It’s been a year since the death of my friend Dennis Valente. I miss him, a lot.
First of all, he was hilarious, always making me giggle; during the four years we served together on the Delaware County Board of Supervisors, I learned not to look at him if I needed to maintain my serious adult face. Occasionally, I even succeeded. He was smart, too, smart like a fox. As he often said he was half Irish, half Sicilian, which meant that he not only loved to fight (the Irish half), he knew how to win (the Sicilian).
To say I loved him would be an understatement, because I did, and not just because he was funny and smart like a fox, but because he was a good, generous, loving friend. Although we didn’t see eye to eye on all of the issues, Dennis always had a deeply thought-out reason for what he was doing, or how he was voting, which I respected. He cared about his town, Davenport, his constituents, and the county; he was funny but not glib, never taking the easy or simple way to fix whatever knotty problem was at hand. Dennis was a mensch.
He also considered himself — and was — a farmer, running the Garden Center on Route 23 with glee and dedication, reveling in the annual explosion of growth and possibility as he contemplated what varieties he would plant this year, or next, and how best to serve and keep his customers happy. He was a city boy transplanted to Delaware County by choice and by vision — the vision of a life where digging in the dirt was possible, where continuing his business of repairing vintage gramophones was doable, where family and friends and customers and staff could mesh and meld to make true community not just possible, but a remarkable fact of and tribute to his heart, his generous spirit, and his remarkable, fascinating, too brief life.
When I last spoke with Dennis, we both knew that his remaining time on Earth was short, but even so we laughed together over the guy in the background saying he might vote for him in 2023, for a change. Hey, he’d never voted “blue” before, you know! We’ll take it, we said. And, typical of Dennis, he paid me a compliment because he was that generous, even as his life was ending, always thinking about others, consistently kind. Okay, sure, his wit and acumen regarding the frailties of his fellow human beans could be both acute and cutting, yet I don’t recall ever seeing or hearing him make that cut, hurting another person intentionally. Ultimately, Dennis Valente liked people, and was eternally interested in them, their many gifts, quirks and foibles.
Dennis was a Democrat, like me, but he was also a true blue small “d” democrat. Socially liberal, fiscally conservative with specific carve-outs for priorities he knew weren’t always getting the attention or funding they deserved, he dismissed no one, no point of view. His town board meetings were epic, hours long, conducted without a written agenda, literally anyone could talk, change the subject, or ask questions at any given moment, about anything. I lasted almost three hours at one such meeting, then abandoned ship, amazed he was able to tolerate the chaos, but, for Dennis, the mild chaos of his meetings was a part of representative democracy; everyone speaking, everyone having a say was democracy, and, as usual, he wasn’t wrong.
His memory was vast, his intelligence broad, his humanity larger than life, and his commitment to doing the right thing was unimpeachable. Dennis was a hard worker; he had values, and it showed. The voters in Davenport rightly returned him to office time and again, but he didn’t make it to election night last year, dying a week before what would have been his sixty-eighth birthday, in April of 2023.
I miss my friend. I resent having him taken too early from his family, from me and his other friends, and from his community. We rarely, however, get to choose how or when we die, we simply get to live, and make choices the best we can while alive. So often we stumble and fall, living down to expectation instead of up, forgetting to be humble, or to tap into our organic resilience, finding humor and joy in the face of life’s inevitable challenges.
Dennis did, every day up to his last. He loved life, and made great choices, not perfect ones, but great and right for him; he was forever humble and gracious, generous and funny. I am so lucky to have known him. We all were. Rest in peace, my dear, dear friend. You are missed.