let things drift away."
Before I could respond, he said, "Okay! Great talk!"
And he was gone.
Last phone call. No do-overs.
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Dennis was intense. His focus was total; he could not be budged once engaged. His desk and his car were a mess; he often talked about what a blessing his admin had been; for the first time in his life, he wasn't losing important documents and forms.
He did things completely and fully; he could go days without any real sleeping. He was enthusiastic and passionate and his joyousness could soar.
He loved his kids, loved Brian, Jason, and Shayne, in a big, emphatic, flawed, messy, and constant way. He loved his stepkids. He worried about all of them.
Underneath his surface, a kind of controlled rage simmered sometimes; other times, he seemed drained and distant, as if all his interior rooms were coated, that day, with frost.
But then he'd snap back.
He was complex and he was confusing and he lit up a room. When he turned his focus on me, he could make me feel like I was the most important person he knew.
He was not a perfect man, but he was a damned good brother.
I still miss him, all the time.
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My mother had categories for each of her kids. (Mine were 'artist' and 'dreamer'…also 'lazy' and 'smart mouth.') Dennis, she said, was her worker.
And he did work. He threw himself into whatever he did, into teaching reading, into clipping hedges, into doing house repairs, and into excelling at graduate courses.
He often said he was pretty sure that, in a different era, he'd have been diagnosed with ADHD or ADD. He had only two speeds: blazing and sleeping.
Whenever he came to family gatherings, he would sit in the comfiest chair available, and, in the midst of majestic mayhem, he would fall, having come to rest, profoundly asleep.
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Dennis loved a good, sly, practical joke. He liked to remind Mark and me not to take things so everlastingly seriously.
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Did I ever tell you that Mark hates driving with windshield wipers on? He absolutely, unequivocally HATES it.
He'll be driving and rain will be sluicing and I will be having blinded conniptions, and Mark will only grudgingly turn on the wipers, let them clear his view, and then he'll turn them back off. The man hates windshield wipers flapping.
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It was a long ride on country roads to the town in central New York State where Dennis's funeral was going to be held. We were winding, after a couple of hours in the car, around monotonous hills in northern Pennsylvania. Jim was sitting pensively in the back seat ("Is Mom starting to cry? Again?"); I was staring out the window at another dark forest; Mark was driving, grimly.
I could feel the tears gathering again, getting ready to spill.
And then the windshield wipers turned on.
"What the—?" said Mark, viciously, and he fiddled with controls.
Flap flap flap.
It was not raining.
Mark swore and turned knobs.
The wipers started flapping faster.
"What is it?" said Jim, anxious.
"Wipers," muttered Mark.
I looked at his face, and he was so…annoyed that I couldn't help but smile.
Mark looked and me and enunciated.
"Not.
Funny."
"Let's stop at the next service station," I suggested, "and see if they can help."
But the next service station was a long way away.
Flap. Flap. Flap.
Finally,—oh, finally!—-a tiny scrap of civilization hove into sight, and there, thanks be, was a service station.
"Thank GOD," whispered poor Jim.
And at that moment, the wipers stopped flapping.
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The wipers worked just fine for the rest of the trip. In fact, they never acted up again, never ever, not for the life of that car.
A mechanic could probably have explained the phenomenon, but Mark and I agree that Dennis was in the car, pulling levers and chortling, telling us to calm down, to get over our sorry selves.
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I remember Dennis agreeing to pick up a friend of mine and give us a ride to a dance. We were very young teenagers, and this was a very big deal. My friend was a gorgeous person who struggled with self-esteem.
When we got to her house, she came out onto the porch, uncertainly, not sure what kind of vehicle she was looking for. Dennis, the car parked, saw her tentative posture.
He exploded out of the car, ran up the steps, and extended his arm.
She took it. He said something to her that I couldn't hear, and she laughed, tossed her hair, and came marching down those steps. Suddenly my friend owned that night, just a freshman girl in high school being escorted by a handsome college guy.
That was Dennis, too.
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The night my mother died, when we were all gathered in the hospital room, frozen, he found her hairbrush and sat by her bed and brushed her thick, still vibrant, hair. She was not awake; she was caught, it seemed, in some in-between twilight, but he sang to her, little scrappy, hummed tunes. He brushed in rhythm with his songs.
Some people in my family can carry a tune. I am not one of them.
Neither was Dennis.
Still, I swear the brushing and the humming found their mark; my mother's face relaxed.
Dennis kept on, endlessly patient in that endless night.
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The night my father died, Dennis, who had arrived in a hurry with no suitcase, no toothbrush, decided it would be safe—that there would be time—for him to run home and get his things, to come back and rejoin that final vigil.
But Dad slipped away suddenly, and I had to call Dennis.
He said, "I know. I looked over, and he was riding with me."
He was an entirely practical person, my brother, but he was imbued with that Celtic fey-ness, too.
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It is not possible to capture a person in a few paragraphs, to convey a true sense of their complexity.
And maybe it's not necessary either. But I will say this: that gathering once more to celebrate Dennis, to acknowledge that we miss him, to tell the stories, to groan, grin, grimace, and laugh, seems like a wonderful, an essential, thing.
People leave us; we say they pass away. We hope they're in a better place.
But their imprint doesn't fade, and their impact is still felt, and, once the raw hurt wears off, we know: it was good this person, for all their flaws and foibles, all their gifts and all their gravity,—it was GOOD that they were here.
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Right?
Okay. Great talk.
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