{"id":5306,"date":"2026-03-02T09:46:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T05:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=5306"},"modified":"2026-03-02T06:58:55","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T02:58:55","slug":"it-was-twenty-years-ago-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=5306","title":{"rendered":"It was twenty years ago today"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Twenty years ago today was the worst day of my life: the day Joe Sullivan was killed in a car crash at the age of 23.<\/p>\n<p>Joe had been my friend since the Reagan administration. I haven&#8217;t had a better friend nor have we had a better president since. (Those of you who knew Joe know that he would be honored to receive mention in the same sentence as our 40th president.)<\/p>\n<p>They say time heals all wounds, but that&#8217;s not true here. Time hasn&#8217;t healed this one. If anything I&#8217;m more made about this on March 2, 2026, than I was two decades ago. Every day I have another instance of, I wish I could have done this with Joe, seen this with Joe, or talked about this with Joe. Whatever the opposite of a pleasant diversion is,\u00a0<em>this<\/em> has been my background noise for 20 years.<\/p>\n<p>Tune in Friday to\u00a0<em>Math and Musings<\/em> for a therapeutic retelling of the story, 15 minutes about the man I haven&#8217;t spent 15 minutes\u00a0<em>not<\/em> thinking about since March 2, 2006.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Twenty years ago today was the worst day of my life: the day Joe Sullivan was killed in a car crash at the age of 23. Joe had been my friend since the Reagan administration. I haven&#8217;t had a better &hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=5306\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5306"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5307,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5306\/revisions\/5307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}