Story for the Week
Dennis would have been 62 today. When he died, there were still so many restrictions because of COVID, so we chose today to gather with family and friends in the back yard of the home he found for us. We will be remembering everything that made us love him. Today will be for celebrating his life. I know there will be tears in the laughter because we miss him, and I hope that you get a sense of who he was by reading what I shared about him today. I want to share him with the world because he truly changed mine.
In honor and memory of Dennis Dominic Ahyee
July 18, 1959-September 20, 2020
Dennis and I met in an online chat room. I don’t know how many of you knew that.
I’ve always been a night owl, so I ended up befriending a lot of people in the UK who were online during their morning and my evening. One evening while I was chatting, I kept getting a private message from Got Even More Milk telling me “go to bed,” and then Milk would close the message so I couldn’t respond. I was quick enough once to ask why I was being told to go to bed, and Milk said because it was the middle of the night. I responded that it was 8:00 in the evening.
That’s when we discovered that Milk was in New York and I was just outside Chicago. Since one of our mutual UK chat friends had suggested he talk to me, we both assumed the other was in the UK. I also admitted to him years later that I had assumed at first that he was a large-breasted woman when really he just liked the Got Milk slogan and it was already taken when he signed up.🥛
From January to June of 2002, we continued chatting, first in the chat room, then on Yahoo Messenger, and then finally by phone. When all you can do is talk, you get to know one another pretty quickly. After a few flights back and forth to meet in person, Dennis suggested that we had to pick a city. He said he wasn’t planning to move to Chicago to live six blocks away and date me and if I was good enough to live with, I was good enough to marry. He asked my dad’s permission, even though I was 36, and we got married that July 5th in New York—just us, a minister, his friend Chris, and his sister Denise. We stopped at Annie’s Roti Shop to pick up our wedding dinner, and we spent our honeymoon the next day in Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, where I had my gallbladder removed.
That was the beginning. People told us that at least we had a great story. Dennis loved telling people that we got married on the fourth date—that I took one look at him and had to have him. I would tell him that he clearly thought very highly of himself, and I know all of you understand what I’m talking about.
There were so many things to love about Dennis. He wasn’t perfect, but the good in Dennis far outweighed the challenging. He was devoted and he was passionate about the people and things that he loved. He wanted to be the best for us and felt guilty about his own allergies when we found out about Corinne’s, wondering if I regretted marrying him because of it. After his diagnosis and as his disease progressed, he was sad about the things he knew he was going to miss, especially for Corinne, but he felt even more guilty knowing he was going to be leaving us.
Everyone that I’ve talked to about him and everyone I’ve heard from over the past 10 months has mentioned how funny he was. I used to joke that he would swing between being a five-year-old boy and a 15-year-old teenager. He never really grew up, and I loved that about him. Even when I was mad at him, I had a hard time keeping a straight face when he did the little dances he would do out of the blue or he’d make a little boy pouty face.
No matter how each day went, he never lost his sense of humor. Even the last few days in the hospital, he made the nurses laugh. One day, the nurse came in to check his blood sugar. He had been in and out of sleep, his eyes were closed, and she told him what she was doing and told him it would just be a quick stick and asked if he was ready. He nodded slightly and made a noise to tell her it was ok. But as she took his hand, he opened his eyes, pulled his hand back, and said, “WAIT!” And then he paused and said, “I was fibbing.”
Dennis was kind and thoughtful. He knew how to make people smile. I would comment about the sky being pretty or something looking nice, and he would say, “Like the wife?” He never missed an opportunity like that. And nothing was too much for Corinne. Every year on Christmas Eve, he took her out to buy something special. It had to be something that wasn’t on her list because he had already bought everything on the list. When she was younger, she knew that trips out with Daddy resulted in a lot more “loot” than trips with me.
He missed out on a lot with Tenielle when she was growing up, but Tenielle, he loved you so much and wanted you in his life. He wanted you to know how important you were to him, his firstborn. He wanted you to be happy. When Dennis talked about kids, he never referenced his “daughter.” It was always his “daughters,” plural, and we are blessed to have you in our life as a result.
As if spoiling Corinne wasn’t enough, when Asher came along, I think he felt like he had permission to relive his own childhood. I can’t count the number of times he was ordering something to send to Asher and ordered a second one for himself. Remember, I said he still acted like a five-year-old boy, right? I am so grateful for Facetime because Dennis actually had a chance to meet Asher and Shawn before he passed. There was a lot of Asher doing show-and-tell and just being Asher, and there were plenty of “I love yous.”
Dennis also spent time “talking shop” with Shawn, especially as his disease progressed. Shawn, I have to tell you that it might seem like a little thing, but for Dennis, that was huge. He always told me that he was born a Catholic and he would die a Catholic. He didn’t really go to church and didn’t care that I wasn’t Catholic, but he also realized that faith connections are stronger than how you practice your religion, and it made a difference in how he sought out counsel from you and my church’s minister.
Dennis was a good friend. I think that’s evident today. For years, he held on to an old Trinidad phone book, and one day, he started randomly calling people that he used to know in school. Every single one of them remembered him, and he spent hours on the phone that day. We had a visit last Thanksgiving from four women he went to primary school with, and he had a group chat going with them. Every time we went on vacation to Florida, we had someone to visit—my aunt lives there, but we’d also visit his friends Jim, Hugh and Francine, Cleon. His friends far outnumbered mine.
I always told him that before we got married, I didn’t know the names of any of the staff at our doctor’s office. Dennis made a point of knowing all of them. When Dr. Shah’s nurse commented on how much she liked Dennis’s water bottle, he ordered one for her and had it shipped to the office. I have so many new friends and family in my life because Dennis talked to everyone and anyone, which is so not in my comfort zone. And he called his mother every single day.
We’ve had a lot of tough days in the last 10 months and certainly since his diagnosis. Today is almost the last of the “firsts” without him. Tenielle’s birthday is a few days before the one-year anniversary—just two months away, and I still can’t believe he’s been gone that long. We talk about him every day, and in a lot of ways, it still doesn’t seem real, but we smile more when we talk about him now. We laugh about what a goofball he was.
There are times we’ll be talking about something and the mantle clock holding his ashes will chime, and we thank him for his opinion or tell him to mind his own business. One time when Corinne had a friend over, I said something that annoyed Corinne but made her friend laugh. When the clock went off right at that moment, Corinne’s friend said, “See, even your dad agrees.” I regularly look at my memories on Facebook now to see what things he tagged me in, and I started seeing his countdowns to Christmas a few months ago. They always made me roll my eyes before, but I’m glad I can still see them now.
“Someone You Loved,” the song we just played, released in the U.S. in mid-April of 2019. That’s also when Dennis’s brother Rodolfo came to live with us. At the beginning of May, the day before Dennis went for his endoscopy to figure out what was going on, I remember telling my mom that I couldn’t shake the feeling that God placed Rodolfo in our lives because we were going to go through something really hard. I’ve never been one to put that negativity into the universe. I’ve always had the attitude that we worry when we need to worry, but I couldn’t shake the feeling.
When I first heard the song we played and first really listened to the words, I Googled what it was about. I don’t know why. It could easily have just been about a breakup, but Lewis Capaldi said in an interview that they had had a couple of bereavements in his family. In August, when I went to pick up the readout from his scan to tell us how the first rounds of chemo had done (because Dennis could never wait for the doctor to call; he always wanted the results as soon as they were available), I took the envelope, I got in the car and started it, and as I opened the envelope, that song came on the radio. Those were the results that told us there were lesions on Dennis’s liver, which made it impossible for them to do surgery.
I am not exaggerating when I tell you that we heard that song every single time something progressed. Thursday morning, as I was getting ready to go to the doctor for some tests, I turned on music for the dog because I was leaving him in my bedroom. That was the first song to play, and I felt like it was Dennis telling me that he was with me, that he IS here to get us through it all.
Throughout our marriage, Dennis and I had a lot of things happen that made us say God has a plan and everything happens for a reason. When he moved to Chicago, he couldn’t get a job, and it gave him hours a day to spend online chatting with his dad before he passed away. When he went on disability and we were collecting only a percentage of his salary, I got a promotion, and my new salary made up the difference. Neither one of us really believed in coincidences.
I didn’t tell Dennis what I told my mom about Rodolfo until we started looking at the clinical trial and the doctors told us Christmas would be a stretch. I never told him about the song. There were times it would come on in the car when I was alone and I would just cry, and there were times I would just turn it off. But I always knew that we were going to play it for him. Because it says everything I have felt since we found out. But now it brings me more comfort, even when it makes me sad.
Dennis and I had just over 18 years together. It wasn’t enough. We expected more. We knew for 16 months that we weren’t going to grow old together, but I was never ready. I’m still not ready, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get used to the idea.
Everyone that I’ve talked to about Dennis has made me realize that he really was larger than life. There is a gaping hole where he used to be, and our world is emptier without him in it. But our lives are fuller and we are better people for having known him. We will always miss him, and we will never stop loving him.
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