- September 17, 2024
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The enormous success of Willis Smith Construction allowed Lakewood Ranch's Dave and Amy Sessions to travel the world, exploring nature's most fascinating and remote environments.
But one place stood above all others when it came to Amy Sessions' favorite place to be.
Home.
Dave Sessions stood earlier this week at their Lake Club home, pointing through the door of their bedroom closet. He was talking about all the special qualities of Amy, who died Aug. 3 at their Maggie Valley, North Carolina vacation home after a fall down the stairs. Dave was showing some examples of what made her extraordinary.
In the closet, he opened a cabinet that was stuffed full of many items. Amy had stashed away a collection of gifts, little things just to brighten a person's day. There was a Yahtzee game, articles of clothing, knickknacks, and even a can of corned beef hash — just in case a gag gift was in order.
On the floor was a couple rolls of gift wrap, scissors and tape. It all was at the ready in case someone needed a pick-me-up, or a smile.
"She did simple, little things that people would cherish," said Dave, his eyes watering. "Little ... loving ... caring ... things."
"She always knew what gift to get a person," said her daughter, Haley, who is 32. "She was so good at that. She constantly was thinking about other people. You could hear her voice brighten when she talked about being able to help someone. She was so good with people, even though she didn't think she was."
It was a striking dichotomy when considering Amy was a shy, almost reclusive person who mostly just wanted to be surrounded by Haley, Dave, and their son Doug, who is 31. Yet, she would stop the car to help a homeless person she never had met.
At 10:30 a.m., Sept. 14, a funeral service for Amy Sessions will be held at the Church of St. Patrick in Sarasota. A celebration of life will follow at the church's Fellowship Hall at noon.
The family is trying to find the best way to describe their love of Amy to those who attend the services. They will have to find the words, through their grief, because Amy's impact on the world around her — outside of home — was often done in anonymity.
Haley told a story about her mom attending a fundraiser at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota. Willis Smith Construction had made donations to the fundraiser and Dave and Amy were attending.
Haley was out that night, but when she arrived home, she found the house cluttered with paintings.
"Some of them were good, some of them were morbid," Haley said. "She bought all the paintings of the kids who couldn't sell them at the fundraiser. It was crazy, we had paintings everywhere. She wanted to support everyone.
"I had nine apartments in 11 years, and I had a couple of those paintings," Haley said with a laugh.
When it came to her children, no task was too hard for Amy.
"She always was there at the drop of a hat," Doug said of his mother. "I live now in Raleigh (North Carolina). When I moved in, she sent me a big box of little things. In there was an obscene amount of paper towels ... two years worth. We still joked about it. It always was a challenge to her to find out what you needed, and then to get it."
Doug called his mother "a homebody like me."
"She always was so supportive. Anything I wanted to do, she was nurturing.
"She loved me, and she was caring. Whenever she would see me over the holidays, she would tear up. I guess that is what moms do."
He said she embraced being a mom and didn't have second thoughts about not pursuing her own career.
"She didn't regret anything," Doug said.
The love story between Dave and Amy Sessions began at the University of Florida when Amy's roommate set them up on a date. Dave thought it was more of an outing with several of their friends along. But no one showed up other than the two of them.
Dave proceeded to take Amy to the campus basketball arena — the Stephen C. O'Connell Center — which at the time was being built with an inflatable roof. Dave, the future builder, was intrigued.
"When I first saw Amy, I thought she was cute, adorable," Dave remembered. "She was very quiet and shy, and I told her we were going to break into a construction site. I was so fascinated by it.
"It was an arena with an inflatable roof and I wanted to figure out how they did it. They had a series of underground tunnels and tubes. The whole building was pressurized.
"Did she have an interest in it? None. We walked over there and I was explaining things. We climbed stairs and ladders and scaffolding."
They got to the top of the arena, 110 feet up, and took a moment to look over the campus, and up at the stars. But it didn't seem to matter. Amy told Dave later that it was her worst date ever.
Even so, when they got back to their dorm (Trusler Hall, men on one side of the dorm, women on the other), and were saying good night, Amy leaned over ... and kissed Dave.
"She said she saw stars," Dave said. "I did, too."
He still didn't think he had much of a chance.
"I was the geeky guy who loved talking about buildings," Dave said. "But it started to grow into a romance."
It helped the romance along that Dave cleaned up his act when he went to meet her parents.
"I was long-haired and rebellious," he said. "I was somebody no parent would want to see. It was a huge change in me. I wanted to be a better person and I wanted to give this woman everything she desired."
It will be 40 years in November since they were married. They had planned a trip to Europe to celebrate the occasion.
It was 1988 when Dave Sessions joined Willis Smith Construction as a program manager, and shortly afterward bought the company. Sessions was all-in financially so things were tight as he and Amy planned to start a family. The company had an entire revenue of $2.9 million his first year.
Amy was eight months pregnant when she gave up her fashion career with Burdines department store, where she was quickly moving up the ranks. She had a goal of being a buyer of merchandise.
With Willis Smith Construction struggling to find its way, it was a tough decision to have just one income in the household.
"It was a massive struggle, but she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom," Dave said. "And I wanted her to have the joy of being a mother."
After giving up her own career, she supported her husband in any way she could.
"In those next 10 years, she helped me with the marketing and the press releases," Dave said. "She wrote the company newsletter for years."
At company events, she helped Dave size up possible clients. Haley said her mother had an uncanny ability to size up people in a matter of minutes.
Her intuition paid off for Dave, as long as he would listen.
"She had such a different perspective than I did," Dave said. "It helped me in those early days. And there were times that I absolutely should have listened to her. We made a wonderful team."
Willis Smith Construction turned into a giant, doing $138 million in business in 2022, the last time Dave made company revenues public. Along the way, Amy concentrated more on the kids and the household.
But even if Amy wasn't hands-on at Willis Smith, Dave said her contribution was invaluable.
"The way you would win a project was through research, desire and passion," he said. "That takes time. I never would have had that time if she hadn't been taking care of everything else."
Despite Dave's 80-hour work weeks, Amy made sure the family traveled together, to national parks, to lakes, to ski slopes, everywhere they could to be close to nature.
As they grew older, she liked attending the company events less and less.
She loved gardening and being around the house. When Dave and Amy bought the vacation home in the Maggie Valley of North Carolina, she found a new slice of heaven with bears, turkeys, raccoons, deer and bobcats on the property.
They were there in the days before she died. Just after midnight on Aug. 3, Dave and Amy were asleep when something woke her up. A bear had been visiting their front porch almost nightly, and Amy loved going downstairs to watch it.
Dave wonders if Amy heard the bear, and was making her way downstairs in a slumber. In the past, when Amy had gone to watch the bear, she wouldn't turn on any lights in the log home so as to not scare it away.
He is left to wonder if Amy didn't turn on the lights for that reason, and took a misstep.
"One misstep, and our lives are changed forever," he said quietly.
They had begun spending more time there after Dave partially went into retirement last year. His full retirement has been coming as he finishes "paper work" and eases out the door of Willis Smith. She was pushing him to retire soon.
"We were at the stage where we were going to be together, and we could do anything we wanted," Dave said.
Through his sadness, Dave tries to recreate their most amazing moments in his mind. He most remembers the look on her face after the birth of each of their children.
"The look of exhaustion," Dave said. "Then that look of instant, instinctive, motherly love."
"That and I remember looking into her eyes when we got married ... the way she looked at me."
