The Darrell Sheets story has had a rhythm to it all week — the initial shock, the outpouring of grief, the cast members finding their words one by one, the family stepping forward with the pieces of the picture that only they could provide — and just when that rhythm seemed to be settling into the quieter, more private stage that follows the loudest days of public mourning, something new has come to light that the people closest to Darrell have decided cannot wait and should not be held back any longer.

It is the nature of stories involving real people and real loss that the complete truth rarely arrives all at once — that the full picture assembles itself gradually, in the uneven and sometimes surprising way that memory and grief and the complicated human business of deciding what the world needs to know work together over time, each new piece arriving when the person holding it is finally ready to let it go. What has just come to light is one of those pieces — not the loudest detail in the Darrell Sheets story and not the most dramatic, but in many ways the most important, the kind of specific and human truth that does not change the facts of what happened but changes completely the way those facts feel, the way the man behind them is understood, and the way the community that loved him is going to carry his memory forward from this point on.