I’m Maria. I’m Denise’s older daughter. I think this is going to help me grieve, and help us all to remember my mom.
My mom is Denise.
Born in the Bronx to Anastasia, 48, and Walter, 52, Denise was a surprise. Her siblings were already adults: Kathleen and Anastasia were wives and mothers; Walter was in the military; and 16-year-old Joan was horrified and ‘ran off with a sailor’ shortly after Denise arrived.
Denise compared her young life to that of Francie Nolan in Betty Smith’s novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, published one year after Denise was born. Denise was a creative child who fit in with a small circle of sensitive friends. She read a lot, and daydreamed on her stoop in the shadow of Yankee stadium. She went to Catholic schools, and took Joan as her confirmation name, inspired by fearless, petite, sword-wielding young Joan of Arc.
She graduated from Hunter College, and then worked clerical jobs, commuting from her parents’ apartment in the South Bronx to midtown Manhattan. Her boring typing-pool life looked far sexier 40 years later when she recognized her former workplace, a still-existing Madison Avenue advertising agency, as the model for the TV show Mad Men. She marveled, sometimes in horror, at the details the show captured so accurately, everything from the clothes, the drinking, and the smoking, to the cattiness, the racism, and the difference in the ways bigger-busted women were treated in the workplace.
In 1967, Denise met John, a Navy man from New Jersey, at Cardinal Spellman’s Servicemen’s Club. They married less than a year later, John having spent most of that year on a submarine. Shortly after the wedding, they moved to Greeley, Colorado, where John went to journalism school on the GI Bill at Greeley State (now University of Northern Colorado). Denise got a job as a social worker, which gave her a chance to drive her VW Bug all over the foreign western landscape, meeting her hardy clients in far corners of the rural county.
Between 1968 and 1970, Denise’s mother, father, and her oldest sister, Kath, passed away. Denise was devastated, and she and John moved back to the east coast to be closer to family. John finished his degree at the University of Maryland, the state where Denise would live for the rest of her life.
Daughters Maria and Elizabeth were born in the 1970s, and the family settled in Carroll County, satisfying John’s desire to live in a place that was not remotely urban. They were active with St John’s Catholic church in Westminster: the girls went to the school, Denise got a job working for the catechism program, and they all developed deep friendships with the social-justice-oriented regular attendees of Sunday’s 8:45 a.m. Folk Mass.
John left the family in the mid-1980s, taking a job in Flint, Michigan, and John and Denise divorced. Denise supplemented her income with freelance writing for local newspapers and Catholic publications. She and the girls got more involved with Resurrection Farm, the homeless shelter founded and run by a group of those social justice Catholics from St. John’s. The relationship with the Farm deepened when the family couldn’t afford rent plus the heating bill at the big house on Main Street, and Denise, Maria, and Beth moved to the Farm in the winter of 1986-87. Denise had been commuting 20 miles to work at Mount Saint Mary’s seminary and, to add insult to injury, her car also died that winter. A very good friend, Jim, co-signed a loan for another used car and the lease for an apartment. In the spring, Denise and the girls were back on their feet, thanks to the Farm family.
From that apartment in Westminster, both girls were launched to college and beyond, and Denise found a professional home in the public library. She worked throughout the Carroll County public library system at the information desk for a decade, forming deep friendships with her many fellow English-major coworkers. She continued occasional freelance writing, and was the editor of the Resurrection Farm newsletter for years.
In the mid-1990s, Denise got the grave diagnosis of congestive heart failure, when her acupuncturist validated that her symptoms were more than the anxiety attacks her general practitioner had suggested. She prepared for the worst, including writing her own funeral mass, but effective new pharmaceuticals came out at the same time, and ended up controlling the chronic problem for nearly 25 more years.
As an empty-nester, Denise moved to Baltimore County for a job at Towson University library’s information desk. She enjoyed living close to a bigger city, and enrolled in the school’s Master of Professional Writing program. While she was never stickler – for anything, grammar included – the writing degree was a creative outlet that she relished. She finished the degree shortly before she retired. Meanwhile, her health problems had been compounded by gout resulting from the heart drugs, and serious physical pain became a more frequent part of her life.
Denise made two trips to Ireland with Maria to see if she could discover enough evidence of her forebears to petition for an Irish passport. That didn’t end up working out, but they enjoyed the adventures, exploring Galway, Ballina, the Cliffs of Moher, Tipperary, and other wonders of the west and south of Ireland.
In 2005, Beth and her young son, AJ, formed a household with Denise, and the three would live together for the next 12 years. Beth got a new job in Montgomery County, where they moved, first to Gaithersburg, and then to Derwood. Denise’s life as an actively involved grandmother meant that she became a connoisseur of Montgomery County’s fine playgrounds, nature centers, swimming pools, and other public family amenities that she and AJ enjoyed together.
Through an outgoing fellow karate mom, Beth, AJ, and Denise found out about Mill Creek Parish United Methodist Church. After having grown disappointed with many aspects of Catholicism, Denise and Beth found the Methodist community a very welcome change. Mill Creek members were friendly, active, and engaging, and AJ was pleased with the programs for kids, and the donuts. Denise relished friendships she made at Wellness on Wednesdays, at the Singles Group (average age: 80), and in the Adventure Book Club.
In spring of 2018, Denise, Beth, and AJ split up the household, and Denise moved to Leisure World in Silver Spring. Denise ended up enjoying the social opportunities, even if early experiments did not go so well. She found the Scrabble Club too competitive, and the Comedy Club, it turned out, was a group of five older men who got together to tell one another dirty jokes. But she volunteered at the library, enjoyed the lively near-arguments of the New Yorkers’ Club, and especially loved the Writers Group, on whose gatherings she frequently reported for the Leisure World News.
In spite of having suffered with serious, chronic health problems for decades, Denise died in November 2019 from acute myeloid leukemia, which was formally diagnosed only four days before she passed away.