Dani Bates

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It was weird how soon I knew something was off. Denny was never late to anything. He would always say, “If you’re not ten minutes early, then you’re late.” He would even get annoyed when we were first dating if I would show up late (which I did frequently) and would try to hide his frustration. He didn’t hide it well. Fun fact: I was 45 minutes late to our outdoor wedding. Not kidding, one reason I was so confident in marrying him that day is because he was still so excited and happy when I got there. He wasn’t even kind of annoyed. He was just so excited to be married to me.  But on that Friday, I knew by 8:01am something was off. Actually, I remember him leaving early in the morning, but he told me on Thursday that he was going to the gym the next morning. So I woke up just as he was leaving and rolled back over and went back to sleep. When Winnie woke me up with a Diet Coke (the only good thing about that day was her running in with a can yelling “Good Morning”) at 745...

4 weeks ago, at this moment, I was trying to remain calm. I had driven all over Utah County and asked places Denny frequented if they had seen him(Denny is hard to miss unless he’s in a crowd of tall people, then you can’t even see his head). I called his best friend, his mom, and his brother. I called his boss and a secretary from his work to tell them he may be late and to let me know the second he gets there.  Earlier that week he’d shown some signs of stress. But, if you know Denny, he gets stressed out all of the time. He would have a less than average month at work and threaten to quit (though he never actually followed through and we had this conversation 40,000 times). His best friend and I always teased him about being a bit of a Drama Queen. 95% of the time he was even keeled. But then he had that 5% that was over the top. Stressed out Denny was a familiar one.  The stress from work came because all Denny ever wanted was to protect and provide for his fami...

This is a picture from the day before his funeral when I took the girls to the mortuary. I had a hard time deciding if I would let the girls see their daddy but I just knew that’s what Denny wanted for them so I did. This may sound morbid, but the Mortuary did an amazing job and Winnie said “Daddy looks so handsome!” When we first went in though, I said, “Who is that?” Winnie said, “I don’t know.” “Yes you do, who is that?” “I don’t know!” Part of that could be because he had a massive beard when he died that I asked them to trim to his normal beard length(#sorrynotsorrydenny). But I don’t think that’s the real reason because she can look at pictures of him with any beard length and recognize him. I think Winnie knew her daddy wasn’t in there. I think she didn’t recognize his body without the amazing fun silly daddy spirit inside of it. Then we talked about how his body is here but his spirit is now in Heaven. We talked about how his body is going in a special box and we’re going to p...

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Winnie put stickers on the casket during the funeral. My sister was worried I would be upset about it as she was doing it during my talk. I loved it and told her to keep putting more on there. What a cute little tribute to Denny from his best buddy. Winnie has been doing a little bit better (despite BOTH girls having a double ear infection 🙄). She’s more social and wanting to go play. Which is good for me. I’m exhausted in every sense of the word and in every possible way. I definitely need some breaks. It’s so fun to see her smiling and happy and being her sunshine and rainbow self. She loves friends, especially girls that are older than her. But her favorite is when there is a “Daddy” there. A particularly amazing neighbor/friend has taken W every day for several days in a row for at least a few hours at a time. She says she likes to play with Brian because he’s a daddy. She wants to watch baseball and play catch with him. It’s equally sweet and heartbreaking. The daddy she insists...

This is the last picture taken of Denny. Piper has always been very attached to me, but the night before he disappeared, she was SO attached to him. He was the only other person she would go to with any sort of consistency. But that night she would not let him put her down. And I took this picture because I thought it was so cute how much she wanted him. Normally he would eat it up whenever one of the girls wanted him over me. He didn’t do that this time. He kept handing her back to me. Then she’d try crawling right off the bed to get back to him. He was stressed out and pacing the hallway while we chatted. But we were teasing each other and smiling and talking about how we can get through anything together. We talked about how much he loved his girls and how much his girls loved him. We talked about how strong he was. He expressed a lot of his inner struggles earlier on in the day and throughout the evening, but we ended the conversation well and talking about how I would help him wo...