by Ryan Kok

Created on: April 20, 2009

All of the following is true, except that out of respect for privacy, I have changed the names of those involved.

John was one of the nicest and happiest men whom I have ever met. Even though I was barely a teenager at the time when his family moved in to the house up the street, it was incredibly obvious that he was a wonderful father. He loved his wife Sandy and his children Kara and David with all of his heart. And every time I saw him with his children, the happiness that he exuded seemed like it would spread to everyone within a three mile radius. It was just infectious. I never met a person who didn't absolutely love John. In fact, his whole family seemed like something out of a 50's era TV commercial. It's as if everything they did as a family had some sort of pastel glow over it, and you couldn't help but just stop, stare, and be envious of what they had.

I guess that's why it seems all the more horrible when it all goes to Hell.

Nobody saw it coming. And still to this day, I can't mentally come to terms with the idea that John would take an old revolver, a gun which as far as Sandy knew had been thrown out a long time ago, and shoot himself through the heart. Their house was at the top of our street, seven houses away, and yet the screams and cries from Sandy as she came home from work and found his body still haunt me to this day. But nothing haunts me more than hearing the voices of his children, the children whom we were babysitting at our house, ask why their parents hadn't yet picked them up to take them home for dinner.

Like I said: Hell.

In the agonizing days following the suicide, the funeral came and went. I had been to funerals before, but never like this. Sandy was sobbing the entire time. You could hear her over the entire crowd. It's never left me.

John had apparently left a suicide note, but all that it had really said was how much he loved them all. Even today, nobody whom I have talked to about it really knows or understands all of the circumstances surrounding his suicide. Of course, nobody has ever actually dared to ask Sandy though.

For about a week after the death, life was just about as horrible as you could imagine. We were still babysitting the kids, and the routine of it all seemed like it helped the kids to get their minds off of things. We would just go through the motions. I guess it helped to keep our minds off things as well. The younger of the two children, David, was a little too young to understand it all, but Kara was definitely

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