Denis Geary, ‘worked to elevate the dignity’ of his clients, died in December
After Denis Geary, 66, died in December there were, according to some estimates, 600 people at his funeral. His wife, Faith VosWinkel, said the service was so well attended because the community at large felt his absence.
“St. Patrick-St. Anthony Church in downtown Hartford is a very good sized church, and the church was full, standing room only, and it was full of secular folks, Jewish folks and Catholic folks,” VosWinkel said.
They came, she said, “because they had a loss, and that’s Denis. It was profoundly felt.” Weeks after the funeral, VosWinkel and her family continue to get cards in the mail and messages online from people wanting to share stories of their time with Geary.
“It keeps Denis very much alive,” she said.
Geary, originally from Bloomfield, and his family have belonged to St. Patrick-St. Anthony Church for more than 25 years. For all that time, he was also executive director of the Jewish Association for Community Living, working with adults with special needs.
“He had his feet certainly in our Catholic faith, and he had his feet very much in the Jewish faith,” VosWinkel said.
In 2018, Geary was awarded the Henry M. Zachs Spirit of Judaism Award from the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford. VosWinkel said the award is “rarely, if ever, given to a non-Jew.”
“It was kind of a big deal at the time,” VosWinkel said. “Ironically enough, shortly before he got the award, his younger brother had done the genetic 23andme thing, just because they’ve always believed that they’re 99 percent Irish. But there was this 2 percent Ashkenazi Jew in them. So, when Denis got up and got the award, he was like, ‘Well, you know, I have to come clean. I actually am a little bit Jewish.”
Among the people who spoke at Geary’s funeral was Rabbi James Rosen of Beth-El Temple in West Hartford. Rosen said during an interview that Geary had “a capacity to see each individual that he served as something very precious, something very important. He really worked to elevate the dignity, the well being of his clients.”
“He was a great student of the Jewish experience and values and then translated them into the programs and the group home experience, where these values were expressed in ways that were evident and very appropriate for the clientele that were there,” Rosen said.
Geary’s son, Conor Geary, said his father “found a real calling in his work.”
“The indelible piece of his legacy for so many people is that he was able to retire last year — which was bittersweet given the fact that we knew that he was sick at that point — but in the wake of his retirement, it left such sort of a gaping void that people knew how impactful my dad was to so many lives and so many lives of people, who wouldn’t be able to manage, care for, provide solely for themselves.”
Geary was, according to his wife, always at home in any crowd of people. VosWinkle served in the state Office of the Child Advocate for years, and friends saw them as something of a power couple: He, a jovial and staunch advocate for people with disabilities; she, perhaps more straightforward but just as staunch an advocate for children.
“My husband, in his superlatives in high school, was voted the friendliest, and that always was with him. ‘Oh, my god, your husband Denis. He’s so friendly,’” she said people would tell her. “It was always that friendly personality and, ‘Here’s his wife, the child advocate. She’s the big and bad child advocate. You guys are the yin and yang of each other.’ It’s certainly true. I’m pretty honest. I’m direct, but that was a hard thing, to be in the shadow of this friendly guy.”
Conor Geary is the onfield host for the University of Connecticut athletics, specifically women’s basketball and UConn football. He said his ability to be so at home in front of crowds is a trait he inherited from his father, though “he would probably poo-poo that notion because he was a very humble guy.”
“He realized what he had was a skill and a tool to really make people feel like they were enjoying themselves, to feel calm, feel reassured, feel like they could have a good time, tell a joke, whatever it might be,” Conor Geary said. “He absorbed all those different kinds of energies. So I do think that’s precisely where I got it from.”
Geary’s own father died when he was nine years old, from complications related to Crohn’s disease, which VosWinkel believes also contributed to her husband’s death.
“His mother took up drinking pretty seriously at that point. His sisters were away in college, his other brother was in high school, dealing with high school things and his [younger] brother was four going on five,” VosWinkel said. “He had an enormous sense of responsibility for his younger brother.”
Later, when Geary himself had children, VosWinkel said “he wanted to be a great father and a great husband, but he wasn’t always sure how to go about that because he didn’t have anybody to role model from.”
“He by default, not decree and certainly not by any sort of biological maturity, had to become the person who was providing for someone else, the dressing
and the bathing and the food and all those things, when all the other elements of his life were were really discombobulated,” Conor Geary said. “I think that ultimately became a real motivator for him to make sure that myself and my sister were always in a position to have a very present, very active, very engaged father, who knew what really hard times were like.”
When Geary’s illness progressed and he was in hospice, knowing he was going to die, VosWinkel said it was more like a “celebration.”
“We celebrated, we sang, we ate. Somewhat organically, it just sort of happened. People just started coming and bringing food,” she said. “The rabbi came and 31 people were in our space here where we were doing prayers and he would play the songs that he wanted to play at his funeral for people to hear and nieces and nephews and grandnieces and sisters and brothers and everybody. We felt like it was a little bit of a live wake for him.”
This story is part of an ongoing series profiling the lives of Connecticut residents who have recently died. If you have a friend or family member you’d like to be considered for this series, please send me an email jordan.fenster@hearstmediact.com.