Life Memorial: In Memory of Roy Michael Hanrahan Celebrating the life of Michael Hanrahan, he is gone, but his memory lives on.

On May 08, 2011, I received a phone call from a friend, which delivered news that our dear childhood friend Michael Hanrahan had passed away the day before. The moment that I heard the news my body grew numb and a torrent of old memories rushed through my mind in waves. Some of these memories were good and others were bad, but each memory meant something special to our childhood friendship.

To the best of my memory, I first met Michael Hanrahan in 1986 through his younger sister Kristy Hanrahan. Upon the first impression, Michael seemed to be an ordinary guy with a laid back personality – he was pretty much average. As our friendship matured, the impression that I had about him took on new dimensions and complexities. There was nothing average about Michael.

I have personally known hundreds of people throughout my lifetime and no one in my lifetime left more of a profound mark in my life than Michael Hanrahan had left. We remained friends for about ten years before we grew apart and went our separate ways, but in those ten years of friendship my life was impacted goodly.

Michael was an extraordinarily brilliant young man. He was a computer genius before computers were mainstream and cool. This guy could make a computer come to life in ways that I had never seen before. I knew very little about these electronic instruments and actually thought too complicated to use. In other words, computers intimidated me.

My feelings about computers soon changed with Michael’s encouragement. As I routinely dropped by his house to visit him and his sister, Michael would sit at his Tandy Computer System and spend hours playing classic DOS games. I loved playing games, but never played a computer game until Michael taught me how to play them. He actually would be teaching how to use a computer keyboard and issue commands so that the PC games would operate the way they were suppose to work. My computer fears soon turned into computer cheers. I wanted a computer of my own.

Michael and I did the things that typical teenage guys would do in our spare time living in the city. We hung out with our mutual friends, drove around town and spent weekends patrolling the mall in hopes of meeting girls. I never had much luck with the girls, but the girls sure were attracted to Michael. He never had trouble meeting and chatting up with some pretty girl that he had met while at the mall. I spent most of my time in the arcade plopping a fist full of quarters into the Midway arcade machines.

Michael grew up in a family whom was into riding and showing horses. His mom and sister owned a horse or two and kept them at a nearby stable. Some weekends his family invited me to the stables where they feed and sometimes rode their horses around.

Honestly, I thought that horses were beautiful animals, but these creatures nerved me more than computers once did. This fear really never was overcome. I was the outdoors type of guy whom enjoyed spending all day fishing and hunting, while Michael had always been more of a city boy. Michael’s thing had always been computers, electronics and either reading science fiction novels or watching science fiction movies, especially the BBC classic called “Dr. WHO” television series. I had never watched or knew of this television series before I had met Michael.

When I say that Michael liked Dr. WHO, I mean that he really was a superfan of this series. He probably had collected the entire Dr. WHO series on Bata Max videos. He and other of our friends would sit and spend hours watching the Dr. WHO time travel adventures play out. Personally, I found the series a bit too silly for my taste, but he enjoyed them and I enjoyed spending time with my friend.

Michael really enjoyed reading. He was the first and the last person that I ever knew that could be reading one book from front to back, and then be reading a different book from back to front at the same time. I asked him, “Why start reading a book from back to front” and he replied, “To read how a story ended, so to see how and why it ended that way. It is fun to read differently than others normally read.” Wow, it actually made a lot of sense to me and maybe only to me.

As Michael and I grew older and into our twenties, Michael started college and ended up earning a B.S. degree in computer science with a minor in Bio Medicine; that eventually landed him into a fruitful lifetime career in computer I.T networking. During his college days our friendship started showing early signs of waning.

I begun dating a woman that I met while out on a beer run for a party that Michael and I had been invited to. Michael watched my back and proved his friendship to me by warning me that my girlfriend had gotten knocked up by her employer and was planning to sleep with me, and then convince me that the baby was mine. Knowing this information beforehand saved me from making a foolish decision to sleep with her and eventually made it easier to breakup with her, because I could no longer trust her. It takes a very good friend to possibly risk a friendship to tell the truth about another friend’s girlfriend. I really respected Michael a lot more after he had done that.

Our friendship ended almost a quickly as it had begun. Honestly, I know that I had been quite the jerk one evening and that had been part of the reason as to why the friendship ended, but not the only reason. It has been more than fifteen years since Michael and I had just hung out together. I tried to mend our friendship throughout the years, but Michael now had his own family and wasn’t too interested in repairing a broken childhood friendship and eventually neither was I.

To me, I’ve always consider Michael a friend, because friends like Mike are far too rare. Once friends than always friends has always been my motto.

There are so many other ways that Michael Hanrahan left his mark on my life, but these things I will keep in-between my dear friend Michael and me. Michael you will be missed – my friend.