Sometimes I wonder if the world spins merely due to human energy. Are just we a bunch of Forrest Gumps, just running and running to generate rotation? Is that the answer to it all?
Whatever’s to blame, it’s clear this life marathon moves with reckless racecar speed. I find it mildly freaky I can now date my hardwired memory back to events more than a decade ago. It makes me feel slightly ancient—older generations, commence eye rolls—while wondering where all that intangible time went. Accomplishments and happenings snowball as life rolls on, still remaining just a blip on the radar. Twenty, forty, sixty years is nothing in the scheme of it all.
Just a month ago, however, I think I actually felt the great progress of earth stop. It may have even spun backwards a little bit. A dear friend of mine lost her father to cancer. He was a man who fought and fell, but fell with untouchable strength as a martyr for life’s worth.
Within the span of four months, sickness intruded and stole all but a fraction of the time he needed for recollections, celebrations and goodbyes. Just like that, a man of only fifty years was gone, leaving us fifty years too soon.
I like to joke with my own father, who is of similar baby-boomer age. I refer to him affectionately with numerous geriatric nicknames, pointing out his silver hair and Coke bottle glasses circa 1970. I’d like to think my old man—no pun intended—has lived a life worth three autobiographies. Still, if someone were to steal the pen away right now, I know those three volumes would seem a drop in the bucket. The sad reality is that no one realizes how young fifty is until fifty is all you get.
While the collective heart of my friends aches more than ever, we do not intend to linger on the sadness. That’s wasn’t Mr. Henshaw’s style.
An 800-word limit does not do him justice. Frankly, nothing written can. The man was someone to be experienced, since his teaching—or, in an appropriately affable sense, coaching—was one part him, one part you. Instead of the mason who built the wall, he was the architect who drew the foundation, subtle and sound.
He wouldn’t screw on the training wheels and send you on your way; he would show you how it’s done, push you off and run three steps behind—just out of peripheral view—letting you swerve but setting you upright after a fall.
He never told you how to live—just showed you. He was a Goliath, but a gentle giant in every sense of the phrase. I’m not yet convinced he didn’t leave this earth just because his heart was too big for his body to function.
Yet what really makes him so special was his holistic intention to nurture man. His hobby—nay, his career and his purpose—was the advancement of people. A second father to each of us, he extracted personal utility from welcoming and walking alongside kin and stranger alike.
His personal mantra: everything taken for one’s self must equivalently be pumped back into the community. He knew what many of us are missing is this daily embodiment of selfless investment in community, the most rudimentary yet enriching source of fulfillment. People are the basics—a truth too often overlooked by the tunnel vision that comes with personal success. While many embrace “every man for himself,” Mr. Henshaw coined “no man left behind.” We need more of that.
I wish the whole wide world could have watched him live. To me, he was both a man and a legend. Of course, had I said that to his face, he would have rolled his eyes. “Girl, you’re crazy,” he’d say, warm and Southern. He was ever humble.
While in February the world was rattled, heaven was rocked. I know I was just a fortunate particle swept up in his quiet magnitude, lucky enough to have known him on the ground, newly excited to embrace Papa Henshaw in his new home one day.
Kate’s column runs biweekly Fridays. She can be reached at k.colver@cavalierdaily.com.
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