Todd is dead.

Todd is dead. He died last Tuesday. It's been 6 days and it barely feels real.

Todd was my neighbor, friend, and a regular topic of discussion in my home and with my friends & my family. There are a thousand different reasons for that, and none of them matter anymore because Todd is dead.

I'm still processing it and trying to make sense of it all... I guess if I keep saying it out loud, I'll start to accept that it's real. He will never come and knock on my door again, and Amy and I will never have to hide out and debate if we should let him in. That may sound harsh, but the truth is in the last days of his life even I was fearful of him. I worried he'd hurt his wife or children, or even us. His behavior had grown erratic and he had shown an agression I had never seen before. It's these things especially that make it all hard to process. We noticed something was happening and something was different, but we didn't see THIS. We couldn't figure out what it was... and now that we know, I want to go back and do it all over, but I can't and it probably wouldn't matter if I could. The what-ifs are killer.

Todd left behind a wife and two kids. A 2 year old boy will grow up and have faint memories of the man who stayed at home and raised him for the first two years of his life. Most of his memories will come from what people told him, from their understandings of who Todd was. And I'm learning more and more that Todd was a different person to almost everyone who knew him. In addition to a a son who will never know his father, a 3 week old baby girl will grow up knowing nothing of her father except what she learns from pictures and family. Someday she might recall his scent as he held her in infancy, but probably not. Which brings me to his wife, J will go on with her life because she is an amazing woman who has shown more strength and courage in the last week than I have ever seen from someone dealing with the death of their husband. She will struggle to teach her children who their father was and keep him alive for them even if they don't yet know he's gone.

Jesus, this sucks.