Dear Danny Boy,

I am so glad to read your post and know how you are doing. I've wanted to write but I figure you have all kinds of red-heads doting on you already....

I know you will cause some kinda stir in Vegas. I wish I could go but my teaching schedule will not allow it after missing a whole semester this spring while I was out with Scott.

I do want to share some of Scott's words with you and others here. He always kept a personal journal and I have been comforted by reading them after his passing. I will share an excerpt here that he wrote three days after finding out he was "terminal" and 7 weeks before he died.

"...My heart is so full. I do not want to leave this life. I have such a feeling of joy and of purpose, although the latter is vague. So much I want to say, to tell, to write. So much I want to do with my wife and family, living and loving. So much of the world I want to see. I want to tell people that love really is the answer and that one of the best routes to that knowledge is literature, in its broadest category. It is always better to know than not to know.

I want to live and keep working and to do all the new work I now see could be mine to do. I want to warn people, poignantly and practically, against smoking and drinking.

It is hard, so hard to die when my heart and my head are so full of love and of life. I sense the joy. It is in me. It is in my love for Christine and the girls and my friends and loved ones. For my work. For literature, for life itself. I've had a good life.

A word has been the theme of my thoughts lately: Apotheosis. I think it means spiritual transformation. That has been happening to me, I believe. I will look it up exactly:

'Apotheosis--the culmination or highest development of a thing; the ultimate, quintessential, or final form; the exaltation of a person or a thing to a final state of triumph or glory, the ascension of a person or a thing from earthly existence to heavenly glory.'

Yes, that's right: Apotheosis of myself, of ourselves!"

Danny, I wanted to share this with you and others because even after a "terminal" diagnosis, Scott continued to amaze us with his many gifts of fierce heart and spirit.

And I recognize this in you, and I applaud you for being--as a friend described Scott--a light-bringer, a swift human current.

Christine