Deputy Sheriff Thomas L. Reuter

I just stumbled across this page today, and yet 31 years and a few months later, the memories hit me anew.

Tom, I have long wanted to say these words to you, and I will never get the chance. At the time we lost you, I was already well into the development of complex PTSD and had no connection with my emotions; that is no longer.

I really wish that I could have told you how much I loved you and how much you meant to me. I was just a ragtag little girl, probably coming across as needy and annoying, and you loved me anyway. You were there for every important thing that happened in my life between age 5 and the day of your death one month and one day before my 12th birthday. You and Diane showed me what it meant to love your kids, and you provided so much to me emotionally than you could have ever known. My life was a daily hell, and yet I knew that your house was always a safe place.

Thank you for who you were, who you helped me to be then, and who you have helped me become now. Thank you for Diane, Dan, Doug, Tim, Sherry, and Andy. They were siblings in my heart and a relatively stable set of people to count on when I had nothing and nobody else. Thank you for the homemade pizza nights, the walkie-talkie hide-and-seek, the weeks at the Bavarian, the beach (and the sunburns!), and the last-day antics (that at least once ended with Peggy in the lake). Thank you for your friendship, your service, and your love. I carry so much within me that would not exist without having been loved by you, and I am so deeply grateful for every minute of those almost-7 years that you were in my life.

You are so deeply loved and missed and remembered. ❤

Erin Reddy Wolff

July 25, 2021