To the world, Alex Sullivan was a gentle bear of a man who died in a movie theater on his 27th birthday.

To me and my family, he was something else — a friend. He was the newborn at my wedding, the smiling 3-year-old petting my dog, the 10-year-old hockey star whacking me in the shins as we played in the street, the polite teenager, the newlywed whose hug took my breath away.

There is a cold detachment that comes with being a journalist. We move in other people’s worlds and hope to see them in unguarded moments that give our stories their resonance. We come to care about the people we write about — I remain in regular touch with several of the families who lost children at Columbine — but there’s still a wall between us, for, in the end, we are merely observers. That wall was shattered Friday morning.

Every photo a memory

Photographs of Alex — as a baby in a car seat, as a big brother at a reservoir, as a teenager at the Olympics — spill across an ottoman.

“Every single picture just has a story behind it,” Megan Sullivan, Alex’s younger sister, says as she looks over the snapshots.

She and Alex’s dad, Tom Sullivan, are telling some of those stories.

There is a photograph taken July 20, 1991 — Alex’s 6th birthday. In the image, there’s a cake and candles, and big smiles on Tom and Alex and Megan, and a handmade “Happy Birthday” banner on the wall behind them.

It was snapped the day Tom and his wife, Terry, started a tradition with Alex — taking him to the movies on his birthday.

They saw “The Rocketeer” that day. And all these years later, it no longer matters that when they went to Pizza Hut after the film, the special “Rocketeer” kids meals with the cups featuring images from the movie were all gone. It is the first film Megan can remember seeing in a theater.

“A lot of my memories growing up, we always had a great time together, and had fun and played and climbed trees, and I was right there with him on everything,” she says.

There’s a photo of Alex and Megan on a sunny day at Aurora reservoir — one of her favorite shots of the two of them — their faces frozen in youthful wonder. And another of them in an embrace as adults.

There’s a photo of Tom and Alex in the blue and orange of their beloved New York Mets — homemade baseball posters on the wall.

It was their answer to Broncos Day at Alex’s school.

“I said, ‘Alex, do they have a Mets Day?’ ” Tom recalls. “And he looked up at me, and he said, ‘I don’t think so, Dad.’ And I said, ‘Well, by God, from here on out, we’re going to have a Mets Day.’ “

Each year on opening day, they’d buy everyone a new Mets T-shirt, or a hat, or a jacket, and they’d grill hot dogs, fill a bowl with popcorn and watch whatever baseball game was on.

As Tom and Megan talk, they laugh at the silly things, like the time Alex put his head through a door during a squabble with his sister — damage the two conspired to hide with a poster (Terry discovered it immediately). Or the times too numerous to count that Alex showed up drinking a giant cup of Starbucks coffee (Megan worked at Caribou Coffee).

And they express pride in all that Alex was.

A husband whose love for his wife, Cassie, was obvious and who seemed a natural at marriage. A peacemaker who would tell Tom to calm down when he got worked up. A lover of comic books and movies who made friends everywhere and could quote “Caddyshack” from the opening scene to the closing credits.

A brother who would call his sister and make her day each time they met.

“He’d give me a big hug,” she says, “and, I don’t know, it just made everything better.”

Friends since college

I was a freshman in college when I met Tom Sullivan. Both of us were pursuing journalism degrees. He was a few years older; I was right out of high school. He came from upstate New York; I was a Westerner.

But something clicked. Chatting turned into coffee and lunch, and by Christmastime, he and Terry were a regular presence in my life.

Over the past 30 years, their friendship has blossomed through barbecues and ball games, halloween parties and high school graduations. There was even a chance meeting in Salt Lake City during the 2002 Winter Olympics.

“Alex is shot”

At 3 a.m. Friday, Tom was up, getting ready for his early morning shift at the Post Office. He clicked on the news and saw the initial reports on the shooting, and he knew Alex had been planning to see the new Batman movie. But as soon as he saw an image of the Century Aurora 16, he felt a wave of relief.

That wasn’t the theater Alex usually visited.

After arriving at work, Tom tried several times to reach Alex, just to be sure, but his calls went straight to voicemail.

Then, about 6:30 a.m., Terry called — frantic.

“Tom, Tom, Alex is shot,” she said.

The call was disconnected. A moment later, they connected again, and the next few hours at Gateway High School were a swirl for Tom and Terry, for Megan and Cassie, and for the friends who gathered with them. There was an agonizing, fruitless search of hospitals.

By 10 a.m., Tom resigned himself to the idea that Alex was gone.

It would be 10 hours before officials would confirm that, but as they waited, desperate for news, they told Alex stories.

“This might sound hard to believe, but we already had — we had laughter on Friday at Gateway High School,” Tom says.

That celebration has continued in the numbing days since.

Like the story of the day Alex, as a little boy, scratched a $40 winner on the lottery ticket in his Christmas stocking. He wasn’t yet in school, but he suspected the $2 Tom gave him for candy and a soda was a pittance.

“Dad,” he protested, “where’s the four-oh?”

In recent days, the family has been overwhelmed by the kindness shown by friends and strangers alike — a huge fruit basket from the cookie shop where Alex worked for all of three weeks as a teen, the friends from every phase of his life who have stopped by their Aurora home, the call from Arizona Charlie’s casino in Las Vegas, which in recent years has been Tom’s annual stop during a two-day, guys-only, Super Bowl jaunt — a trip that has included Alex since he was 21.

Today, the people who loved Alex will gather to say goodbye to him. There will be tears. But there will also be Alex stories.

“We’re going to keep doing it,” Tom says. “We’ll be talking about Alex forever and ever. There’s no reason to stop — and that’s just the way it’s going to be. … When I hear a new story, it will be a new adventure. I will have met him again that day.”

Utterly happy

My wife and I last saw Alex at his wedding a year ago. He was 2 weeks old at our wedding; now he was a grown man whose love for his wife was infectious. During the reception, he stopped to visit, making us feel that we had been the ones who had made the event special, thanking us for coming.

“Well,” I deadpanned, “I figured since you came to our wedding, we needed to come to yours.” Alex laughed.

But my enduring memory won’t be of my lame attempt at humor. It will be of the bear hug that made it hard to breathe for a moment. And it will be of the smile on his face — the smile that made it clear he was deeply in love. And utterly happy with his life.

Kevin Vaughan: 303-954-5019, kvaughan@denverpost.com or twitter.com/writerkev