Kenny is proof that time and heart alone can make a friendship regardless of space. Here in the hollers of West Virginia, we knew we had a friend in the wide open spaces of the Midwest from the first when Kenny came into our lives. Among the first outside a VERY small area in West Virginia to hear us, Kenny quickly became an actual friend; albeit a friend with whom we never had the pleasure of hoisting a pint or smoking a shoulder, devourtly wished and sadly regretted. Notwithstanding ever having gotten to raise a physical ruckus with Kenny, we raised a multitude at a distance and the laughter and camraderie was without peer.
Kenny's impeccable sense of the absurd, his ever-present delight in the day-to-day, and his ability to render his life in such a way as to be a friend so real as to be identifable before even the sound of his voice, made him a pearl of great price in our lives.
Friend, we ache not for what you were to us, but for what you cannot, at least in common terms, be to us for some time to come.
Yet you will be there, the lilt in a giggle, the snort in a guffaw, but most importantly the unalloyed determination to do right, to do good, to be, in the end, a source of the light that forever challenges the darkness.
Peace to you, our brother, our friend. Everything is part of it, and you, although untimely and unfairly, are now part of everything; and that we will carry with us, no burden, but an honor and a granting of the goodness you brought to us.
