Sean Dylan Ahern, 45, passed away very unexpectedly on Friday March 8th of 2024.
That sentence alone is paralyzing. It instills the type of grief that stops your heart and pulls the very ground from beneath your feet. Sean. Not Sean. This can’t happen to someone like Sean, this can’t be real.
You see, Sean was the type of man that you remembered. Not for silly things like the type of clothes that he wore or for the things that he had. To him possessions meant nothing. No. Sean was simple. He loved his family. He loved his friends. And everything he did, he did for them. Period.
This will not be a typical obituary, because Sean was the furthest thing from a typical man. He deserves more than a traditional blurb about his accomplishments. He deserves the story of his life. It’s all that I have left to give him.
Sean was funny, compassionate, humble, and downright brilliant. But most of all, he was unapologetically loyal to those he cared about.
He planned his life with painstaking precision right from the word go. From his first step to his last, Sean knew what he wanted. To spend time with the people who were important to him. That meant working as hard as humanly possible, so that he could retire at 45, having earned his beloved pension to spend his days watching his children grow up, as well as travel the world. Sean was 2 months shy of retirement when he passed. It seems a cruel joke that the universe played on him.
Sean’s life was anything but typical.
He always described himself as a blue-collar guy, working a blue-collar job. He came from humble means, and worked very, very hard for everything he had.
Sean graduated from Syracuse University on a full scholarship. While attending, he was awarded a semester abroad, where he worked in and traveled to many different countries around the world. When he went to Ireland for the first time, Sean was broke, but decided that he wanted to find out more about his family name. He bought himself a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, and walked for hours until he reached the town his family originally came from. When he got there, they told him the records in the church had been burned in a fire, but said that the Ahern family had never left, and were up the road. Sean took his bread and peanut butter and went to their house, where he knocked on the door and said, “Hi, my name is Sean Ahern.” They proclaimed that he was family without another word. They took him in, he stayed with them for several days and even worked in their fields with them. But that was Sean. Always smiling, always happy, always the good guy in someone’s story.
After college, Sean joined the Army. With his father being a Marine and his grandfather a retired navy commander, Sean felt a very strong connection and duty to serve his country. During his time spent in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Afghanistan, he served as an intelligence officer from 2000-2005. That being said, he experienced his fair share of tragedy and loss during this time. Like most war deployed veterans, Sean was not always forthcoming with his experiences there, but his involvement in them would change him as a person and motivate him even more to help people for the rest of his life. He eventually earned a Bronze Star for acts of heroism, as well as many other military honors and commendations. He was proud, damn proud, to be a veteran.
After the military, Sean was having a difficult time deciding what to do next. He sat down one day and had a conversation with his uncle about career choices. His uncle looked at him very sternly and said, “You’re Irish, son. You’ve got three choices, Cop, fireman, or gangster.” Sean, fortunately, chose the first option, and became an Endicott Patrolman for 19 years. His loyalty to his fellow men can be summed up by a few words from one of his work brothers, Matt Brubaker, who said that “Sean was more than just my co-worker. He was my friend and my brother in blue. Sean was loyal, compassionate, smart, and he could talk to anyone about anything. He had an uncanny ability to sort through any situation and recognize what was important and what wasn’t. He was the epitome of the saying 'Don’t sweat the small stuff.'"
Sean’s brothers in blue, and I say this with the utmost veracity, were everything to him. He loved them. Fiercely. Although I hadn’t spent much time with them through the years, I felt as though I knew and loved each and every one of them just by how often Sean spoke of them and their individual qualities that he always admired. John Dunham, Eric Beavers, Dennis DeWitte, Bradley Solomon, William Davies, Scott Carpenter, Matt Brubaker, David Fish, John Wonka and Angelo Ranieri; I hope, with all my heart, that you all truly understand what you meant to Sean. His love for you went beyond that of a best friend. He would have gladly given you everything he had and more, knowing all the while, that you would have done the same for him.
My life with Sean began in 2012 when I met him at Kelly’s restaurant in Syracuse. We spent hours talking, and ended the night at the Blarney Stone feeding stray cats and laughing together. Anyone who knows Sean, knows why that’s funny. His love of his own orange cat was unhealthy at best, and was one of the reasons we hit it off so well. I knew immediately that I loved him.
After that, it was a whirlwind of buying a house, getting married in Ireland and very quickly after, expecting our first baby girl. Molly Rose would be the eldest of our four babies: Madeleine Joan, Margaret Aisling and finally John Edmund. Sean considered his children to be the greatest of all his achievements. I remember looking at him after the chaos of giving birth as he held Molly for the first time. He looked as though someone had given him the stars. He told me that he never really knew what true love was until he first laid eyes on our daughter. He acted the same every time one of our children came into this world.
Some of Sean’s favorite moments came from putting our girls to bed each night. From the very first day they were born, he would walk them around the house and gently sing them Irish lullabies until they fell asleep on him. One night, he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “I don’t know what it’ll be like when I die, but when I do, I hope it feels the way it does when Ellie falls asleep on my chest.”
Sean sacrificed himself at every turn for our benefit. He would sleep for an hour after taking a double shift, go to class at BU (he earned his Master’s Degree in Public Administration), wake up and dust himself off just to come with me to doctors’ appointments, playgrounds, open houses and anything else that the kids were involved in; only to go back into work and do it all over again. Of all the hats that Sean wore, being a father was truly his best.
In 2020 Sean and I made the decision to move our family to Skaneateles, NY. This was the best decision we ever could have made. There, we were welcomed with open arms into the community and Sean did what he did best, made fast friends with just about anyone he could talk to. He was quick to join the Auburn AOH and Skaneateles Legion, where he would share “a pint of the black stuff” and meet new people. At the time, we didn’t understand that these “people” would turn out to be a treasure trove of humanity, quickly turning into our second family and some of our best friends. We spent every date night with them, and always left laughing and counting down the days until we could spend more time with them. He was so proud to be part of what they had.
That being said, Sean was unapologetically Irish. Just ask him. Especially after a few pints with the lads. This extended into his love of Irish music, which he would often grace the patrons of these establishments with, by playing every song ever written by Ronnie Drew, the Tossers, the High Kings, Shane MacGowan and countless others. He sang with them. He drank with them. He laughed with them. He loved them.
His other favorite times and memories were spent on the farm with his mom and step father, Christine and Lance; laughing and spending precious time with them whenever he was able. He loved the family dinners, falling asleep on their couch, and Lance’s hilarious stories. Chris, you were the “glue” he said “that held the family together for all these years.”
Sean loved his siblings Laurie, Nikole, Colleen and Andrew. Laurie would babysit Sean for hours when he was little. Sean and Nikole were inseparable as children. Together they did martial arts, played on the beach and in the ocean, went on countless road trips and she was his biggest cheerleader when he played football as a child. His conversations with his brother Andy and his dad on his way home were his therapy. He called almost every day. He was so incredibly proud of Andrew and the family Andrew was raising. Colleen, was his baby sister. He bragged every time he talked about her, her beautiful children, and her epic swimming records as a child.
Every vacation we would spend in Florida with his father John and his step mother Jane, making memories that will always be some of my favorites that we shared. John and he would spend hours in the garage, talking, laughing, singing, and telling stories while Jane and I watch the kids play in the makeshift “beach” we made in the back yard. The night would always end the same way. Sean and John telling each other that life was good, that they had made it, and that it just couldn’t get any better. John loved his son and the pride that beamed from his face whenever he talked about Sean was palpable. John was, and always will be Sean’s best friend.
“Family is the most important thing you can have” Sean would say.
But family wasn’t always blood. Chris Rockhill, Rick Gallo, Obed Varughese, Donal O’Shaughnessy, Julio Santos, Jake Quill, Tom O’Toole, Jeff & Jed Dove, Willie Colon, Big Chris, Noah, Lou Quill, Craig Kimak and Dino DiCarlo, know that you your friendship helped hold his world together.
Sean, my darling husband, you were the only light in so many people’s dark places, myself included.
You’d never, ever hesitate to help someone in need. Whether it was your time, your ear, your hand, or your experience. You were there for them.
Finally, Sean, I have to tell you how unbelievably sorry I am. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry that you’ll never see our daughters and son grow up. I’m sorry that you can’t teach them to swim, play soccer with them in the backyard, or snuggle up for popcorn and movie nights. I’m sorry you won’t get to walk them down the aisle or see Maggie graduate kindergarten. I’m sorry that your son will only know you through pictures and the stories of how much he loved you. I’m sorry you’ll never get to take them to another daddy daughter dance, or carry them on your shoulders when we pick them up from school. I’m sorry that you’ll never again get to take the long way home. I’m sorry you’ll never take our children to another movie, another soccer or dance practice or watch them walk through the door on their first day of school. I’m sorry you won’t kiss them good night and sing the songs in bed until they fall asleep. I’m sorry that you can’t take them for donuts and chocolate milk on Saturdays or take them to roller coaster parks every weekend in the summer. I'm sorry that you won't ever again return cans with our daughter and use the coins to buy her a root beer at the AOH.
You’ll never hear them laugh again, cry again, throw their arms up in the air and yell “Pick me up Daddy!” I’m sorry that you’ll never walk through our door again and see Jack running toward you with his arms up begging you to hold him or Ellie screaming “Duty! Duty!” to you as run to pick her up off the couch. You won’t feel Maggie’s tiny hand grasp yours as she crawls into your lap with her favorite doll and ask you to babysit for her. You’ll never see Molly bring you another art project, or hold your face close to hers to she could kiss you over and over.
You won’t feel the crushing warmth of their hugs, their joy for a fallen tooth, or their excitement when you would leave them chocolates in the yard sprinkled with glitter from the “fairies.” I’m sorry you can’t hold them and tell them everything is ok when the only person in the world they want is you.
I'm sorry that you worked so hard for a retirement that you’ll never see. I mourn the memories that we never made. The places we can’t go, seeing the look on your face as you dance with your babies at their weddings, kiss their own children for the first time, and watch them grow into the adults that you so carefully loved and nurtured.
We love you. We see you everywhere and in everything. Your legacy will always live on through your children, your family and your dear friends. We will never be the same without you. My love, my husband, my baby, you will always be our light.
Funeral service will be held on Friday, March 15th at 10am at St. Mary’s of the Lake Church, Skaneateles, followed by a celebration of Sean’s Life at the Skaneateles American Legion Post #239 at Noon. Burial will be Private.
The family has asked Please No Flowers donation’s can be made to Lindsay Ahern. To send condolences, visit: robertdgrayfuneralhome.com.
Link to the GoFundMe for the Ahern Family:
https://gofund.me/2959fc72
That sentence alone is paralyzing. It instills the type of grief that stops your heart and pulls the very ground from beneath your feet. Sean. Not Sean. This can’t happen to someone like Sean, this can’t be real.
You see, Sean was the type of man that you remembered. Not for silly things like the type of clothes that he wore or for the things that he had. To him possessions meant nothing. No. Sean was simple. He loved his family. He loved his friends. And everything he did, he did for them. Period.
This will not be a typical obituary, because Sean was the furthest thing from a typical man. He deserves more than a traditional blurb about his accomplishments. He deserves the story of his life. It’s all that I have left to give him.
Sean was funny, compassionate, humble, and downright brilliant. But most of all, he was unapologetically loyal to those he cared about.
He planned his life with painstaking precision right from the word go. From his first step to his last, Sean knew what he wanted. To spend time with the people who were important to him. That meant working as hard as humanly possible, so that he could retire at 45, having earned his beloved pension to spend his days watching his children grow up, as well as travel the world. Sean was 2 months shy of retirement when he passed. It seems a cruel joke that the universe played on him.
Sean’s life was anything but typical.
He always described himself as a blue-collar guy, working a blue-collar job. He came from humble means, and worked very, very hard for everything he had.
Sean graduated from Syracuse University on a full scholarship. While attending, he was awarded a semester abroad, where he worked in and traveled to many different countries around the world. When he went to Ireland for the first time, Sean was broke, but decided that he wanted to find out more about his family name. He bought himself a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, and walked for hours until he reached the town his family originally came from. When he got there, they told him the records in the church had been burned in a fire, but said that the Ahern family had never left, and were up the road. Sean took his bread and peanut butter and went to their house, where he knocked on the door and said, “Hi, my name is Sean Ahern.” They proclaimed that he was family without another word. They took him in, he stayed with them for several days and even worked in their fields with them. But that was Sean. Always smiling, always happy, always the good guy in someone’s story.
After college, Sean joined the Army. With his father being a Marine and his grandfather a retired navy commander, Sean felt a very strong connection and duty to serve his country. During his time spent in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Afghanistan, he served as an intelligence officer from 2000-2005. That being said, he experienced his fair share of tragedy and loss during this time. Like most war deployed veterans, Sean was not always forthcoming with his experiences there, but his involvement in them would change him as a person and motivate him even more to help people for the rest of his life. He eventually earned a Bronze Star for acts of heroism, as well as many other military honors and commendations. He was proud, damn proud, to be a veteran.
After the military, Sean was having a difficult time deciding what to do next. He sat down one day and had a conversation with his uncle about career choices. His uncle looked at him very sternly and said, “You’re Irish, son. You’ve got three choices, Cop, fireman, or gangster.” Sean, fortunately, chose the first option, and became an Endicott Patrolman for 19 years. His loyalty to his fellow men can be summed up by a few words from one of his work brothers, Matt Brubaker, who said that “Sean was more than just my co-worker. He was my friend and my brother in blue. Sean was loyal, compassionate, smart, and he could talk to anyone about anything. He had an uncanny ability to sort through any situation and recognize what was important and what wasn’t. He was the epitome of the saying 'Don’t sweat the small stuff.'"
Sean’s brothers in blue, and I say this with the utmost veracity, were everything to him. He loved them. Fiercely. Although I hadn’t spent much time with them through the years, I felt as though I knew and loved each and every one of them just by how often Sean spoke of them and their individual qualities that he always admired. John Dunham, Eric Beavers, Dennis DeWitte, Bradley Solomon, William Davies, Scott Carpenter, Matt Brubaker, David Fish, John Wonka and Angelo Ranieri; I hope, with all my heart, that you all truly understand what you meant to Sean. His love for you went beyond that of a best friend. He would have gladly given you everything he had and more, knowing all the while, that you would have done the same for him.
My life with Sean began in 2012 when I met him at Kelly’s restaurant in Syracuse. We spent hours talking, and ended the night at the Blarney Stone feeding stray cats and laughing together. Anyone who knows Sean, knows why that’s funny. His love of his own orange cat was unhealthy at best, and was one of the reasons we hit it off so well. I knew immediately that I loved him.
After that, it was a whirlwind of buying a house, getting married in Ireland and very quickly after, expecting our first baby girl. Molly Rose would be the eldest of our four babies: Madeleine Joan, Margaret Aisling and finally John Edmund. Sean considered his children to be the greatest of all his achievements. I remember looking at him after the chaos of giving birth as he held Molly for the first time. He looked as though someone had given him the stars. He told me that he never really knew what true love was until he first laid eyes on our daughter. He acted the same every time one of our children came into this world.
Some of Sean’s favorite moments came from putting our girls to bed each night. From the very first day they were born, he would walk them around the house and gently sing them Irish lullabies until they fell asleep on him. One night, he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “I don’t know what it’ll be like when I die, but when I do, I hope it feels the way it does when Ellie falls asleep on my chest.”
Sean sacrificed himself at every turn for our benefit. He would sleep for an hour after taking a double shift, go to class at BU (he earned his Master’s Degree in Public Administration), wake up and dust himself off just to come with me to doctors’ appointments, playgrounds, open houses and anything else that the kids were involved in; only to go back into work and do it all over again. Of all the hats that Sean wore, being a father was truly his best.
In 2020 Sean and I made the decision to move our family to Skaneateles, NY. This was the best decision we ever could have made. There, we were welcomed with open arms into the community and Sean did what he did best, made fast friends with just about anyone he could talk to. He was quick to join the Auburn AOH and Skaneateles Legion, where he would share “a pint of the black stuff” and meet new people. At the time, we didn’t understand that these “people” would turn out to be a treasure trove of humanity, quickly turning into our second family and some of our best friends. We spent every date night with them, and always left laughing and counting down the days until we could spend more time with them. He was so proud to be part of what they had.
That being said, Sean was unapologetically Irish. Just ask him. Especially after a few pints with the lads. This extended into his love of Irish music, which he would often grace the patrons of these establishments with, by playing every song ever written by Ronnie Drew, the Tossers, the High Kings, Shane MacGowan and countless others. He sang with them. He drank with them. He laughed with them. He loved them.
His other favorite times and memories were spent on the farm with his mom and step father, Christine and Lance; laughing and spending precious time with them whenever he was able. He loved the family dinners, falling asleep on their couch, and Lance’s hilarious stories. Chris, you were the “glue” he said “that held the family together for all these years.”
Sean loved his siblings Laurie, Nikole, Colleen and Andrew. Laurie would babysit Sean for hours when he was little. Sean and Nikole were inseparable as children. Together they did martial arts, played on the beach and in the ocean, went on countless road trips and she was his biggest cheerleader when he played football as a child. His conversations with his brother Andy and his dad on his way home were his therapy. He called almost every day. He was so incredibly proud of Andrew and the family Andrew was raising. Colleen, was his baby sister. He bragged every time he talked about her, her beautiful children, and her epic swimming records as a child.
Every vacation we would spend in Florida with his father John and his step mother Jane, making memories that will always be some of my favorites that we shared. John and he would spend hours in the garage, talking, laughing, singing, and telling stories while Jane and I watch the kids play in the makeshift “beach” we made in the back yard. The night would always end the same way. Sean and John telling each other that life was good, that they had made it, and that it just couldn’t get any better. John loved his son and the pride that beamed from his face whenever he talked about Sean was palpable. John was, and always will be Sean’s best friend.
“Family is the most important thing you can have” Sean would say.
But family wasn’t always blood. Chris Rockhill, Rick Gallo, Obed Varughese, Donal O’Shaughnessy, Julio Santos, Jake Quill, Tom O’Toole, Jeff & Jed Dove, Willie Colon, Big Chris, Noah, Lou Quill, Craig Kimak and Dino DiCarlo, know that you your friendship helped hold his world together.
Sean, my darling husband, you were the only light in so many people’s dark places, myself included.
You’d never, ever hesitate to help someone in need. Whether it was your time, your ear, your hand, or your experience. You were there for them.
Finally, Sean, I have to tell you how unbelievably sorry I am. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry that you’ll never see our daughters and son grow up. I’m sorry that you can’t teach them to swim, play soccer with them in the backyard, or snuggle up for popcorn and movie nights. I’m sorry you won’t get to walk them down the aisle or see Maggie graduate kindergarten. I’m sorry that your son will only know you through pictures and the stories of how much he loved you. I’m sorry you’ll never get to take them to another daddy daughter dance, or carry them on your shoulders when we pick them up from school. I’m sorry that you’ll never again get to take the long way home. I’m sorry you’ll never take our children to another movie, another soccer or dance practice or watch them walk through the door on their first day of school. I’m sorry you won’t kiss them good night and sing the songs in bed until they fall asleep. I’m sorry that you can’t take them for donuts and chocolate milk on Saturdays or take them to roller coaster parks every weekend in the summer. I'm sorry that you won't ever again return cans with our daughter and use the coins to buy her a root beer at the AOH.
You’ll never hear them laugh again, cry again, throw their arms up in the air and yell “Pick me up Daddy!” I’m sorry that you’ll never walk through our door again and see Jack running toward you with his arms up begging you to hold him or Ellie screaming “Duty! Duty!” to you as run to pick her up off the couch. You won’t feel Maggie’s tiny hand grasp yours as she crawls into your lap with her favorite doll and ask you to babysit for her. You’ll never see Molly bring you another art project, or hold your face close to hers to she could kiss you over and over.
You won’t feel the crushing warmth of their hugs, their joy for a fallen tooth, or their excitement when you would leave them chocolates in the yard sprinkled with glitter from the “fairies.” I’m sorry you can’t hold them and tell them everything is ok when the only person in the world they want is you.
I'm sorry that you worked so hard for a retirement that you’ll never see. I mourn the memories that we never made. The places we can’t go, seeing the look on your face as you dance with your babies at their weddings, kiss their own children for the first time, and watch them grow into the adults that you so carefully loved and nurtured.
We love you. We see you everywhere and in everything. Your legacy will always live on through your children, your family and your dear friends. We will never be the same without you. My love, my husband, my baby, you will always be our light.
Funeral service will be held on Friday, March 15th at 10am at St. Mary’s of the Lake Church, Skaneateles, followed by a celebration of Sean’s Life at the Skaneateles American Legion Post #239 at Noon. Burial will be Private.
The family has asked Please No Flowers donation’s can be made to Lindsay Ahern. To send condolences, visit: robertdgrayfuneralhome.com.
Link to the GoFundMe for the Ahern Family:
https://gofund.me/2959fc72
