Facing grim news, he was full of life

I'LL NEVER FORGET how easily Officer James Henninger talked about his own death.

And I'll never forget how much he loved life.

I met Henninger - who died Saturday - in 2011, just six months after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and given six months to two years to live.

He wasn't bitter or angry, he was joyous and full of stories about a full life, like when he saved a child with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, or when he was washed overboard off the coast of Spain while serving in the Navy.

Just last week, I was telling a colleague about a story Henninger shared with me about his time on the Police Department's "Granny Squad," in which cops dressed up as elderly folk to lure would-be robbers.

While in full-on granny mode one night, Henninger said, he picked up a pigeon to appear crazy, and someone swooped in and stole the pigeon out of his arms.

"I was horrified," Henninger said. "You can't even hold a pigeon in Philadelphia!"

Henninger's amazing sense of humor and his obvious love for his fellow man made him one of the most incredible cops - and people - I've ever met.

When I received word of his passing from his wife, Barbara, last weekend, she wrote that Jim "would like for the guys at work to know that he still had his hair in the end. He also still had his humor and had the nurses laughing."

When Barbara told me this afternoon that she had gotten a glass container to place her husband's ashes in - as opposed to the cookie jar he had mentioned - so that he could look out on the neighborhood, she added, "He said he doesn't want a smoker anywhere near him, because he doesn't want to gain weight when they put their ashes in there."

- Stephanie Farr