Dennis Paul Doherty

Nurse, scholar, advocate, mentor, drummer, runner, loyal friend, and loving husband, father, son, and brother, Dennis P. Doherty, PhD, RN, NPDA-BC, passed away on Sunday, February 12, battling pancreatic cancer. He was 46.

“He was always someone who lit up a room and was a joy to be around,” a friend wrote of Dennis, offering just one of many tributes online in the days following.

“He was always smiling, always in a good mood, full of energy, and patients and families loved him,” added a Boston Children’s Hospital colleague. “Whenever I couldn’t decide if I wanted to challenge myself, Dennis would, without a doubt, talk me into it.”

“I just wanted to have a birthday party, and he wanted to turn it into a big fundraiser for a charity,” recalled another friend. “But that was Dennis: ‘Let’s have an epic bash, and also help people.’”

Dennis was born in Boston, in what is now Brigham and Women’s Hospital, just a few short blocks from Children’s, his future proving ground as a professional. He grew up in Dorchester, the first son of Paul Doherty, a union carpenter who worked on the Big Dig and other projects, and Denise Doherty, a typesetter for the Dorchester Reporter and then type studio manager at Boston University. Dennis was joined by a brother, Larry—the two were known to practice pro-wrestling moves on each other in the front room—and a sister, Brigid. The Dohertys’ extended family also included two nurses, who by their example planted the seeds for Dennis’ career aspirations.

But first, he was a kid who was into music. Dennis attended Boston Latin Academy, where he played trombone in the school jazz band and bonded with bandmates while learning and performing jazz standards, and listening to and going to see favorite rock acts, from Guns ‘n’ Roses to Letters to Cleo.

“He was energetic, enthusiastic, and knew how to have a good time,” wrote classmate Tom Appleman, a bassist in the BLA jazz band. “There was always a realness about him, and you felt like you could talk about anything to him, regardless of how silly or deep you thought it was.”

Dennis switched from trombone to drums, and along with Appleman and others,

started a hip-hop/funk-rock band called Epileptic Disco. (In the future, as a pediatric nurse, Dennis would cringe when asked about that band name. Still, he said, “We were sixteen.”) Even as teenagers, the band started playing the Rathskeller and the Middle East, eventually opening for popular local and national ska and rap acts such as the Allstonians, Big D & the Kids Table, Shootyz Groove, and the Lordz of Brooklyn. They even performed their hit “Larry Bird” live on Mike Adams’ Sports World on NECN.

Dennis continued with the band throughout his first two years at Northeastern University, where he studied for a bachelor’s in nursing science. “I probably spent too much time promoting the band,” he said later in a Q&A with Journal for Nurses in Professional Development (JNPD). “Whether I was trying to get booked on the right gigs, handing out flyers for shows, or trying to get our demo to disc jockeys, I was always attempting to get more people to know about the band.” Later, those skills would come in handy in his professional career in unexpected ways.

At Northeastern, Dennis met Nancy Reardon, who was studying toxicology. The two spent many Thursday nights at the Squealing Pig in Mission Hill, with off-color folk singer Mike Barrett providing a live soundtrack. When Dennis started an Irish cover band, Nancy would bring her girlfriends downtown to Jimmy O’Keefe’s to hear him play. (He also sang one song from behind the drums.) At some point, Dennis and Nancy fell in love.

Another watershed moment came when, through Northeastern’s co-op program, Dennis was hired as a clinical assistant in the Medical-Surgical Intensive Care Unit (MSICU) at Boston Children’s Hospital. “As a student, I was in awe,” he wrote later. “It seemed to me that the nurses ran the show. I could see that they were independent and had autonomy. The nursing staff was proud and intelligent. I knew that I wanted to be this kind of nurse.”

Dennis graduated from Northeastern in 2000. After a year at Franciscan Children’s in Brighton, he returned to the MSICU at Boston Children’s Hospital, this time as a registered nurse. Now he provided direct care to critically ill children, from newborns with rare anomalies to teens with cancer.

“Looking back,” he wrote in 2013 as part of an application for a promotion, “all my best experiences—the patients and families for whom I truly made a difference—the key was being myself. . . . Being able to talk about the Patriots with a teenage boy who had a spinal cord injury was as important in his recovery as his surgical interventions were in his healing. Giving my iPod to a patient’s father for the night after talking about bootleg Grateful Dead tapes provided some normalcy for a man who listened to music daily. Cutting up scrubs to make a stocking cap for myself and a patient’s grandmother provided laughter to a twelve-year-old girl on [a ventilator].”

That positive attitude could be a powerful way to cope with work in an intense environment, said a Children’s colleague, Sue Hamilton, in an interview. “Critical care can be toxic to your soul,” Hamilton said. “There’s heartache all the time. Dennis would see people burning out and also people wanting better pay and respect. That’s where he took off. ‘I want to make morale better.’”

Dennis started a morale committee that spread to the hospital’s other intensive care units. “They’d do fun things, but they were also a voice for the nurses and the things most important to them,” said Hamilton.

Dennis also joined the American Association of Critical Care Nurses (AACN), which had started advocating for healthy work environments in hospitals. Dennis brought this initiative to Children’s, surveying his colleagues and bringing the results to management.

“I spent a lot of my 10 years as a staff nurse in the MSICU opening my mouth,” Dennis wrote. When his colleagues complained about the way vacation days were allocated, Dennis took action. “I remember barging into our nursing director’s office, outraged, yelling about how things had to change. This did not help my cause.”

As he grew into this advocacy role, Dennis learned to channel that passion into getting results with methodical fact-gathering, big-picture thinking, and collaborative discussions. He volunteered to chair the MSICU’s recruitment and retention committee. “I took this role very seriously and put 100% into it.”

Meanwhile, Dennis and Nancy bought a home in Hyde Park and were married in 2006. They had their first son, Patrick, in 2008; moved to Norwood; and had a second son, Daniel, in 2012.

But even as he began notching personal and professional milestones, Dennis didn’t leave music behind. In an especially active period from 2005 to 2008, Dennis played drums in the Larkin Brigade, an Irish pub rock band who were nominated for a Boston Music Award. Once again, Dennis was a force of nature not only as a percussionist but also as a promoter. Thanks in large part to his efforts, the band landed big gigs such as the WBCN Rock ‘n’ Roll Rumble, the Boston Irish Festival in Canton, Darkbuster’s Hometown Throw-Up, and a Boston Harbor cruise with the Pietasters. They traveled to New York City to open for the Skatalites at the Knitting Factory and for Seanchai & Unity Squad at Rocky Sullivan’s. They even played a music festival in Toronto, where Dennis rightly insisted on side trips to Niagara Falls and the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Another outlet for Dennis was long-distance running. The first time he plodded around the Fens as a husky Northeastern student, he vomited afterwards. But within a few years, he was running half marathons, and in 2012, he announced he was running the Boston Marathon to raise funds for the Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism.

It was only then that most of the Dohertys’ friends learned that young Patrick had been diagnosed as autistic.

“I don’t know why it is so hard to discuss this, but I avoided it,” Dennis later told music journalist Michael O’Connor Marotta. For four years, “People would ask, ‘How’s your son?’ and I would be like ‘Oh great!’ But I would feel sick to my stomach.”

That changed when Dennis made his marathon announcement. “It has been difficult,” he wrote on his Flutie Foundation fundraising page. “On the one hand, we have the sweetest, most loving, beautiful little boy. On the other hand, it is hard not to wonder why this had to happen to Patrick.” Why was he born into a world that wouldn’t fully support his needs as a disabled person? With three- to five-hour therapy sessions five days a week, he added, Patrick was making gains in his speech, cognition, and behavior. But Dennis was afraid that Patrick wouldn’t be understood or accepted by society at large.

“This is my means to tell the world: yes, my son has this diagnosis, but I love him to pieces,” Dennis wrote. “Patrick runs a marathon week in and week out between school and his therapy. If he can do that, I can run 26.2 miles.”

A burden was lifted as friends rallied behind Dennis and his family. Donations and words of support poured in, online and at the fundraisers Dennis threw at the Beachcomber in Quincy and other venues. Folks donned “Team Doherty” T-shirts and joined him on training runs over the Newton hills.

“The whole process [was] cathartic,” Dennis told Marotta. It “helped me work past this sort of self-pity and realize that I have an amazing son who is quirky, but also funny and sweet and happy. He makes me better at all parts of life.”

On Patriots’ Day 2013, Dennis ran 25.5 miles. He was just outside Kenmore Square when Larry found him and told him what had happened at the finish line. Nancy, Patrick, Daniel, Paul and Denise were all across the street from the explosions, but thankfully they were unhurt. Shortly, Dennis and the other runners were stopped and sent away from the course.

Exhausted, hurting, lacking a phone or wallet, Dennis walked down Brookline Avenue, took a left on Longwood Avenue and made his way to the MSICU at Children’s Hospital.

“I was simply looking to get warm, sit down, and figure out what to do next,” he wrote later, but “I was showered with love and concern for my and my family’s well-being. One by one, staff came out to see that I was all right. . . . The staff of the MSICU is a family.”

Dennis signed up to run the marathon once more in 2014, throwing himself into training and fundraising all over again, including with a Larkin Brigade reunion at TT the Bear’s. But this time, on Patriots’ Day, Dennis crossed the finish line.

The following month, he completed his master’s degree in nursing and nursing education from Framingham State University. That summer, he started a new job at Children’s as a professional development specialist. He managed nursing orientation, the healthy work environment program, the mentorship program, and other facets of staff empowerment, which was his passion. “Dennis was everyone's biggest cheerleader, a mentor and always challenging you to be the best version of yourself,” commented one colleague.

Over the next several years, Dennis planned and presented at national conferences on nursing professional development (NPD) and gained a reputation as an expert in the field. Becoming board certified in NPD, he said, “was one of the proudest days of my nursing career.” And in 2021, he earned a PhD in nursing science from University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Just as Dennis had encouraged his bandmates and hustled to get bigger gigs, he worked tirelessly in his professional field to make connections and plan events, and he urged fellow NPD practitioners to do the same. “Be like an aspiring rock star trying to build a fan base,” he told JNPD.

Dennis still made time to take in plenty of actual rock concerts, big and small. He kept listening to and discovering new indie rock bands. He hired a Guns ‘n’ Roses tribute band for his 40th birthday party. He regularly went to see Jimmy Buffett, whose music he thought was “horrible,” because the tailgating was so much fun. Once, when he was heading into Great Woods (or whatever it was called at this point) to see the Black Crowes, Dennis noticed a young fan about to reluctantly fork over an exorbitant sum to a scalper. It so happened Dennis had an extra ticket. He handed the kid the ticket, for free, with barely a glance at the furious scalper.

Along with running and skiing, Dennis picked up another demanding physical pursuit in CrossFit. He could back-squat 300 pounds—no surprise for someone who possessed “the strength of a Viking behind the drum kit,” as one musician friend put it.

For Dennis, the social aspect of all these activities was key. By inviting peeps to a concert—or a Patriots or Boston College football game, or a Northeastern hockey game—he was nudging friends out of their middle-age rut and continuing to make memories.

“Dennis had the rare ability to balance work, family, and friendship at a time of life when far too many of us sacrifice at least one of those things,” said longtime friend Mike Miller.

Moreover, when disparate folks were gathered, Dennis made sure everyone felt welcome. A great conversationalist and genuinely curious about others’ experiences and perspectives, he liked to listen as much as he liked to talk. “Dennis knew how to make an impression on everyone he met, without trying to be the center of attention,” said Miller. “This may have been his greatest gift.”

One of the last such gatherings was when Dennis assembled a crew to go see the Lemonheads at Paradise Rock Club in December. He was admitted to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in early February. He missed Northeastern’s 2023 Beanpot win by one day.

“Most of all,” said Nancy, “Dennis loved the [stuffing] out of me and the kids. In his drugged-up stupor, from his hospital bed, he managed to send the boys and me cupcakes for Valentine’s Day.”

In addition to Nancy, Patrick, Daniel, Paul, Denise, Larry and his wife, Meghan, and Brigid and her husband, Mike, Dennis leaves nieces and nephews Ben, Shannon, Jennifer, and Liam, along with cousins, aunts, and uncles, and countless friends and colleagues.

Services from the Gillooly Funeral Home, 126 Walpole Street (Rt. 1A), NORWOOD were held privately. A Memorial Service will be held at the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center Amphitheater, 77 Avenue Louis Pasteur, Boston, MA on Saturday, March 11, 2023 at 11:00 AM. Complimentary parking will be available in the parking garage under the venue.

In lieu of flowers, the Dohertys ask that donations be made to The Boston Bear Cubs, a Massachusetts Special Hockey Affiliate for which Patrick plays and Dennis was a coach. Donate at https://www.paypal.com/us/fundraiser/charity/1496345 .