About this Website
A note from Liz (Dennis’ daughter)
When I last saw my dad in person, in May 2023, we discussed death. We had conversations that were hard, but necessary and full of love.
As part of this, I said “I know you don’t want a funeral, but we’re going to need to do stuff… and I was thinking something like an international film festival might be nice.”
Dad heard the word films and he went from “I don’t want to talk about it” to delight at an excuse to share movies with me. He turned on the TV and took me on a tour of different movies he had in his favourites folder. He fast-forwarded to different bits he liked, talked about why he loved different movies and sent more recommendations to me over text later. He loved so many diverse movies, he was happy to have an excuse to share them with me. After he took me on the tour he said “I’ve shown you the inside of my brain.”
He gave us a list that I’ve put in a spreadsheet. I’m thinking of the best way to translate it to the website for ease of reading, Dennis being Dennis, no list is small.
Leave a Note
We have a guest book on this website, so that if people want to leave a memory or a reflection about Dennis they can easily do so in a central space.
Dennis Celebration Form
We’re still figuring out what to do in terms of in person and online gatherings to remember him by. We’ve created a form to make it easier:
- For people to share ideas
- Help us come up with plans that work for them
- So we can email you to tell you what we’re organising where and when.
About the Movie Recommendations Spreadsheet
The Dennis Movie Night Spreadsheet is broken up into multiple tabs. The first two lists are complete and come from dad’s response to the idea of a film festival for him:
- Wave 1 – movies dad showed me on his TV in May 2023
- Wave 2 – movies dad sent me about after we spoke in May
The next tabs are a work in progress. We’ll be adding to it over time:
- Family Favourites – movies that make us think of Dennis. Some of them might not have made it into his Wave 1 or Wave 2 listing because he’d already shared them with folks so much! Some of them might be new to you or nice to return to.
- YouTube – how he loved to watch different things and send people all kinds of YouTube links. This section is pretty bare right now, but we anticipate it will grow quite a bit as we go over old messages and remember things.
- Music – a place to gather music he loved as the YouTube section will likely get too crowded to have music in it as well.
- Dennis would have liked it – a place to collect things we think he would have liked and wish we could share with him.
We’re still figuring out what we want to do, but one thing we do know is that if you want to watch a movie that dad loved, that would be delightful. If you want to tell us how the watching stuff in his memory went, that’s even better.