I first met Dennis Lisenby online in a Yahoo chatroom in 1997 in late winter.  He had assumed the guise of a pirate.  I played the Lady Gardenia.  Those persona shaded our early conversations and perhaps drove most of our relate for the next twelve years.

A few months after we first encountered each other, he asked me to visit him in North Carolina.  He sent a photograph so I would recognize him at the airport.  Up until I received it, he had consistently described himself as a twelve-foot giant.  He captioned the photo, “I might have lied”. The bank of lobster cages in the background caught my attention.  I asked my friend Alan, “What’s he talking about?” and Alan replied, “The wheelchair, Corinne; I think he means the wheelchair.”

I won’t try to speculate on the vagaries of our married life, or his deficiencies as a husband or mine as a wife.  I say nothing of any impact he had on my son; I do not speak for Patrick, nor do I tell any part of his story except how I might feel about events.  But I do want to share what I learned from Dennis.

He had sayings that still permeate my own catalogue of truisms.  Life is not for the squeamish, or the faint of heart, he would remind me when I grew frustrated or weary.  In his own moments of peevishness, he’d angle two fingers in the shape of a gun against his temple and spout, Nobody move or the crippled guy gets hurt.  Life strained his resilience, and eventually wore it thin, but for most of the time that we spent together he kept on trucking.  

He would off-road in a motorized wheelchair or an old Blazer or his high-top van.  He kept his martini glasses in the freezer next to the AA batteries.  Every pencil on his desk aligned with the blank pads.  He turned his computer screen off at night.  He folded his socks.  In the first few years of our married life, until an accident set him back a year or two, he changed the oil in his car despite the fact that he had to lower himself onto a flat dolly with a rope wrapped around the door handle.  Why pay someone to do it if I can do it myself, he reasoned.

We visited a neuro-psychologist after an accident that had left him clinically dead for two six-minute periods.  She told us, Look at it this way.  He was brilliant before the incident; now he’s merely bright.  I know that frustrated him, just as that ghastly twelve-month period of dependence on me drove him bonkers.  But he kept at what he could.  We still ate dinner with an atlas and a globe in those days before Google became a verb.  He still wrote sharp, clear technical papers for the team at work, or at least, they assured me that he did.  

In our time together, Dennis built an accessible garden in our backyard to mirror one about which the Charlotte Observer had written back home, with a photograph of Dennis in his manual wheelchair pruning a vine.  He orchestrated the construction of the wheelchair ramp that he himself designed. Years later, after a wild ice storm sent a tree crashing on the 100-year old porch, he paid my first ex-husband to build a new, grand outdoor space.  He had asked me to identify the best carpenter in town, and I gave my honest response.  The two of them spent an entire summer drinking beer in the front yard and complaining about me, more or less good-naturedly.

In the summer of 2008, my son went to Mexico and Dennis took a fateful contract in Ohio.  Alone for the first time in 17 years, I started a weekly missive to a listserve which morphed into my initial blog, The Saturday Musings.  A few years later, from his post-divorce abode in some Ohio town, he sent me an email in which he stated, without pretension or hesitation:  I’m reading your weekly posts.  I’m thrilled you finally found your voice.

Dennis once tried to talk me out of the marriage that he had proposed by telling me that it would turn out badly for me.  He envisioned his own end as it ultimately came, a long slow slide into his last days.  He wanted to spare me that.  Yet fortunately, he acquired a good friend in Ohio who sat beside him in those final hours, and sent his spirit soaring.  Debbie talked to him, and wrote about him, and kept me informed since the hospital had called me upon his admission two days ago.  We’re divorced, I had said.  But you’re listed as his emergency agent, they kept telling me.  I gave them Debbie’s number and then called her myself.  I have never met her, but I believe she helped release his spirit in the final hours.  I walk with her in love tonight.

Life challenged Dennis in ways that he hoped no one else would experience.  He sought solace in destructive forces, and ultimately, they might have hastened his death.    Looking back, I can’t forget or excuse some of the choices he made and the paths down which he chose to traverse that visited sorrow upon me.  But I still think of him as a 12-foot giant — clumsy, perhaps; hurtful at times; and occasionally, a thoughtless destroyer of small villages beneath his feet.  Also, though, his towering stature lifted him above the ordinary, into the heights of the glorious.  He had a certain nobility of spirit that shone through any failings that might have plagued him.  Life gave him lemons, and he grabbed a bottle of gin and put a twist in it, with a touch of vermouth, just a little bit dirty.

It’s the eleventh day of the one-hundred and twenty-seventh month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.  

 

Dennis R. Lisenby

03/13/1951 – 07/11/2024

I HOPE YOU’RE DANCING IN HEAVEN.

P.S.  I’ve never been so honored as when his friend Debbie asked me to write his obituary, now linked above (click on his name).  She added a few important details, perfecting my draft.  I walk with her in love today and every day in his memory.