Denerial Pierite was a joyful, if sometimes carefree father of D’Naria, husband of Keisha. He and Keisha were killed in September, 2007 in an accident after his car collided with an exposed culvert. They were enroute to their one year anniversary celebration.

I don’t  think I’ve met anyone as patient and, though detached, caring as Denerial. After my dad had his stroke, endured three months of hospitalisation, and finally came home, Denerial was there, assigned to ‘watch’ a man who’d become little more than a speaking vegetable.

As dad grew stronger, corraled his abilities, and grew fiesty, Denerial was there, even when dad recited a few ugly words that bubbled up from his childhood through his still-healing brain. While dad learned to walk and talk again, Denerial exercised him physically and mentally, making conversation, stimulating dad’s brain, and calming him down when needed.

Though I couldn’t be there, I was confident that this funny and unique young man I’d met - Denerial - held my father in good hands.

When my wife and I moved to Louisiana in August 2006, I got to hang with Denerial more often. He offered to take me to the shooting range for target practice, and impressed me with his patience and care for my own father. While there were opportunities for us to replace ‘D’ with cheaper and less experienced people, we never considered it. He was someone dad was comfortable with, even when dad was frustrated and tough to work with.

Denerial was a tempering force to dad’s sometimes heated need to express himself.

Denerial was a good friend to the man who was my sister’s boyfriend, and who I am now glad to call my brother-in-law. They were fast friends - good people, brought together across race, class, and hundreds of years of southern inertia to be friends.

Denerial and Keisha’s wedding was a beautiful, vibrant piece of what it means to be hopeful and middle class in Louisiana - something that’s vanishing too quickly. In that little church between Alexandria and Marksville, I had a smile a mile wide - my wife and I watched another couple make vows we’d expressed to each other just eight months earlier.

Over the next six months, until April 2007, I saw and talked to Denerial a couple of times a week. When I was sad, he joked with me. When I was really sad, we told “yo’ momma” jokes. (My favorite: “Yo’ Momma is so fat...she jumped in the air and got stuck!”)

(And when I was pissed off, he’d indulge my occasional vice, lending me a cigarette - or when he quit smoking, he’d tell me that everybody was just full of shit.)

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A bare year later, Denerial and Keisha drove by me under the southern sky, in the heat and sticky evening humidity to park their new Lincoln MKS in the grass at the Oaks. They’d arrived for my sister’s wedding, one of the happiest days of my life. I met them at the car, overjoyed to see them both and happy that they’d come to share Brooke’s wedding.

I’m wistful that my sister’s wedding day was the last one I got to talk to him, to say hello to Kiesha, to see them both overjoyed at my sister’s wedding and to see my dad half-walking, so far beyond what he was once seemed condemned to. Denerial pushed him, cared for him, and even fussed at him when my father’s own children could not.

This page stands in memorial to Denerial and Kiesha Pierite, and as a reminder to D’Naria of what a good man her father was.

God will certainly welcome Denerial and Keisha in Heaven.