Every year, 78-year-old Rocky Mountain Middle School custodian Dean Davis swears he’ll retire, but he always comes up with some reason not to.
His latest, morbid excuse?
“I’m looking for two holes (for my wife, Carol, and me) to get buried in. And when I get them all paid for (then I’ll retire),” he said.
But Jade Chavez, the middle school’s Spanish liaison and secretary, isn’t taking any excuses from Davis this year. That’s why she organized a GoFundMe for community members to help fund her friend’s retirement.
Chavez has worked at the school for three years; Davis for 18. The pair are usually the last people in the building on a given school day, so they’ve gotten pretty close.
“I love learning about him, and he gives me advice,” Chavez said.
Davis experiences daily pain in his legs, hands and back, but never complains and rarely takes a sick day.
“This body of mine, it doesn’t know how to quit,” Davis said.
Some of his health issues stem from a battle with stage IV colon cancer 18 years ago.
“They took a big ball out of me, like a baseball,” he said about his tumor. “I came out of that alive, but I keep telling my wife I’m dead. When you get cancer, and when you get all them treatments, it takes a lot out of you.”
Namely, over a year of chemotherapy left him with peripheral neuropathy, an umbrella term for conditions involving damage to the nerves outside of the brain and spinal cord. Symptoms include numbness, tingling and pain.
“It gets you in your hands and your feet up to your knees almost, and you can’t walk that great. That’s how come I have problems,” he said. “I take medicines for it, but you always have pain.”
Like a 31-year-old “big sister,” as Davis put it, Chavez is always giving her friend a hard time for overexerting himself — for example, when the 78-year-old custodian climbs onto countertops to dust out of reach spots or skips meals.
“He shouldn’t be working, and he’s always in pain,” Chavez said. “The first year I started working here, I asked him, ‘How would you feel if I made a TikTok about you?’ And he did not like that. So, I want to respect that and not do it, but I did it now because I just can’t see him like that.”
When Davis learned about the GoFundMe, he was embarrassed.
“Having people look at me like, ‘Oh, he’s old. He should be retired’? No, that’s not me,” he said.
As Chavez put it, she organized the fundraiser not because Davis has to retire, but because he deserves to.
Davis has been working ever since he graduated from Grantsville High School in Tooele County six decades ago. He milked cows at a local dairy for 32 years. Then he worked maintenance and custodial jobs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Lucas Aerospace in Park City, Bear Creek Country Kitchens in Heber City and the Zermatt Utah Resort & Spa in Midway.
When Davis tried to imagine his retirement, all he could think of was more work. He plans to spend his days pulling weeds in his backyard. He can’t see himself “sitting in the house all day long watching television.”
But when pushed, he admitted he’d like to travel to Georgia and Iowa to visit family. Montana and Idaho, just for fun. He might even go on an Alaskan cruise with his wife, who has been begging him to retire.
“I think she put her up to it,” Davis said, pointing to Chavez.
He’ll also, of course, spend some time planning his funeral. He’d like his hearse to be his baby blue 1986 Dodge Ram pickup truck, which he inherited from his father when he died in 2000. Somehow, the car has only 88,000 miles on it.
“I want to use it for the coffin … and let somebody step on the gas, and I go flying out,” he joked.
Davis’ retirement GoFundMe has already raised nearly $6,000 and can be found at tinyurl.com/y38wn3pu.