Larry Henry, RIP :: Jeff Jacoby

On Monday, the day he turned 61, Larry Henry died of kidney failure. He was a fine friend and a splendid writer, who endured the pains and debilitations of prolonged illness without losing his good-heartedness and good humor. Larry wrote a weekly column for The American Spectator, which today publishes a symposium in his memory. My contribution appears below; to read the others, by Wlady Pleszczynski, Shawn Macomber, Jeremy Lott, and W. James Antle III, please visit http://www.spectator.org.

Lawrence J. Henry, 1948-2009

LARRY HENRY WAS A GREAT TALKER, but the last time I saw him he couldn't speak. That was on New Year's Day, when my wife Laura and I went to visit him at the Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston. He looked miserable and uncomfortable and more than a little frustrated with all the tubes and monitors he was hooked up to, and with the struggle to breathe through his tracheotomy, and with the exhaustion that comes from pushing an ailing and defective body through an endless gauntlet of medical care and hospital stays.

"How are your boys?" he mouthed soundlessly. I filled him in on the latest. In the 10 or so years we'd known each other, we had exchanged countless emails and had conversations on every topic, but above all on the delights and puzzles of fatherhood. Like Larry and Sally, Laura and I have two sons; our youngest, like theirs, was adopted from Guatemala. It was politics and current events that first sparked our connection -- Larry contacted me out of the blue one day with an idea for a column about Christian conservatives -- but it was the common experience of raising sons that turned an acquaintance into a friendship.

I asked Larry one time what he thought of suspending reading privileges as a punishment for a bright, book-loving kid -- my older boy, Caleb -- who was misbehaving in some egregious way. He replied by describing the sort of discipline that had worked with Bud, his oldest -- and how completely flummoxed he was to discover that it had exactly the opposite effect on Joe, his younger son. "Obviously, I don't know a thing," Larry emailed. "And I'm not qualified to offer advice on Caleb." He offered a few suggestions anyway, then wound up with: "It's hard to say, and no one knows but you. And if you ever want to discover how little you really know about kids, just have another one."

"Don't know a thing"? Larry knew more things, and lived a life brimming with more experiences, than any three people I can think of offhand. From writing advertising copy to running a local paper, from playing in a rock band to OD'ing on the Golf Channel, from losing his kidneys to finding God, there seemed to be nothing Larry hadn't done, nothing he couldn't turn into a timely and topical column. Every columnist in America had something to say about Sarah Palin last fall. But only Larry Henry could have produced "Memories of Wasilla," his recollection of carousing and taking flying lessons in Sarah Palin's hometown. "We haven't had anyone so interesting on the national scene in a long, long time," he wrote in that column. You could almost say the same about Larry.

Cover lightly, gentle earth.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

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May 22, 2009 update: A memorial service for Larry Henry took place at St. John's Episcopal Church in Boston on Sunday, May 17. The American Spectator's editor, Wlady Pleszczynski, wrote about the service, which included some remarks from me, a few days later.

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