Afterward

In the years that followed, Dennis spent most of them working as a purchasing agent for a glass manufacturing company in Shreveport, Louisiana. He and Gertrude had one daughter and one granddaughter. In his 50s he spent a few years in Kentucky caring for his aging parents and looking after his interest in the family's coal mining operation. Around 1980, he and Gertrude moved to Ringgold, Louisiana to a cabin on Lake Bisteneau, where they lived out their remaining years.

He was a kind and gentle spirit who was quick to help a friend or a stranger. When a single mother with two young boys had no heat in her home one cold winter, he paid the money she owed to the gas company and had service restored to her house. He fixed what was broken in the home, piled food on their table, collected clothes for her two little boys, put a Christmas tree in their living room, then took the kids to church. He never mentioned this to a soul.

He loved music, mountains, wide-open spaces, nature and little kids. He loved his dogs and cats as much as he loved any other human being. And he loved his wife as much the day he died as he did the day they were wed. They were like one soul that shared two bodies.

In the Sixties, a woman named Doris began working in the same office as Gertrude and they became friends. Doris had been a child in Germany during WWII. She shared stories with Dennis about what life had been like for her and her mother after her father, a German soldier, had been killed in battle, stories about famine and fear. During the years of their friendship, Dennis sought details from Doris about where her father had been at the time of his death, then he would retreat into solitude, pouring over old battlefield maps and calendars, worrying that he had been the one who had taken the man's life.

By the time he died at the age of 72, he could not even bring himself to shoot a bird.