The marriage of Wendy Ishii and Bo Dimon is the story of creative conflict resolution, forgiveness and financial pragmatism  

LAPORTE – When Bo Dimon learned that Wendy Ishii keeps a voodoo doll of her on her fireplace mantle – and she uses it – Bo had only two polite requests.

“I asked her to stop poking me in the eyes, because I had cataract surgery coming up,” Bo said with a laugh. “And I asked her to carry it during our wedding ceremony.”

Wendy assured Bo her eyes were safe: “I was aiming lower down,” she can now say with a laugh.

Wendy and Bo – or Bo and Wendy, if you prefer – have much in common. They are both septuagenarians. They both deeply loved the same man – Colorado State University professor Douglas Ishii. They are both widows. And, as of Jan. 4, they are now married. To each other.  

I’ll give you a beat to catch up. 

Theirs is not a political story. It’s not a queer story. It’s not a stunt. And it is certainly not a joke. If anything, it is a confirmation that throughout most of human history, marriage has been used as a business contract designed to consolidate property and forge economic alliances.

But this story is also a deeper demonstration of an unlikely friendship and of profound forgiveness between women. And in these deeply divisive times, Wendy and Bo hope maybe their improbable journey together can be seen as a model for creative conflict resolution and finding common ground.

“Every marriage, as you know, is based on a unique story, and ours is no exception,” said Bo. “We have a unique bond. We were both married to the same wonderful man. I mean, who knows my life better than Wendy?”

As the widows recently stood before friends and family in Wendy’s living room in Laporte, they directed their vows as promises both to each other and to the memory of the man they loved: To respect, openly communicate and mutually support one another in enduring partnership and friendship.

Bo praised Wendy for her fearlessness and graciousness. Wendy, in return, promised to “keep together what share, trouble and sorrow our lives may lay upon.”

It would be easy to joke here along the lines of, “Who knew the IRS could play Cupid?” but the real matchmaker here was Doug, who died on April 13 at age 82.

“We think Doug is here beside us today,” said Bo – and, Wendy interjected, “in our bras.”

Literally. At the wedding, both women carried tiny vials of his ashes in their bosoms. He was not only there, Bo believes, he was “rolling his eyes and laughing.”

It’s true that this was a marriage of convenience; no one is saying otherwise. Mostly for the convenience of several Fort Collins attorneys and tax accountants.

“Doug loved both Wendy and Bo – and why not? They’re both very special people,” said Fort Collins attorney and musician Drake Johnson, who presided over the wedding.

Even after Doug’s 35-year marriage to Wendy ended in 2017 and he later married Bo, Doug continued to handle all the taxes and the finances for both Wendy, who is now 78, and Bo, who is 72 and lived with Doug in Woodland, Wash., until his death from a sudden infection.

“Doug’s obvious wish was that both women would be financially taken care of throughout their lives,” said Johnson. But Doug, holder of more than 20 patents in groundbreaking neuroscience research, didn’t leave a will – only notes. “He was a brilliant scientist, but he was truly an absent-minded professor,” said Wendy. “He clearly had a strategy. He just hadn’t made it official.”

Which put these two women who didn’t much care for one another in a very awkward place shortly after Doug’s death – sitting next to each other in Johnson’s Fort Collins legal office. Trying to work it all out.

Doug had amassed a considerable estate. There are six rental properties – all in Wendy’s name. Bo has three children from a previous marriage. Wendy has what she calls Doug’s three “bonus children,” along with their spouses and children. Doug also had two sisters and a brother to consider. As is the case with grief and competing financial interests, this could have gotten ugly very quickly.

Instead, the women went to see Johnson in Fort Collins, where Wendy set the tone for how this was all going to go. As for the six properties, she said, “I’m going to split it all with Bo,” she said. “It’s the right thing to do. And I know it’s what Doug would’ve wanted.”

Here was Wendy relinquishing half of an estate that, simply through Doug’s procrastination, remained largely in her legal name. To a woman she had stabbed in effigy as therapy. Keep in mind, this meeting was in the immediate wake of Doug’s death, before anything resembling bonding had occurred between them. Bo could have argued for all of it. But that never occurred to her.

The thinking was, by simply splitting all assets equally between these two women, each with their own trunks of the family tree to tend to, they then could take responsibility to ensure that everyone would be treated fairly down the genealogical line.

It was Johnson’s legal duty to remind Wendy that she really didn’t have to do this. To which Wendy replied:  ‘Yeah, I do.” To which Johnson replied: “Yeah, knowing you – you do.”

Still, this agreement only set the stage for a lot of legalese ahead, all of it falling on Johnson.

“And after listening carefully to everything and realizing that this was going to take a ton of my time,” Johnson said, “I told the women, almost as a joke: ‘You’re already married financially. It would just be so much easier for me if you two got married for real.’” 

As Bo recalls, the women just sort of looked at each other in that moment, and Bo said: “Well, then – why wouldn’t we?”

Meet the characters

Douglas Nobuo Ishii was born in 1942 into an American wartime internment camp known today as the Santa Anita Racetrack. He went on to become a longtime professor of Biomedical Sciences and Physiology at CSU. He was renowned for his groundbreaking research on diabetic complications, brain atrophy and nerve regeneration.

He was an associate professor at Columbia and a divorced father of three in 1980 when he met Wendy Nute at a craft show in New York, where he bought the successful stage and screen actor a vase. They married in 1982 and moved to Fort Collins three years later when he was hired at CSU.

Wendy is an artsy bohemian type who co-founded the enduring Bas Bleu salon theater in 1992, largely with Doug’s help. Wendy was named the Colorado Theatre Person of the Year in 2008 and won the Colorado Theatre Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. Still active, she returns to the stage as Battle-axe Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of Being Earnest” starting Feb. 20. 

Deborah “Bo” Dimon had no deep roots before she arrived in Fort Collins in 1980. She got married, raised three kids in Poudre Canyon and worked as a U.S. Forest Ranger before landing a job teaching in CSU’s English Department. That’s where she met Doug.

He was a great man, Wendy said. “But he wasn’t perfect.”

Wendy was blindsided to discover that Doug, at age 73, had fallen in love with another woman. He moved with her to Washington, where they were married in 2018. Wendy told Doug to take that craft-show vase with him.

It’s not easy for either woman to talk about those painful years. But all successful relationships are based on honesty, and Wendy and Bo have pledged to be fully transparent about the origin of their own. There’s no other way to put this: Wendy was ruined.

“I didn’t have one day after Doug left until he died that I didn’t cry – whether I’d see a rock that (our dog) peed on, or something in the store that I didn’t have to buy anymore because Doug ate corned beef hash and I didn’t,” she said.

“After he left, he said to me: ‘Just think of me as dead.’ And I said, ‘That would be easier.’ And I’ll be honest – it was.”

It’s all just so understandably human. Wendy focused her misplaced anger on the easiest target: The woman she didn’t really know at all.

“I’m not a violent person, but there was a time when I really wanted Bo to die in a fiery crash, or to get eaten by a bear when they were out camping,” Wendy said.

Bo totally gets it. “I was the other woman,” she said. “I was the one wearing the scarlet letter.” She admits to her own insecurities about Wendy and the immense shadow she cast all the way to Washington. When Bo learned the origin story of the vase in her house, she ordered it gone.

How did we get here?

Fast forward to Jan. 4. Nine months after Bo and Wendy committed to working together, to getting to know one another honestly, and to discovering all that they have in common.

“And what we have in common is Doug,” Wendy said. “Doug was the most amazing person I’ve ever known, and he loved Bo. So what I want now more than anything else is to know her. And what I know of Bo now, I really like.”

As these two remarkable women found themselves navigating grief and endless financial documents, something beautiful emerged: A mature and empathetic decision to join forces, not just for the practical benefits, but because they discovered in each other a true companion who understands their individual stories better than anyone else ever could.

It was not lost on either that the germination of their new friendship coincided rather nicely with what is considered to be the human gestation period.

“Through their mutual loss, Wendy and Bo have, against high odds, found in each other a healthy and sustaining way to talk and cry and laugh away grief,” said Fort Collins author John Calderazzo. “And beyond that, many of us have witnessed a growing mutual affection that has arisen from helping each other to heal.”

Eventually, Wendy even learned to forgive Doug. The breakthrough came when a friend finally told her: “Wendy, he didn’t leave you – he went to something.”

“That really has helped me over the years,” Wendy said.

On the afternoon of the wedding, talk of past rancor and petty jealousies gave fully away to talk of open communication, mutual support and partnership moving forward. As for those dark thoughts of Bo being bit by a rattler? “Now that’s all gone,” Wendy said with a laugh.

To hear the vows, to see them cut the cake, to hear the songs sung by Bo’s daughter, rising Fort Collins folk singer Christine Alice, you’d swear these two are in real love. And the thing is, they are, in a way that not everyone will understand or sanction.

This is a sexless love story built on real life, resilience, shared history, and yes, a healthy dose of pragmatism.

“I want to publicly say how grateful I am that Wendy has come into my life,” Bo said at the ceremony. “She is fearless. She is also gracious, understanding, caring and compassionate. She is fiercely smart, well-read and well-spoken. She is hilarious, talkative, charismatic, talented, and let’s not forget – forgiving.”

When Wendy first read a draft of Bo’s vows, she asked her new partner to take out all those adjectives. But Bo refused, “because I mean every one of them,” she said. 

And that, as we say in journalism, is “the nut graph” of the story of Wendy and Bo, the two married widows now going about their unconflicted lives in two different states. Theirs is a story of forgiveness.

“For both of us,” Wendy said.

They know their story will cause some to snicker – they snicker, too. What they don’t care about is anyone who might disapprove.

“God, if I worried about things people said about me over the years, I couldn’t leave the house,” Wendy said with a laugh.

The wedding wasn’t legal – not the day it was held at Ishii’s home on Jan. 4, anyway. That came the next day, when the two signed the legal paperwork at the Larimer County Courthouse. They were met there by Deputy Clerk Erik Rohman, who recognized Wendy in a way that usually only happens in the movies.

“Hey!” the clerk told her as he stamped, “I used to mow your yard 20 years ago!”

The women giggled, and took that as a favorable sign. They left whispering the sweet nothings that lovebirds in their 70s do. “We had a lovely talk about bladder leakage,” said Wendy, which is something women in their 70s talk about quite a lot.”

Doug, they believe, would have loved it. 

John Moore is the Denver Gazette’s Senior Arts Journalist. Email him at john.moore@denvergazette.com