Stories That Carry Light

Five years a widow, newly and seriously ill, Dena Sullivan found she could no longer feel what she knew she was supposed to feel for her daughter. The love was there in her mind and nowhere else. So she began leaving invisible sticky notes — one word, placed in the mind’s eye of the people she could not reach: LOVE.

Sticky Notes: But the Greatest of These Is Love is what she found  — from hospital beds to rehearsal halls, from rice jars to whispered forgiveness. 

The stories move in a spiral. A moment returns later, told again from a different angle, carrying a new discovery of love. Like a good preacher who takes one theme and returns to it throughout the sermon, each retelling builds on the last until the truth settles deeper. What seemed finished opens again, and another layer is waiting.

Dena Sullivan is a retired database architect who once programmed factory robots, and a trained musician. She writes about illness, music, and the quiet evidence that someone is answering — without claiming to know who.

For anyone who has ever had to learn, on purpose, to love someone again.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched—they must be felt with the heart.     Helen Keller

Foreword

There is something in Dena’s story that speaks to each of us, because at its heart it is a story of the human condition.  It is a story she gently reshaped with invisible sticky notes carrying a single message—love—placed on the foreheads of those she loved, tried to love, chose to love, feared to love, and continued to love.  The constancy of hope, the bond of family, and the enduring power of love are the universal threads that hold each of us within the intricate tangle of life.

Clinical medicine is often measured in rigid metrics.  These measures have value, but after several decades of practice, I am convinced that the most meaningful part of medicine involves a science that defies measurement.  When integrative medicine, music, and art are woven into the fabric of healthcare, we begin to understand a deeper truth: not all maladies can be cured, but healing is always possible.

Through trust, acceptance, and hope, Dena’s story gives clinicians permission to recognize and honor patients’ unseen experiences of healing.  As a physician who champions integrative medicine, I have witnessed how the spirit can lead where the body falters. 

Dena’s methodology—a silent “love” note placed in the mind’s eye—is more than a spiritual exercise.  It is a way of retuning the transceiver of the human heart.  Her quiet art of the invisible sticky note reveals the power of positive intention, the strength of collective consciousness, and the subtle yet undeniable force that flows between healer and healed. Like the roots of forest trees, we are connected beneath the surface in a living web that has no single weaver.

For those living with long illness, this book becomes a vital field guide—especially in those moments when even the silence of prayer can feel like abandonment.  The sticky note method may be the bridge we have been missing between our moments of loss and our lifelong capacity for connection.

In its quiet simplicity, the story of the sticky note reminds us of something both ancient and enduring: love still makes new roads where none seemed possible.

After almost forty years at the bedside, I have learned this: healing begins wherever love is allowed to enter the room.

Connie Jennings, MD

Integrative Medicine

University of Kentucky

Lexington, Kentucky

March 2026

I don’t remember the exact day it began. There was no choir of angels, no bolt of light. Only stillness. And then, a whisper: Love anyway.

I was sick. My body had become unrecognizable, foreign. I bled into my own eyes, lost weight like time shedding skin, and lived mostly inside a quiet room in my parents' house—a place of convalescence and quiet despair. The world I had built, the identities I had worn—wife, programmer, mother, musician—had begun to dissolve. Even prayer, once a steady murmur in the background of my life, had grown silent.

What remained was breath, and a question I could never quite silence: Why am I still here?

That question echoed in the walls of my bedroom. It followed me down the hospital hallways. It waited in the spaces between IVs and infusions. And then one day, while praying for someone who had hurt me deeply, the answer came. Not in words, but in an image: a single yellow sticky note, placed gently on their forehead. It said one word:

LOVE

I began to do it more often. In my imagination, I placed sticky notes on everyone I encountered—family, doctors, old friends, strangers. Even the ones I couldn’t bear to speak to. Especially them. Not out of sainthood. Not out of strength. But because it was the only way left to pray.

And something began to shift.

It wasn't immediate. There were no miracles in the sky. But slowly, relationships softened. Conversations reopened. Bitterness eased. Even within me.

I didn’t know then what I see now: that every thought is a seed. Every word, a vibration. And every silent act of love—even one scribbled on an imaginary sticky note—sends a frequency into the world that can bend the very shape of reality.

This is not a book of theology or science. It is a book of resonance. A testament to the invisible power of intention. It is the story of how I remembered that the greatest force in the universe was not control, or health, or even understanding.

It was love.

And this is how I found it—one sticky note at a time.