This is my friend Beau and his family.

Beau took his own life on Monday, January 22nd.

Here’s what I’d like to do:

I’m asking everyone I know to share this with everyone they know, and so on. I’m also asking everyone I know and everyone they know to give anything they can to this fund.

I don’t know of any way to calculate the toll something like this takes on a family, and there is no monetary amount that can fill the hole left by a departure like this.

I ask you to put yourself in the shoes of a wife who just lost her husband, trying to figure out how she’s going to buy food and pay rent for the next 17 years before her 1 year old heads out into the world.

Put yourself in the shoes of an 11 year old boy watching a father teach his son to fish on the banks of the Mississippi river.

Or a 7 year old girl outside her 1st grade classroom, watching her friends’ fathers come scoop them up after school.

Or a 1 year old girl who will never know what a warm hug from her father feels like.

I met Beau in rehab in early 2019, and we fought demons together. Some days it really felt like all we had was each other. He listened to things I couldn’t tell other people. He would call me out when I spoke negatively about myself. He told me to write. He encouraged me. He told me to keep fighting and hang in there.

Over the last five years, he’d call me when he was well. And he’d call me when he wasn’t. He’d laugh and cry with me. We’d talk about fighting demons and how we were figuring things out. How we were getting better. He encouraged me every step of the way from the day we met until the day he died.

My words will always fall short in any attempts to describe Beau and the love I have for him.

He. Was. A. Good. Dude.

Please help.

His family needs us.