WRITING WITH ROX weekly prompt—In Memoriam

Daniel writing at the Beach,  May, 2011, at a yoga and writing retreat

In Memoriam
Daniel Hennessy, student, spirit brother, writer, poet, friend

As soon as I received the email from Daniel's wife Lynne, subject line "Daniel Hennessy," I knew that he had left his body and moved onto the eternal sunrise. But how can that be? I wondered in that infinite nanosecond before clicking on the message, how can it be? He's happy now. He's doing great. Life is good. It can't be.

I opened the email and read from Lynne that Daniel died unexpectedly last Thursday evening. "I know you two were close and I'm sorry to have to break the news in this way," she wrote.

I pushed aside my Greek Yoghurt and looked up at the sky. I exhaled with shocking volume and locked eyes with the blue of the sky contrasted against the white of the clouds, the same watercolor blue of Daniel's eyes. "Why brother?" I asked. "Why?"

I remembered the first time I met those watery blue eyes in the summer of 2010 at the Loft.  Intuitive Writing. How familiar they were, how much relief they brought, not only to me, but also to the students he shared his stories with in that class. How that class led to another and another, then several epic email exchanges, some in Spanish, some in intuitive flow.

The last email I received from him last July said: "Hey Rox, goin' pretty good.  Lot of travel this summer plus motorcycle camping in state parks.  Lynne is building a portfolio of state park pastorals...sometimes she uses her motorcyle for an easel....How you?" 

I did not write back.

I'm still waiting for an answer. It's coming. First I have to deal with the grief. Get past the denial. I'm still in denial about my father's death; I keep telling Too Cute Face that "when you meet my dad someday..." because I know how much they'd fall in love with each other upon meeting and part of me truly believes it will happen. So it's going to be a while.

"It's not important how he died," Lynne later wrote, "but how he lived."

And how I can speak to how he lived and how he wrote. The seductive literary drawl of his reading voice, especially when reading a chilling childhood memory, where he managed to weave humor into horror. (We both write of our mothers as "Ma," and we both mean the same thing.).

Yes, I can speak volumes to how he lived, suffered, healed, married, wrote, thought, felt, and celebrated among friends and family last May, that beautiful sunny celebratory day that was his wedding day and a day I will never forget because everything, even the stillness, twinkled.

And  I plan to write those volumes. But not today. Today is not about making anything more or adjectivial or big of the loss over or the life that was Daniel, but just to say I will miss you brother, writer, friend, lover of all beings, watercolor eyes, happy drumming man, love animal, poet wanderer, and eternal sunrise... your stories—both on and off the page, ones we created together, one's I had the pleasure of hearing—will live in me for a lifetime, and when the time is right, breathe some of that eternal sunrise back into the world.

Daniel laughing with writing friends

the two Beauties
by Daniel Hennessy

Alan Watts said we did not
come into this world, 

we come out of it.

Well, there's the rub.

Because there is a nostalgia, too.
That I am a visitor on this lovely planet,
that my real home is in the sunrise, 
and that I am reminded of this
by the glance of an infant.

Well, that infant came out of something, too.

Like dew.

Who are we?

Whether you knew Daniel, or perhaps your own "Daniel," all thoughts and feelings  are welcomed and wanted. Love, Rox